A tobacco plantation with black workers and a white overseer. Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. It is most commonly used as a recreational drug, and is a valuable cash crop. A plantation is a large piece of land (or water) where one crop is specifically planted for widespread commercial sale and usually tended by resident laborers. Slave labor extracted from imported Africans was used extensively to work on early plantations in the American colonies and the United States, throughout the Caribbean, the Americas, and in European-occupied areas of Africa. Engraving, late 17th century.