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Chinese consumers for the most part smoked tobacco grown in China on countless small family farms spread across the empire. Processed in tiny workshops located near tobacco farms in the mountainous peripheries of China's nine macroregions, premium regional tobaccos were aggressively marketed by the large merchant groups that dominated China's long-distance trade. By the mid-eighteenth century, mainly as a consequence of large-scale migration into the Yangzi River highlands, a two-tiered system of tobacco production and consumption was firmly in place. Peasants smoked affordable tobacco grown locally, while the moneyed elite conspicuously consumed expensive tobaccos transported over great distances through China's integrated market economy. The infinite assortment of domestically grown tobaccos that emerged by 1750 or so allowed for a dramatic expansion in tobacco smoking among both rich and poor in virtually all corners of the empire. This chapter traces the expansion of Chinese tobacco production, consumption, and trade between 1600 and 1750. It also discusses tobacco cultivation and retailing.

This chapter describes the development of bright tobacco, which became the literal lifeblood of the region's countryside and towns following the Civil War. The elements of a bright tobacco culture that came to dominate Southside farming caused subtle changes to the traditional routines of the farminig of dark tobacco. Farmers selected varieties of seed for certain color and taste characteristics; they planted these seeds on new portions of the Piedmont landscape; and they experimented with new methods of curing their tobacco. While none of these changes seemed dramatic departures from the tobacco culture that had existed in the Southside since the mid-1700s, collectively these practices would alter both land and people over the following decades.

This chapter discusses the expansion of the bright leaf tobacco culture. By the 1840s, Caswell, Halifax, and Pittsylvania counties had an active contingent of modernizing planters' and farmers' intent on spreading the message of agricultural reform across the Southside. While the message of agricultural reform initially challenged the development of bright tobacco, in the end reform advice would encourage the new crop's diffusion. Following the Civil War, bright tobacco culture would contribute to many of the conditions that antebellum reformers feared—from catastrophic soil erosion to a decline in farm diversity and profits—but the reformers' message actually stimulated the prewar growth of the crop.

This chapter examines the impact of the Civil War on tobacco agriculture and manufacturing. While the Civil War neither doomed bright tobacco nor ensured that it would become the dominant form of regional agriculture, it did accentuate antebellum cultivation and marketing practices. The war helped build the reputation of bright tobacco and expanded the market for bright leaf products by creating severe competition among the South's tobacco producers, a competition that favored tobacco of the best quality.

This chapter uses documentary and archaeological data from excavations and environmental analysis to explore the processes of human-initiated landscape changes at Poplar Forest and in the surrounding region over the course of a century. The author traces aspects of colonial and antebellum agriculture including cycles of livestock rearing and tobacco cultivation, the detrimental effects of long-term monocrop cultivation, and efforts to ameliorate those effects through scientific farming, including agricultural diversification and the application of new methods of agriculture such as contour plowing, the application of fertilizers, and crop rotation. Today, local vegetation, place names, fauna, and topography continue to bear the marks of colonial expansion, agricultural practices, and the economic aspirations of planters engaged in large-scale tobacco production.

This chapter introduces Jefferson's enslaved community and explores the debate over the extent to which agricultural systems determine social organization within plantation settings. The author compares the timing and scope of the transition from tobacco to grain cultivation at Poplar Forest and Monticello around 1790 to the spatial organization of enslaved plantation households, paying particular attention to architecture and the occurrence and frequency of subfloor pits. After detailing the results of excavations at three Poplar Forest quartering sites-Wingos quarter, the North Hill quarter, and an early-nineteenth-century quarter-she concludes that architectural changes in quarters were set in motion by planters' acknowledgement of the importance of supporting the growth of enslaved families, beginning in the 1750s and 1760s, not by the introduction of grain agriculture in the 1790s.