This book explores the history of tobacco agriculture in the Piedmont region of Virginia and North Carolina since Emancipation in 1865. Focusing on the transformations in labor—the tasks of growing tobacco; the arrangement of workers; and the cultural meaning of labor—the book argues that the predominance of family labor in tobacco agriculture in the Piedmont in the twentieth century was an accident of the arrangement of labor following emancipation that was then reified in federal policy. This reification, however, was not accidental, but a product of farm families’ advocacy of that particula ... More

This book explores the history of tobacco agriculture in the Piedmont region of Virginia and North Carolina since Emancipation in 1865. Focusing on the transformations in labor—the tasks of growing tobacco; the arrangement of workers; and the cultural meaning of labor—the book argues that the predominance of family labor in tobacco agriculture in the Piedmont in the twentieth century was an accident of the arrangement of labor following emancipation that was then reified in federal policy. This reification, however, was not accidental, but a product of farm families’ advocacy of that particular model of tobacco agriculture. Their advocacy, in turn, was driven by a culture that esteemed small-scale, artisanal production over large-scale, industrial capitalist production. It concludes with the dissolution of this labor-centered culture and the growing prestige of large-scale, industrial agriculture as a result of political changes, technological modernization, and neoliberal market and labor ideologies.