The scope of this question is intended to cover social, political, and economic realms, and is NOT intended to become a place to post links to your favorite anti-smoking health scare sites.
Imagine a world in which the tobacco plant never existed, or it went extinct in ancient times. Everything else about the world starts the same. E.g. the Greeks probably will still lose at Thermopylae unless you can find a way to prove that the fact that a plant that they didn’t have anyway could have reasonably affected the outcome.
How would history and the world today be different, especially considering social structures, politics, and the economy?
I’ve been hypothesizing that the United States of America might not exist in a tobacco-less world because the economics of British settlement in several of the North American colonies were heavily driven by the desire of Europe for more tobacco. The Washington family were tobacco farmers - would George Washington have been born in Virginia without tobacco? Maybe his ancestors, realizing that Virginia wasn’t the best place to settle because it had little economic future, would have settled in Newfoundland and little George would have become a fisherman who never dreamed of revolution.
I agree with the OP. The English settlements in Virginia were on the verge of failure when tobacco cultivation turned them around. If tobacco farming hadn’t existed, there would have been a much smaller English presence in the New World and the English colonies probably would have ended up being overrun by the French or Spanish. France, rather than Britain, might have become the dominant Imperial power in Africa and India. No American Revolution would have probably meant no French Revolution and maybe no follow-up revolutions in 1848 and 1917. You might still have a world ruled by Kings and Tsars and Emperors.
Unlikely. The British settlements in New England took off pretty quickly, the northern colonies quickly became more important, economically. The British were itching for an empire, itching for control of what is now the US. They would have found something else to fill the niche that tobacco had.
The settlement of North America would have happened almost exactly the same way without tobacco. Europeans didn’t come here to make their fortune in some specific way, they were opportunists, and there were plenty of other opportunities. Gold, sugar cane, cotton, fur, were among many end product attractions, and the Indians were giving away free land to anyone with a gun. Sure, there’s that old Butterfly Effect, but the non-existence of tobacco would cause no greater change than the average random element eliminated from the picture. Imagine instead the non-existence of beavers, the geographic topology of vast areas of North America would be greatly different. Without maize Indian culture would have developed along an entirely different course. Tobacco is rather non-descipt in it’s impact on culture and the environment.
Tobacco strips the soil of its fertility very quickly, more so than other common crops. Without tobacco, much of the soil in the South would probably be in better condition today.
There’s a great book called Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization. It has some amazing (and sad) photos of highly eroded land in the southern US, as a result of intensive tobacco farming. The topsoil just disappears.
Virginia was the breakthrough colony. Roanoke was founded in 1584 (unsuccessfully) and Jamestown was founded in 1607. Jamestown was almost abandoned in 1610 and it wasn’t until tobacco was cultivated in 1612 that the corner was turned.
The first English colonies in New England were Cuttyhunk Island in 1602 and the Popham Colony in 1607. Both were abandoned within a year. There were no further attempts to colonize New England until the Plymouth Colony was founded in 1620. And the revived interest in New England was a result of the success of Jamestown.
The New England colonies did take off quickly once they were founded. But if the Virginia colonies had failed, there would have been no interest in founding any New England colonies.
It’s true England wanted an Empire. But they wanted successful colonies in order to build that empire. Nobody wanted to divert resources to what appeared to be useless land.
So why did anyone bother to establish colonies in New England since tobacco wasn’t a viable crop there?
Tobacco has an interesting history for multiple reasons. I suspect however that mankind would have achieved as much or more than it has even in tobacco’s absence.
The Pilgrims were pining to get to the Americas before the Jamestown colony was doing well. They really didn’t have a whole lot of options, and it’s unclear they would have headed elsewhere or tried to stay in Europe if that colony had failed. They ended up heading further north, anyway.
Actually you can grow tobacco in New England. There are tobacco farmers in New England to this day. It’s not a particularly great place for tobacco farming though.
But New England is where the Plymouth Company had the right to develop colonies. Given a choice they might have been happier starting colonies further south but the Virginia Company had the rights to that area.
But while the Plymouth Company had a right to develop colonies, it wasn’t required to. As I noted above, the charter had gone unused for years after a couple of unsuccessful attempts. However once Jamestown started making some money for the Virginia Company, the Plymouth Company decided to take another shot at founding a colony in the area it had a claim to.