Afterword: Tobacco’s Glocal Worlds

My research in colonial BengalBengal, on tobacco, indigo, and sugar (Sinha-Kerkhoff in Colonising Plants in Bihar: Tobacco Betwixt Indigo and Sugarcane (1760–1950). Penguin Random House, Gurgaon, 2014; Sinha-Kerkhoff in Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures. Commodities and Anti-commodities in Global History. Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, pp. 29–49, 2016; Sinha-Kerkhoff in Embedding Agricultural Commodities. Using historical evidence, 1840-1940s. Routledge, London, pp. 99–119, 2017), over almost the same time frame as this volume, made me acutely aware of the distinctions among various crops and locales, and the need to broaden my story (Sinha-Kerkhoff in Globalising Everyday Consumption in India. History and Ethnography. Routledge, London and New York, pp. 98–121, 2020). It made me see the need for a comparative perspective within the overarching history of capitalism, whereby empirical case studies can act as building blocks for garnering a much-needed local and global historical perspective.