Tobacco on the Periphery

Jean Stubbs has published widely on Cuba, with a specialist interest in tobacco, class, race, gender, nation and migration. In 1985 she established her place as a pre-eminent historian of Cuban tobacco with the publication of Tobacco on the Periphery (a new expanded edition of which was published by Amaurea Press in 2023). Her foundational work on Cuban tobacco, and especially the Havana cigar, led her to trace cultivation, trade, manufacture, labour and consumption on a regional and global scale, linking commodity and migration histories, drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history. Now for the first time, her extensive writings have been collected into a single volume, containing 19 of her tobacco-related articles published between 1982 and 2024. Jean Stubbs first went to Cuba in 1968 to conduct research for her PhD (University of London, 1975). She married there, had two children, and lived and worked in Havana until 1987. After returning to London, she served as chair of both the UK Society for Caribbean Studies and the regional Caribbean Studies Association. In 2009, she was awarded the UNESCO Toussaint Louverture Medal for combatting racism in political, literary and artistic fields, and in 2012 was elected a member of the Cuban Academy of History. In addition to her work on tobacco, her research into contemporary Cuban migration built on this to explore how commodities and nation-branding have shaped new Cuban diasporic mobilities; and her involvement in the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project led to her interest in commodity frontiers and environmental history, and co-producing the documentary Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes (2019). She also recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Commodity History and the forthcoming Palgrave volume Tobacco in Global Perspective.