How Does Tobacco Link to Britain

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How does tobacco link Britain’s empire and America’s development from 1600 onwards? It was the "staple" of the Chesapeake colonies in a broader sense than any other staple the world has known. For, in the ancient province, all the processes of government society and domestic life began and ended with tobacco.[1] In 1612 John Rolfe, an Englishman sent with the Virginia Company, found that tobacco would grow well in Virginia and sell profitably in England. This was wonderful news considering that many of the Jamestown colonists had died or suffered miserably as their farming efforts had been relatively unsuccessful. Throughout Virginia and the greater Chesapeake, the potential cash value of tobacco soon captivated the imaginations of the colonists. They began to plant it in every available clearing, from fields to the forts and streets of Jamestown, and eventually to much of Tidewater Virginia.[2] "Dominating the Virginia economy after 1622, tobacco remained the staple of the Chesapeake colonies, and its phenomenal rise is one of the most remarkable aspects of our colonial history. Tobacco cultivation and exports formed an essential component of the American colonial economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Tobacco plantations were distinct from other cash crops in terms of agricultural demands, trade, slave labor, and plantation culture. Many influential American revolutionaries, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, owned tobacco plantations, and were financially devastated by debt to British tobacco merchants shortly before the American Revolution. John Rolfe, a colonist from Jamestown, was the first to grow tobacco in America. He arrived in Virginia with tobacco seeds procured on an earlier voyage to Trinidad, and in 1612 he harvested his inaugural crop for sale on the European market. Rolfe’s tobacco operation was an immediate
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