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Tobacco builds Virginia
Tobacco is a plant from the Americas, and smoking was an Indigenous practice Europeans took up and turned into one of the first global consumer goods. Tobacco exhausts soil quickly, so the economy demanded a constant supply of fresh land. That is a direct driver of displacement westward, and of the demand for labour met first by English indentured servants and then by enslaved Africans. The shift happened gradually through the seventeenth century, and Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 — in which poor white and Black people made common cause — is often identified as a turning point after which the law began to separate them systematically.
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