Tobacco

A crop native to the Americas, Nicotiana tabacum, domesticated by Indigenous peoples in South America, with cultivation and ceremonial use spreading through the Americas long before European contact. Tobacco became one of the first profitable export crops of colonial North America, particularly in Virginia and Maryland from the early seventeenth century, and its cultivation there was built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, a plantation economy that helped entrench and expand chattel slavery across the American South for the following two centuries. Tobacco remains a major global cash crop today, grown in China, Brazil, India and elsewhere, though production has declined in many wealthier countries as public health concern about smoking has grown since the mid-twentieth century.