Mary C. Neuburger: Balkan Smoke. Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria. Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 2013. XII, 307 S., Kte., Abb. ISBN: 978-0-8014-5084-6

Mary C. Neuburger: Balkan Smoke. Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria. Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 2013. XII, 307 S., Kte., Abb. ISBN: 978-0-8014-5084-6.

In 1966, Bulgaria became the largest exporter of cigarettes in the world, yet the history of this commodity within the country and Bulgaria’s role in the global tobacco market has remained largely obscure. With Balkan Smoke, Mary Neuburger reconstructs a “social life” of tobacco and places it in the multi-ethnic and multi-state past of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bulgaria. Two major foci ground the analysis – the social settings of tobacco consumption and the development of tobacco cultivation, processing, and manufacture in the region.

Neuburger begins with travelers’ accounts of the coffeehouse and the European vision of the indolent smoking Turk, which was used as a foil for foreigner’s notions of their own sober and productive behavior. She moves on to describe with great depth the ways in which the coffeehouse actually functioned as an area of male sociability and artistic ferment. Bulgarians themselves had a complicated relationship with tobacco – some saw it as a modern, Western behavior but newly-rising abstention groups viewed it as a symptom of European decadence.

Neuburger travels from the coffeehouse to the vibrant commercial center of Plovdiv and the agricultural areas of Macedonia and Thrace that, because of their sandy, alkaline soils, became ideal places for the production of Turkish (oriental) tobacco. The tobacco of Bulgaria was more flavorful and less laden with nicotine than American varieties. Neuburger excels in her rich description of the complicated ethnic make-up of the tobacco industry and the back-and-forth fate for Macedonia and Thrace inspired, in part, by their vast tobacco resources.

In the interwar years, women started smoking in greater numbers and in more public venues while brand choices opened to include them. The general boom in tobacco use aided the industry on a path from post-war devastation to experimentation and then reform. Radical politics became party to both the explosion in use and the increase in production, as groups focused on abstention – both protestant and leftist – became more vocal and leftist tobacco workers chaffed under increasing state restriction.

The narrative ends with the effects of WWII and the Cold War on both the means of production and the social spaces for tobacco consumption. As in WWI, Bulgaria entered the conflict on the side of Germany, allowing established trade relationships to continue, but Neuburger uses tobacco production records and Holocaust materials to discuss in fascinating detail the fate of Jewish tobacco barons and the largely leftist tobacco workforce. The Bulgarian populace’s ambivalent attitudes towards anti-Semitic policies, as well as the well-documented anti-tobacco campaigns of the Germans, created a complicated situation. Partisan and political prisoners both came largely (80 %) from the tobacco industry, and tobacco warehouses and manufactures served as holding areas in Jewish deportations.

The Cold War brought down an “Iron Curtain of taste” (p. 209) as Bulgaria supplied much of the Bloc. More and more youth and women smoked, especially in the controlled-leisure areas of the Communist state, and anti-smoking efforts were complicated by the state’s dependence on producing tobacco for the Soviet market and moves to bring in the higher nicotine cigarettes of the West. In 1975, R. J. Reynolds and Philip Morris both made inroads by signing agreements for the production, packaging, and selling of Winston and Marlboro in Bulgaria. After 1979 Bulgaria entered Middle Eastern markets, but the collapse of the Bloc in 1989 also saw the collapse of Bulgarian tobacco.

Neuburger does much to illuminate the history of tobacco producing regions in Bulgaria, but her focus on the “social life” of tobacco steers clear of points of analysis that have driven tobacco studies in other contexts. For example, the effect of mechanization, or the lack of it, in the late nineteenth century on rolling of cigarettes, market availability, modes of consumption, and particularly price points is not explored. Additionally, the reaction of the Bulgarian medical community in the nineteenth century, or in the wake of smoking’s post-war medicalization, is absent except as filtered, occasionally, through abstention movements. Finally, the advertising of cigarettes was limited under the communists, but earlier efforts, except for a brief discussion of one company’s interwar campaign aimed at female smokers, are left out.

Overall, Neuburger’s book unearths critical information about one of the world’s leading tobacco producers. The in-depth analysis of ethnic and empire concerns, accessible writing, and novel approach of detailing the social life of tobacco should inspire interesting questions for commodity historians, tobacco researchers, and East European specialists.

Tricia Starks, Fayetteville