Manila

Tobacco reached the islands with the Spanish, carried across the Pacific on the Manila galleons, and for two centuries it was grown loosely and taxed badly. That changed in 1782, when Governor General Jose Basco y Vargas established a royal tobacco monopoly to make the colony pay for itself. Cultivation was confined to designated provinces, above all Cagayan and Isabela in northern Luzon, where growers were required to plant tobacco and sell the entire crop to the state at fixed prices. The monopoly worked as fiscal policy and was resented as everything else; it is one of the standing grievances in nineteenth-century Philippine political writing.

Manufacture was concentrated in Manila, in large state factories at Arroceros, Meisic, Binondo and Malabon, and in Cavite. The workforce was overwhelmingly female. By the end of the nineteenth century roughly thirty thousand cigarreras worked in the city's tobacco factories, on shifts running from six in the morning to six in the evening with a two-hour break, rolling, cutting, counting and packing. They were not passive: an alboroto in 1812 over wages and mistreatment ended with supervisors dismissed. Catalina de Castro, mother of the revolutionary Andres Bonifacio, worked as a supervisor at the Meisic factory.

The monopoly was abolished on 3 December 1882, and its assets passed to a private successor. The Marquis of Comillas, Antonio Lopez y Lopez, had founded the Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas on 11 November 1881 in anticipation; Tabacalera took over the government factories and in 1887 built La Flor de la Isabela, then among the largest cigar factories in the world. Manila cigars and cheroots went to Britain, Australia, India and China, and a Manila was a recognized category of smoke. The modern industry is a fraction of that, but it is continuous.

Manila is a manufacturing and shipping city; the leaf comes down from the Cagayan Valley and Isabela in northern Luzon, where alluvial sandy loam grows a broad, soft, mild leaf with modest nicotine. The traditional Manila cigar is medium to mild and gently sweet, with dry wood, toasted grain and very little pepper, and it burns quickly. The monopoly's compulsory planting districts created that concentration in the north, and it survived the monopoly by a century and a half. Most Philippine tobacco acreage now goes to cigarette leaf rather than cigar leaf, with premium cigar production a small specialist business.

The cigarrera is the central figure of Manila's tobacco history and one of the first large groups of Filipina wage workers. They walked to Binondo and Arroceros before dawn, worked twelve-hour days broken by a long midday rest, were searched for pilfered leaf and organized when conditions became intolerable. Their wages made them economically independent in a way that unsettled contemporaries, and the factories became a recognized route for women into the cash economy of the colonial capital. Manila remains a cigar-smoking city in a modest way, with the surviving houses selling mostly at home and to Spain, the market that has bought Manila cigars for a hundred and fifty years.