– Of course, one of my first thoughts as someone who studies the Americas, was about the first high volume cultivations of tobacco in the seventeenth century in colonial North America. You mentioned Virginia and Maryland tobacco varieties. What relationship did Gundi tobacco have to these (distant) American tobaccos? (I may be off the mark in making any connection, so feel free to correct me). One of the interesting things I have read about the growth in the colonial tobacco trade was the nature of shipping that it demanded due to its bulky size and need to be packaged in a particular way as it was shipped across the Atlantic.

– I was reminded of a chapter in the recent edited volume ‘Mercantilism Re-Imagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire’, ed Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind, which has a chapter ‘Natural History and Improvement: The Case of Tobacco’ by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson. Although it focuses on political economy, it has some useful, if unarticulated, references to long-distance attempted management of tobacco cultivation, and suggests that there were radically different notions of the same crop according to whether the observer was in London or in the colonial environment.

– Finally, the maps by Minard are great! Thanks for including them. They seem to be unusual maps indeed.

So, to ask a couple of questions:
I agree that we should accept that sites of knowledge are important, and the information can alter upon movement or circulation, and that the site or place has an epistemic quality. I’m wondering what conditions created change in the Gundi tobacco as information about spread from Baden, to Alsace, to Paris?
Do you have information about production levels of Gundi, or numbers of manufacturers, as well as export information? (This might help me imagine how the movement of knowledge could be visualised).