Tobacco never banned in Ming/Qing China?

In history, real-world and alternate, a recurring question arises regarding the balance of trade between the West and China. How to find a good to trade with the Chinese for their tea, manufactures and other goods? In OTL, the British resorted to opium. In my current timeline, I am exploring an Asian market for coca. However, what about tobacco?

The last emperor of the Ming dynasty, Chongzhen, banned tobacco two years before his death and the collapse of his dynasty. The Qing maintained this policy and strengthened it. But there is an argument that many of the Qing's policies were simply those of the late Ming but dialed up to 11. So it is possible that if Chongzhen had never gotten around to banning the crop, then the Qing might never have seen the need to either.

So what if edicts against tobacco are never launched, and a market for the crop allowed to slowly develop. Judging my OTL modern tobacco use in China, it is a habit which hits well into the Chinese culture. Would demand for tobacco among the China, a demand which is far less damaging to the state and economy than demand for opium, allow the Europeans to maintain a balance of trade more favorable to their mercantilist points of view? And what would be the effects of that?
 

archaeogeek

Banned
One of the problems with tobacco as a trade good replacing opium is that, like coca, Britain didn't have a monopoly on its production in the 19th century. While it could be one of many interesting trade goods (I like the idea of coca too and I'd probably note that coffee is another interesting one although I'm not sure if it wasn't already traded, so yeah). So while it could make butterflies I'm not sure it's butterflies the scoundrels of the Honourable East India Company would have liked, all told.

I know tobacco was grown heavily in the early english colonies; particularly in Virginia where it led to a very transient population where the upper class where basically younger sons of british gentlemen trying to make fortune in the Indies but I think there was a major depression of the tobacco market in the late 18th century, so your leading producers by that point would have been in the Spanish side of things, and I'm not sure when the disruption ended in the US.

However I'm pretty sure at that point the british have the problem that their prime tobacco growing regions are now independent.

As for hitting Chinese culture, I know cultural comparisons are sometimes weak: it did hit christian and muslim europe alike and Japan and Indonesia about equally, about has hard as coffee did.
 
The thing is that this PoD would be in the 17th century, so the butterflies would already be flapping relatively early. This could lead to even more expansion of tobacco cultivation in North America by the British, or alternatively it could lead to another power beginning mass cultivation of the crop in order to trade effectively with the Chinese. Perhaps the Portugeuse or Dutch? That would have an effect on relative economic, and by extension political, fortunes in this crucial era.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
But China can grow its own tobacco, and does. Why would it import it?

For the same reason people imported coffee even when it could grow in a lot of places: control of the supply. The dutch had to smuggle saplings from Yemen to break the ottoman-venitian monopoly on it, and the french had a lucky break when they captured a dutch ship with coffee saplings - this happened over the course of two centuries. I assume tobacco would be in a situation a bit like that, where the base resource is still a few centuries away from really spreading worldwide.

(Another plant the dutch smuggled that I know of is Quinine, which was initially a peruvian monopoly)

And yes with their older, more established empires and their older, more established eastern trade routes Portugal and Spain would probably be in a better position to export tobacco to China (and if the POD is in the 17th century then coffee, until the late 18th century, is only grown by the Ottomans, the French and the Dutch so yeah it works slightly less).
 
Top