114 Atlantic African, American, and European Backgrounds to Contact, Commerce, and EnslavementSee also: Chesapeake Colonies; Indentured Servitude; James-
town, Virginia; Johnson, AnthonyChristopher Martin CumoBibliography
Kulikoff , Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: Th e Development of Southern
Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1 680– 1 800. Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Menard, Russell R. “Th e Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Col-
onies, 1617–1730: An Interpretation.” Research in Economic
History 5 (1980):123–61.
Wetherell, Charles. “ ‘Boom and Bust’ in the Colonial Chesa-
peake Economy.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15
(1984):185–210.Toure, Askia Muhammad
Askia Muhamamd Toure (1442–1538), variously known as
Askia al-hajj Muhammad b. Abi Bakr and Askia Muham-
mad the Great, ruled the Songhai Empire from 1493 to
1529 and is considered one of the great West African rul-
ers. Under his rule, the borders of the empire expanded to
encompass nearly 500,000 square miles of the West African
Sahel (arid strip of land south of the Sahara) and savannah
regions, including much of modern-day Mali and Niger, as
well as the northern portions of Burkina Faso and Nigeria.
Aft er serving as a general to two of his predecessors, Askia
Muhammad came to power in a coup, deposing Abu Bakr
b. Ali, the son of Sunni Ali Ber (r. 1464–1492), aft er two de-
cisive military battles. He ruled the empire from the ancient
city of Gao along the Niger River, but also had control of
Timbuktu, the semiautonomous scholarly center of medi-
eval West Africa. His dynasty lasted for a century, oversee-
ing the golden age of Timbuktu and Songhai.
Askia Muhammad was from the Soninke ethnic group
and was a devout adherent to Islam, making a pilgrimage
to Mecca in 1497–1498. In Cairo, he received the authority
to act as a deputy of the Caliph, the overall leader of Mus-
lims, which gave him legitimacy in the eyes of local Islamic
scholars who looked upon him as a pious patron. Askia
Muhammad’s aff able relationship with the scholarly elite in
both Gao and Timbuktu helped secure his place in the doc-
umented history of the region. Th is was in contrast to his
predecessor, Sunni Ali, who was lukewarm to Islamic prac-
tices at best and oft en hostile toward the Islamic scholars.of scale. Small farmers relied on their families and hired
labor, but free labor in colonial Virginia was too scarce
to meet the needs of the large planters. Instead they im-
ported indentured servants from England. Demographic
and economic conditions in England created surplus labor
for tobacco growers in the colonies. Until roughly 1650,
the birthrate in England outpaced the growth in the num-
ber of jobs. Wages fell, driving the urban poor to inden-
ture themselves in exchange for passage to America and
the promise of freedom at the end of their term. Aft er
roughly 1650, the birthrate stabilized and the pool of in-
dentured servants began to shrink in the 1680s. By then
the sugar barons of the Caribbean had demonstrated the
profi tability of slave labor and the planters of the Chesa-
peake switched from indentured servant to African slave.
In 1660, Virginia and Maryland totaled 1,700 slaves and
in 1680, 4,000. Between 1695 and 1700, the planters im-
ported 3,000 new slaves, as many as they had bought the
previous two decades. Setting aside hired help, by 1690,
four-fi ft hs of labor in York County, Virginia, was slave and
only one-fi ft h indentured. Tobacco was the fi rst crop in
North America to use slave labor, establishing the labor
system that the rice plantations of the Carolinas, the sugar
plantations of Louisiana, and the cotton plantations of the
Lower South would replicate.
Tobacco depleted the soil of minerals. Plentiful land
led farmers to cultivate new land on the margin of the fron-
tier rather than to restore fertility to depleted soils. Th ey
converted old tobacco fi elds to grain and pasture, and the
cultivation of new land spread tobacco to North Carolina
aft er 1670 and as far north as the Ohio River by 1800. Into
the 20th century, farmers in southern Ohio grew tobacco
for cigars. Th ere, tobacco farms used free labor. In the
South, slavery persisted until 1865. As was true of cotton,
many postbellum tobacco farms were a mix of tenant and
sharecropper. As in the colonial period, small farms re-
lied on hired labor. In the second half of the 19th century,
scientists urged tobacco farmers to restore soil fertility by
adding fertilizers to their soil and the U.S. Department of
Agriculture established a program to breed new varieties of
tobacco. Aft er World War II, soybeans rivaled tobacco on
the clay soils of the South, bringing diversity to lands that
otherwise depended on tobacco monoculture. Since the
1960s, physicians and scientists have publicized the hazards
of tobacco. Conversely, popular culture makes tobacco se-
ductive to youth.