Aleksander Shopov: ‚A Green-Colored Leaf Called Tabaġa‘: The Earliest Ottoman Inquiries into an American Plant

Vortrag ‚A Green-Colored Leaf Called Tabaġa‘: The Earliest Ottoman Inquiries into an American Plant Aleksandar Shopov (SUNY Binghamton, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) Kommentar: Samir Boumediene (CNRS, ENS Lyon) In the first half of the 17th century the Ottoman Imperial Council began issuing orders to provincial authorities to curb the growing and sale of tobacco whose use or smoking was associated by the Ottoman state with illness and death. The earliest order issued by the Ottoman Imperial Council in 1609 attributes the English merchants as the facilitators for the spread of tobacco and notes that initially it was thought to be a medicine. A number of Ottoman scholars have repeated this story of the spread of tobacco throughout the first half of the 17th century. The attempts to  write about the history of the spread of tobacco emerged in a time of growing legal debates about the permissibility of its use. This article will argue that the early attempts to write histories of the spread of tobacco in Ottoman Empire were central to the medical discourse about this plant among Ottoman but also Moroccan and western African scholars. The attribution of the English as facilitators of the spread of tobacco was done in order to erase an earlier history of Muslim scholars and medical practitioners who examined tobacco and attributed to it medicinal benefits. By examining treatises on the medicinal benefits of tobacco in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic and their incorporation in legal writings I identify and explore the pathways through which the plants and medical knowledge about tobacco moved. This article, thus, contributes to the historiography on the global tobacco diffusion in the early modern period by arguing that the early production of knowledge about plants from the Americas could be identified beyond the Atlantic world. Crucial to the early global diffusion of tobacco were Morocco, western Africa and the Sahara desert, regions from where treatises on the medicinal benefits on tobacco spread to the Ottoman empire. Moreover, the production and circulation of medical knowledge about tobacco followed the pathways through which tobacco was acclimatized and moved as an object that was grown.    Aleksandar Shopov is a historian with interests in the history of science and the social and environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire, with a focus on the period between 1400 and 1800. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2016. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Annemarie Schimmel Colleg in Bonn, and has also held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Library in Washington, D.C., the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, and the Max Planck Institut for the History of Science in Berlin. He is currently writing a book about urban agriculture in Ottoman Istanbul. He is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern Ottoman History at Binghamton University (SUNY) and a Project Coordinator (2021-2027) at the Max Planck Institute for the  History of Science for the project „Agriculture and the Making of Sciences 1100-1700“.