In historiography, administrations have been normaly treated as national, regional or local unities that were entangled in the space of a nation, a state or a nation-state in a rather hierachical way. Such a view echoed the general tendency of historians up to the very recent time to limit their scale of investigation to a “national container”. The tobacco administration in France that had been created in 1810/11 could hardly be understood in such a narrow frame. Under the umbrella of the Ministry of Finances, a Parisian central administration and several regional offices were created where bureaucrats and experts were now responsible for the cultivation, the processing and the trade of a whole sector that been private since the early years of the French Revolution. This administrative network was fluid and in part non-hierachical. It can be seen as a relational system where negotiations between the different officials were a common phenomena.

This is particularly important for the knowlege networks of the officials in the tobacco administration. They were not just focused on the legal, social and economic organisation of tobacco cultivation in France, but they also intended to improve the fields that they inherited from times of privat cultivation. The various improvement projects of the tobacco cultivation in France that fell to a strong degree in the hands of the officials had a border crossing dimension. Improving French tobacco fields by agronomic knowlege implied the establishement of various transnational networks. If we look more closer to the group of engineers and chemists in the Parisian central administration, we can observe a particular interest in Cuban as well as Paraguayan tobacco cultures. Parisian experts were sent out to explore plantations and fields in Cuba and Paraguay, evaluate the quality of raw tobacco and, occasionally, to bring seeds and agronomic knowlege from their fields of investigation to France. Travelers identified ‘Cuban’ elements in the practices of tobacco cultivation in Paraguay and pointed to the applicabilty of such routines in Europe.

Although such expertise from Latin America was not homogenously accepted in France – this becomes particularly evident when we take into account the perception of tobacco experts in cultivation areas in the Eastern border area Alsace – such networks point to to the necessity to understand the French tobacco monopoly as a transnational administration.