The Aegean Archipelagos could be seen as a networked cultural space covered by multilevel web frameworks. The lines (flows or trajectories) are routes of people, goods, ideas and the nodes are the islands and their communities. At the same time islands are also fields of production that makes them matrixes of social and cultural creation. This paper deals with the cultivation and marketing of tobacco in the Aegean islands from the second half of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century. The presence of tobacco was combined with the transition to modernity for island communities when the capitalistic economy was spread and became dominant in the eastern Mediterranean. Following the division of labor, the tobacco processing reinforced the dependency of island economies from regional and global financial systems; also the establishment of an industrial working class within island societies. The tobacco left its mark in social and spatial formation in the Aegean islands both in urban and rural environments.
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