By 1919 the American tobacco industry was producing 50 billion cigarettes a year. 20% of the average cigarette consisted of tobacco grown in Anatolia, prized for its aromatic qualities, that compensated for the bland taste of domestic American tobacco. Whereas the role played at Lausanne by American lobbyists acting on behalf of missionaries, Armenian-Americans and big oil is relatively well known, the American tobacco interest’s role has been overlooked. This is surprising, given that tobacco represented not only a source of profit for American private enterprise, but a major source of revenue (through taxation) for the US government.

In 1919 American tobacco companies called on the US Navy to defend their interests in an unstable and politically-divided Anatolia: the Bureau of Navy Intelligence reported that “one destroyer is kept continually at Samsun, Turkey, to look after the American tobacco interests at that port. American tobacco companies represented there depend practically entirely on the moral effect of having a man-of-war in port to have their tobacco released for shipment.” The importance of this cash crop to the new Turkish Republic was even more evident. When it came to the Lausanne population exchange, therefore, policies prioritized the resettlement of incoming tobacco cultivators to tobacco-producing areas for the express purpose of fostering the tobacco trade.

Since the arrival in Anatolia of immigrants from Kavala, Seres, and Macedonia, a new era of tobacco culture is anticipated, considering the fact that these people are now settling down in the Samsun-Bafra region, where the tobacco is considered the best in Turkey.

G.B. Ravndal, Turkey: A Commercial and Industrial Handbook. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926), 96.

In this conversation, recorded on 29 November 2023, Sibel Karagoc shares some of the discoveries she made over the course of her doctoral research, which forms the basis of a forthcoming book. Sibel and Jon discuss the importance of Ottoman/Turkish tobacco for the American economy and the relative influence of the American tobacco lobby, before reflecting on how Sibel’s research challenges familiar accounts of exchangee settlement in Turkey in the early 1920s, suggesting that the picture was less chaotic than we thought.

Episode 44 – Big Tobacco

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

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