TOBACCO IN HISTORY
TOBACCO IN HISTORY
The cultures of dependence
Jordan Goodman
London and New York
First published 1993
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
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© 1993, 1994 Jordan Goodman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
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ISBN 0-203-99365-9 Master e-book ISBN
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For my parents
CONTENTS
List of figure and tables vii
Acknowledgements viii
List of abbreviations ix
Introduction
1 WHAT IS TOBACCO?
The botany, chemistry and economics of a strange
plant
2
Part I
2 FOOD OF THE SPIRITS
Shamanism, healing and tobacco in Amerindian
cultures
17
3 WHY TOBACCO?
Europeans, forbidden fruits and the panacea gospel
36
Part II
4 RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL
DISCOURSE
Tobacco consumption before the cigarette
56
5 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
Cigarettes, health and the hard sell
88
Part III
6 ‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’
The impact of colonialism before 1800
128
7 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
Planter culture to 1800
164
8 A POOR MAN’S CROP?
The globalization of tobacco culture since 1800
190
9 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
Tobacco is big business
213
Conclusion
10 TO DIE BY SMOKE
Whither tobacco?
237
Glossary 242
Bibliography 243
Index 272
vi
Part IV
FIGURE AND TABLES
FIGURE
6.1 Tobacco quantities: Chesapeake, Brazil, Spanish America and
Dutch Republic 1620–1800 (official figures)
143
TABLES
1.1 World tobacco crop 1990 7
1.2 World tobacco crop 1990, seven leading countries 7
1.3 Employment in tobacco growing 1987 8
1.4 World cigarette production 9
1.5 Multinational tobacco companies 10
1.6 Annual cigarette consumption per adult 1985–8 11
4.1 Tobacco consumption, England and Wales 1620–1702 57
4.2 Pipe makers in England 1630–1700 62
4.3 Tobacco consumption per capita, England and Wales 1698–1752 70
5.1 Cigarette consumption 92
5.2 Market share of leading cigarette brands, United States 1925–49 104
5.3 Filter-tipped share of the United States cigarette market 109
5.4 Cigarette advertising expenditure, United States 1939–83 113
5.5 Cancer deaths, United States 1900–40 124
9.1 Multinational company cigarette output 1980 235
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book could not have been written without the kind assistance of
librarians and archivists in a number of institutions. I would like to thank
the staff of the following: the British Library, the Guildhall Library, the
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, the Museum of Mankind
Library, the Library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, ASH (Action on
Smoking and Health), the New York Public Library and the Arquivo
Histórico Ultramarino in Lisbon. Thanks are also due to the Inter-Library
Loan sections of the Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex and the
Joule Library, University of Manchester Institute of Science and
Technology for providing me with obscure books and journals.
Sections of this book have been given as individual papers at seminars
and conferences. I would like to thank the participants at the University of
Hull, the University of Humberside, the University of Manchester, the
University of London and the University of Kent for the helpful
comments and suggestions.
Several scholars provided me with much valuable unpublished
material and bibliographical information: I would like to thank Ingrid
Waldron, Woodruff Smith, Mac Marshall, Alexander von Gernet and
Cathy Crawford for their help. The manuscript was read in full or in
parts by Alexander von Gernet, Peter Earle, Nigel Bartlett and an
anonymous reader at Routledge. To all of them I would like to extend my
deepest thanks for their criticisms and suggestions and for their time.
Nigel Bartlett was also responsible for collating the quotations and
selecting the cover illustrations. The editorial staff at Routledge,
especially Claire L’Enfant and Louise Snell, have been closely involved in
this project from the beginning and I thank them warmly for their
patience and perseverance.
But my final and most heart-felt thanks are reserved for Dallas Sealy
who has seen me through this book, has read and re-read the whole
manuscript and is the best critic anyone can have.
ABBREVIATIONS
AHU Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino
BAT British American Tobacco
BM Add. Mss British Museum Additional Manuscripts
CSVP Calendar of State Papers Venetian
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization
RCP Royal College of Physicians
RJR R.J.Reynolds
UN United Nations
UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
USBC United States Bureau of the Census
USDA United States Department of Agriculture
USDC United States Department of Commerce
USDHEW United States Department of Health, Education and
Welfare
USDHHS United States Department of Health and Human Services
Introduction
It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the
leading causes of statistics.
Fletcher Krebel Reader’s Digest (December 1961)
Cigarettes just lie there in their packs
waiting until you call on one of them to help you relax
They aren’t moody; they don’t go in for sexual
harassment and threats,
or worry about their performance as compared with
that of other cigarettes,
nor do they keep you awake all night telling you of
their life,
beginning with their mother and going on until
morning about their first wife.
Fleur Adcock ‘Smokers for celibacy’, in Time-Zones
(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 36–7
1
WHAT IS TOBACCO?
The botany, chemistry and economics of a strange
plant
The origins of the tobacco plant are lost. Its history starts around eight
thousand years ago, when two species of the plant, Nicotiana rustica and
Nicotiana tabacum, were dispersed by Amerindians through both the
southern as well as the northern American continent (Wilbert 1991:179).
Modern commercial tobacco is descended directly from the latter species.
Until the very end of the fifteenth century no one outside the American
continents had any knowledge of the cultivated varieties of this plant.
Today it is grown in more than 120 countries, and its manufactured
products are known to virtually everyone.
What is tobacco? An answer requires an analysis in several key areas.
Tobacco exists in four principal dimensions: botany, chemistry and
pharmacology, economics—production and consumption—and history.
The last dimension is the main subject of this book, and the first three of
this introductory chapter.
The tobacco plant is of the genus Nicotiana, one of the larger divisions of
the family Solanaceae, otherwise known as nightshades. The nightshade
family is one of the largest in the natural world and includes, among
other plants, the potato, the pepper and, of course, the deadly nightshade
(Heiser 1969). There are sixty species in the genus Nicotiana alone, 60 per
cent of which are native to South America, 25 per cent to Australia and the
South Pacific, and 15 per cent to North America (Goodspeed 1954:8).
According to Thomas Goodspeed, the origin of the genus lies in the South
American continent from where it was dispersed to all other continents,
Australia included. Most authorities in the field are in broad agreement
with Good-speed, though some dispute his interpretation of the intercontinental transfer of the genus (Feinhandler, Fleming and Monahon
1979). There is further agreement that of all the species in existence, only
two, tabacum and rustica, have been cultivated, and it was these two that
generally supplanted the wild species, in the Americas at least. By the time
Europeans first sighted the New World, and long before then, Nicotiana
tabacum was cultivated primarily in the tropical regions, while Nicotiana
rustica could be found in many more areas, including the eastern
woodlands, Mexico, Brazil and at the extremes of agricultural activity in
Chile and Canada (Wilbert 1987:6).
Both tobacco species are annuals. Tabacum is a large plant between 1
and 3 metres high with large leaves; rustica is shrubby in comparison to
tabacum, ranging in height from 0.5 to 1.5 metres, and produces small and
fleshy leaves. Rustica is now the minor subgenus, being confined
principally to only a few parts of the world—the former USSR, India,
Pakistan and parts of North Africa (Akehurst 1981:34).
Tobacco is grown from seed, microscopic in size—a one ounce sample
may contain as many as three hundred thousand seeds (Akehurst 1981:
48). Wherever tobacco is cultivated, the crop needs to go through certain
stages before it is ready for market. There are variations but the general
pattern is as follows. Since the seed is minute and the seedlings produced
very fragile, they need to be raised in seedbeds before being planted in
the field. Once on their own, the growing plants are generally, though
not always, topped and suckered—the flowers are removed as they
appear, as are the suckers that grow subsequently. At maturity the plants
are harvested either by priming the leaves from the stalk or by simply
cutting the plant at the stalk. Curing is the next and most distinctive
stage. The basic operation involves nothing more than drying the leaves
or the entire stalk to reduce the moisture content and force the leaf
chemistry to produce characteristic qualities and aroma. This can be done
in one of several ways under different environmental conditions: in the
open air and in shade, termed air-curing; in the open air but in full
sunshine, termed sun-curing; in a barn with an open smoky fire, usually
of wood, termed fire-curing; and, finally, in a barn with dry heat
provided by flues running through the space, termed flue-curing
(Akehurst 1981:29–39).
Tobacco (except for Oriental tobacco) is now designated in two
principal ways: it is classed as dark or light tobacco, according to its
method of curing. Until the middle of the nineteenth century all of the
world’s cultivated tobacco was air-, sun- or fire-cured and dark. Light,
flue-cured tobacco became of importance only around the turn of the
twentieth century but it now accounts for the bulk of the world’s output.
The tobacco plant has a general composition which can be found in
most other plants. The chemistry of the leaf is straightforward: around 90
per cent is water and the rest is made up of mineral matter and organic
compounds (Akehurst 1981:522). Nitrogen is the most important element
and the organic compounds the most important chemicals. The
proportional representation of the chemical components of tobacco varies
considerably according to the type and curing method used, as well as to
the region where the tobacco is cultivated (Akehurst 1981:578–604).
Nicotine is the most important nitrogenous compound in tobacco and
in the smoke. It is an alkaloid, a plant substance of basic reaction, which
WHAT IS TOBACCO? 3
produces physiological changes in the body. There are other
alkaloids present in tobacco such as nornicotine and anabasine, but
nicotine is the primary alkaloid in both commercial varieties of tobacco,
tabacum and rustica: these two varieties, importantly, have higher
concentrations of nicotine than do any of the wild species (Wilbert 1987:
134–6; Akehurst 1981:543).
Tobacco smoke is chemically complex and is usually analysed in two
parts, the particulate or solid and the gaseous phase. Some 4,720 separate
compounds have already been identified in the smoke (Ginzel 1990:430).
The gaseous phase contains many chemicals that are well known: carbon
monoxide (5 per cent), carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, ammonia,
formaldehyde, benzene and hydrogen cyanide; the particulate phase
includes nicotine, phenol, naphthalene and cadmium among other
compounds (Davis 1987:20). The compounds in the particulate phase,
excepting nicotine, are collectively called tar. The higher the nicotine
yield, the higher the tar yield and vice versa (Ashton and Stepney 1982:29).
In the particulate phase, the free nicotine is ‘suspended on minute
droplets of tar…less than one thousandth of a millimetre across…’
(Ashton and Stepney 1982:29). Tobacco smoke can also be further
categorized into mainstream and sidestream smoke. About one half of
the volume of the smoke is accounted for by each type. Mainstream
smoke is drawn by the smoker down through the length of the cigarette
and as it travels its temperature falls dramatically until it is comfortable
to inhale. Sidestream smoke escapes as the cigarette burns and both the
smoker and those present will inhale this smoke. As sidestream smoke is
not diluted by passing through the cigarette or filter, the concentrations
of chemicals in the smoke are much greater than in mainstream smoke,
more than a hundred times for certain chemicals (Akehurst 1981:642, 645–
6; Ginzel 1990:433). When tobacco is not smoked, nicotine is still present
but in a water-soluble salt.
There are two facts about nicotine which are now irrefutable but which,
until recently, were not confirmed. They are: first, that people consume
tobacco in whatever form in order to administer nicotine to themselves;
and second, that nicotine is highly addictive, in the sense that ‘tobacco
use is regular and compulsive, and a withdrawal syndrome usually
accompanies tobacco abstinence’ (West and Grunberg 1991:486). Because
cigarette smoke is acidic, the nicotine in cigarette smoke can be absorbed
only by inhaling it into the lungs: the nicotine in both cigar and pipe
tobacco smoke, being alkaline, can also be absorbed through the buccal
mucosa, the membrane lining the mouth (Russell 1987:29). Whether
tobacco smoke is acidic or alkaline depends partly on curing methods
and partly on the different strains of tobacco used (Akehurst 1981:578–
604, 647, 649).
4 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Cigarette smokers who inhale absorb 92 per cent of the nicotine available
in the smoke. What happens then is graphically described in the
following account:
The modern cigarette is a highly effective device for getting nicotine
into the brain. The smoke is mild enough to be inhaled deeply into
the alveoli of the lungs from where it is rapidly absorbed. It takes
about 7 seconds for nicotine absorbed through the lungs to reach
the brain compared to the 14 seconds it takes for blood from arm to
brain after an intravenous injection. Thus, after each inhaled puff,
the smoker gets an intravenous-like ‘shot’ or bolus of blood
containing a high concentration of nicotine which reaches the brain
more rapidly than from an intravenous injection. The uptake of
nicotine by the brain is also extremely rapid.
(Russell 1987:26)
Within 15 or 20 seconds nicotine has reached every part of the body.
Nicotine absorption by pipe and cigar smoking, without inhalation, is
slower and less intense. Research has shown that confirmed pipe and
cigar smokers are satisfied with this pattern of nicotine absorption, but
when cigarette smokers switch to these alternative methods they
invariably inhale the smoke in an attempt to replicate the
pharmacological experience they had as cigarette smokers (Russell 1987:
29–30). Nasal or dry snuff, by contrast, offers the tobacco consumer as
efficient an absorption of nicotine as cigarette smoke inhalation whereas
the use of oral or wet snuff is akin to that of pipe and cigar smoking and
chewing tobacco (Russell 1987: 31–2).
Nicotine is a powerful and complex drug. It reacts with excitable cells
in many parts of the body and brain. One of the reasons for this is that
nicotine is structurally similar to acetylcholine, a vital neurotransmitter,
which acts to bridge the synaptic gap between nerve endings. Because it
is structurally similar to acetylcholine, nicotine can unlock and combine
with acetylcholine receptors throughout the body (Ashton and Stepney
1982:37–8). The effect of nicotine is biphasic in that different dosage levels
have differential impacts: a small dose produces a stimulant effect while
a large dose acts as a depressant; an overdose blocks neurotransmission
altogether leading to instant death (Ashton and Stepney 1982:38–9).
Besides its interaction and relationship with acetylcholine, nicotine has
also been shown to release many other types of nerve transmitters,
including norepinephrine, epinephrine, serotonin and dopamine, some of
which have been shown to be related to hallucinogens (Martin 1987:3;
Wilbert 1991: 185). All of these chemical changes in the body result in
physiological and psychological changes including changes in blood
pressure and pulse rate; increasing and decreasing respiration;
WHAT IS TOBACCO? 5
decreasing skin temperature; producing feelings of well-being, arousal,
alertness and many others (Martin 1987: 2–3; USDHHS 1988). Nicotine
seems to act in such a critical way in the body that there is more than a
suspicion that it acts to release primary drives similar to hunger pangs
(West and Grunberg 1991:488).
Tobacco smoke also contains other, possibly mind-altering drugs
(Janiger and Dobkin de Rios 1976; Siegel et al. 1977:18). Unfortunately, it
also includes many compounds that have been implicated as
carcinogenic and disease-related. There are at least fifty such compounds,
including cadmium, arsenic and formaldehyde (Davis 1987:20; Ginzel
1990:432–3).
In contrast to its chemical complexity, especially when burned, tobacco
is comparatively simple to grow under differing climatic and soil
conditions. The tobacco plant is prodigious in leaf growth at the same time
as being economical on field space. Plant populations can range from 15,
000 to 25,000 per hectare: a single plant can easily produce over 2 square
metres of usable leaf (Akehurst 1981:3). These characteristics alone
suggest the vast economic potential of the tobacco plant.
In global terms tobacco is generally considered the most widely grown
non-food crop though, in terms of overall area devoted to it, the tobacco
crop is not that important, accounting only for about 0.3 per cent of
cultivated land—this can usefully be compared to the proportion for
grain, average 13 per cent; cotton, 2 per cent; and coffee, 0.7 per cent (FAO
1989:1). In many countries, however, the proportion is much larger: in
Malawi, for example, it is 4.3 per cent and in China it is over 1 per cent
(FAO 1989:1).
The tobacco plant is of enormous economic importance to many
countries of the world, both developed and developing. Table 1.1 shows
the distribution of the world’s crop according to information available for
1990. Asia’s enormous share of the world’s tobacco crop is one of the
most significant aspects of global tobacco cultivation. The grouping by
regions in this fashion does, however, obscure the fact that production in
individual countries of the developed world is considerable. This fact is
revealed more clearly in Table 1.2, which shows the distribution of global
production by the seven largest national producers. The position of the
United States in the ranking of national producers is not surprising but
that of China is important to note in the context of the historical
discussion that follows in the succeeding chapters. One other important
feature of contemporary tobacco cultivation is not revealed in Table 1.2.
Most people do not associate tobacco growing with Europe but within
the European Community it is extremely important. In 1990 the total
production of the EC stood at 419,000 metric tons placing it in fifth
position in the world’s league table, but only marginally behind India
and Brazil.
6 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Most of the world’s tobacco crop—estimated at 85 per cent of the total
—ends up in cigarettes (FAO 1989:6). To this end, therefore, most of the
world’s production of tobacco leaf is of the type suited for this purpose,
that is, light air- and flue-cured tobacco (FAO 1989:4; Chapman and
Wong 1990:30). This is a trend which has been in evidence for some time
and is, according to most authorities on the subject, likely to continue into
the future.
This prodigious output has many effects on the economy of each of the
countries where tobacco is cultivated. One of the most obvious and most
direct effects is on the demand for agricultural labour. It is difficult, and
in some places almost impossible, to provide reliable information on
labour, not only because of under-reporting but also because of the
highly seasonal nature of the demand for labour and the fact that many
farming families raise other crops in addition to tobacco. Nevertheless,
while the degree of accuracy of the figures can be debated, the order of
magnitude is clear enough. Recent figures on the numbers employed on
the land in growing tobacco are shown in Table 1.3. China employs more
people in tobacco cultivation than does any other country, about sixteen
million people, according to recent estimates (FAO 1989:6). In relative
terms there is a great variation in the importance of tobacco growing in
Table 1.1 World tobacco crop 1990 (000 metric tons)
Source: Tobacco Journal International, May/June 1991:61–3
Table 1.2 World tobacco crop 1990, percentage of world production, seven leading
countries (000 metric tons)
Source: Tobacco Journal International, May/June 1991:61–3
WHAT IS TOBACCO? 7
the demand for labour. In China, for example, where a large proportion of
overall employment is on the land, tobacco growing occupies about 2 per
cent of total agricultural employment: in Zimbabwe the comparable
figure is 15 per cent, but in Greece and Italy it is 35 per cent and 17 per
cent respectively (FAO 1989:6–7; PIEDA 1992:17). All of the figures are
given in total numbers employed without regard for the nature of the
work, whether full- or part-time, seasonal or annual. Using full-time
equivalents as the measure of labour force participation, the Greek
figure, for example, would fall to around 10 per cent, which is still
substantial enough (Joosens and Raw 1991:1193).
In what was one of the most comprehensive analyses of its kind so far
undertaken, two independent organizations in 1987 reported on the
nature of the world’s tobacco culture. According to this report, in 1983
the fulltime labour demand for tobacco production, from growing to
distribution, was 18.2 million people worldwide: adding in a proportion
of labour from supply industries and relaxing the tight definition of
labour demand, so that family members, part-time and seasonal workers
are counted in full, the authors of the report estimated that tobacco was
responsible for the livelihood of at least a hundred million people
(Chapman and Wong 1990: 49; Warner 1990:82).
In many countries of the world tobacco contributes significantly to
agricultural incomes, being near the top of a league table in many places.
Tobacco is particularly important in China, Zimbabwe, Malawi and
Greece: available figures show that tobacco accounts for between 10 per
cent and 25 per cent of total agricultural income in the last three countries
(FAO 1989:8). Even where the relative value is not as large as in these
countries, tobacco still holds an important position in overall agricultural
activities. In Japan tobacco ranks in fourth place of all crops; in Canada it
is in fifth place; in the United States and Korea it is in eighth position
(FAO 1989:7–8).
There are many reasons why tobacco figures so importantly in the
economy of so many countries, both developed and developing, but one
of the most important and certainly most obvious reasons is that the
Table 1.3 Employment in tobacco growing 1987
Sources: Chapman and Wong 1990:50–1; FAO 1989:7; USDHHS 1992:120
8 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
return of tobacco per hectare of land is both absolutely and relatively
high. In the mid-1980s, for example, the gross returns per hectare from
tobacco in Zimbabwe were almost twice those of coffee, the next most
profitable crop, and ten times more profitable than food crops: in Brazil,
India and the United States tobacco is also the most profitable crop (FAO
1989: 8–9). The relative profitability of tobacco growing is largely
accounted for by a series of factors including price supports, guaranteed
prices, loans from governments and tobacco companies, provision of
seed, fertilizer and other agricultural inputs as well as export subsidies
(FAO 1989:9).
As stated earlier, cigarettes account for as much as 85 per cent of the
world’s output of tobacco leaf. In 1988 over 5 trillion cigarettes were
manufactured worldwide: Table 1.4 presents data on the global
distribution of cigarette manufacturing for 1988 for the top six producers.
While a national distribution for cigarette manufacturing activities, as
presented in Table 1.4, is revealing, it is important to understand that the
world’s cigarette market is supplied predominantly by two main kinds of
manufacturing enterprises: state monopolies and multinational tobacco
companies. In 1988 eight multinationals accounted for 35 per cent of the
world’s cigarette output, and the state monopolies for 60 per cent
(USDHHS 1992:38). With few exceptions, the French state tobacco
monopoly SEITA being the most important, state monopolies tend not to
produce for export.
Less than 10 per cent of the world’s output of cigarettes is exported, the
United States having the largest share of this trade (Grise 1990:22–3). It is
the practice of multinationals to manufacture cigarettes for domestic
consumption and, to this end, they have subsidiaries, affiliated
manufacturing firms or licensing agreements throughout the world.
There is not a single country outside the state monopoly system where a
multinational tobacco company is not represented in some form or other.
In recent years, these multinationals have made significant inroads into
markets protected by state monopolies, either by exporting to them or, as
in the case of China, by opening manufacturing facilities (Connolly 1990).
Table 1.4 World cigarette production (billion units)
Sources: Grise 1990:22; FAO 1990:15
WHAT IS TOBACCO? 9
There are eight multinational tobacco companies, five of which are
American and the remaining European. In terms of financial activity—
sales and profits—as well as output, the largest multinationals by a wide
margin over their competitors are Philip Morris and British American
Tobacco (BAT). Most of the multinationals have a diversified base and
the amount of sales and profits derived from tobacco products varies
widely. In 1991, for example, Rothmans International derived almost 90
per cent of its sales from tobacco: BAT, by contrast, in 1990, earned 57 per
cent of its sales from tobacco (Rothmans International 1991; BAT 1990).
The profile of the six leading multinationals, giving their overall sales—
tobacco and non-tobacco activities—and cigarette output in 1989 and
1988 respectively is portrayed in Table 1.5. Tobacco activities probably
account for 60 per cent of overall sales (Connolly 1990:143; RJR 1987).
Based on 1988 figures, Philip Morris was the fourteenth largest company
of any kind in the world and BAT the thirty-sixth (USDHHS 1992:36).
Cigarette manufacture is obviously very big business. So is central
government revenue from taxation on tobacco products. The amount
collected is in some cases extremely large. In 1983, for example, the
British treasury collected in excess of $8 billion, the German government
around $7 billion: tobacco tax revenue in the United States in 1986
amounted to $9.4 billion (FAO 1989:11–12). For developing countries with
a small tax base, tobacco tax revenues are, in relative terms, of critical
importance. In many developing countries tobacco tax revenue accounts
for at least 10 per cent of all central government tax revenue—in Haiti the
figure for 1983 was 41 per cent and in Argentina 23 per cent (Chapman
and Wong 1990:53). But even in the developed world the proportional
amount of tobacco taxation in overall taxation is quite large—6 per cent in
Britain, for example (FAO 1989:12).
There is hardly any place in the world where tobacco is not consumed.
The extent, degree and type of consumption does, however, vary widely.
In 1985 per capita adult consumption of tobacco varied from under 0.5
Table 1.5 Multinational tobacco companies, economic activity and cigarette output
Source: USDHHS 1992:36, 38
10 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
kilos in parts of Africa to a maximum of 4.3 kilos in Cuba (FAO: 1990: 52–
3). With some exceptions, per capita consumption in the developed world
is substantially greater than in the developing world, though the trend in
consumption now is generally up in the latter and down in the former.
The factors affecting the divergent experience of the developing and
developed world are many, but of particular importance is the impact
of anti-smoking activities and legislation in the latter, and a decisive shift
towards the consumption of cigarettes as opposed to other forms of
tobacco consumption in the former (Chapman and Wong 1990:23). While
few developing countries have experienced a decline in cigarette
consumption per capita, it has been the norm in much of the developed
world since the 1970s with some interesting exceptions: Japan, Greece,
Spain, Iceland and Korea have all seen their consumption rise, in several
cases by a substantial amount (Masironi 1990:269). Table 1.6 presents data
on per capita adult cigarette consumption for selected countries in the
period 1985–8. The variations in per capita cigarette consumption are
enormous. (Here and in similar statistics later, the figures are per head of
total adult population, not per smoker.) The correlation is by no means
perfect but there is a relationship between a country’s wealth and its
consumption of cigarettes. In rough terms, those countries with a high
level of GNP per capita tend towards a high consumption of cigarettes,
while the reverse is true for those countries with low levels of GNP per
capita, but the actual picture is complicated by the involvement of many
factors other than wealth in the determination of cigarette consumption
(Chapman and Wong 1990:24–5).
It is in Asia, in particular, that the modern commercial cigarette remains
less important than in other parts of the world for reasons having little to
do with strictly economic factors. In India, for example, the cigarette
competes badly with traditional forms of tobacco consumption: in
Table 1.6 Annual cigarette consumption per adult 1985–8
Source: Masironi 1990:268
WHAT IS TOBACCO? 11
smoking, alternatives include the bidi (a cross between a small cigar and a
cigarette made of locally produced dark tobacco, particularly popular in
southern India), the cheroot and the hookah; and in chewing, there is
tobacco alone or in a mixture with betel; snuff is also popular (Chapman
and Wong 1990:145). Bidis, in particular, outsell cigarettes: recent
estimates suggest that the sales ratio between cigarettes and bidis is 1 to
7 (Chapman and Wong 1990). In Indonesia, despite a marked rise in the
adult per capita consumption of cigarettes, the locally produced
alternative, the kretek, commands the market for smoking. Kreteks,
consisting of a mixture of tobacco and cloves, accounted for as much as
87 per cent of per capita consumption in the mid-1980s (Chapman and
Wong 1990:151).
Inasmuch as tobacco consumption varies considerably in type and
extent, it also varies in degree, that is, in its prevalence within the
population. Here again, there is a significant difference between the
developed and the developing world. In general terms, a larger
proportion of the male population consumes tobacco, especially through
smoking, in developing countries. In the 1980s the developed countries of
the world had an average prevalence for men of 40 per cent and for
women of 27 per cent—the highest and lowest figure for men was 61 per
cent in Greece and 27 per cent in Sweden: for women the corresponding
figures were 42 per cent in Norway and 14 per cent in Portugal (Masironi
1990:270). In the developing countries prevalence for men is much
greater, and for women much less, than in the developed world.
Scattered figures for the 1980s for selected countries give the following
picture: Bangladesh, men 70 per cent, women 20 per cent; India, men 61
per cent, women, 7 per cent; Indonesia, men 61 per cent, women 5 per
cent; Brazil, men 58 per cent, women 42 per cent; Argentina, men 68 per
cent, women 36 per cent (Hendee and Kellie 1990:874–5; Chapman and
Wong 1990:202, 206). Gender differences in some countries, such as
Indonesia and other Islamic nations, are accounted for by proscriptions
against women smoking for religious reasons, but, on a general level, it is
argued that when constraints against female smoking are removed,
prevalence rises near the point of convergence with male rates (Waldron
et al. 1988).
Smoking prevalence varies not only by country and by gender but also
by race, by locality (urban or rural) as well as by social class in general.
Though the rule is not hard and fast, there is strong evidence that in
developed countries, smoking prevalence is higher among lower social
classes and among those with less formal education: in the United States,
black Americans tend to have a higher smoking prevalence than do their
white counterparts (USDHHS 1989:269; Wald and Nicolaides-Bouman
1991:66–7). In developing countries locality matters as well as social class
(Chapman and Wong 1990:87–231; USDHHS 1992).
12 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
The botanic, economic and, especially, medical literature on tobacco
continues to grow rapidly and is focused primarily, but not exclusively,
on the cigarette and its constituents. Authorities from other disciplines,
including psychology, sociology, anthropology, politics and law have
also become interested in the phenomenon of the cigarette. The main
concern of this book is to explain how humankind became involved with
the tobacco plant, and how the relationships between it and ourselves
have changed over time. As the argument unfolds, it should become clear
that nothing about tobacco should be taken for granted and that, as in
other matters, the history of tobacco is full of conflict, compromise,
coercion and co-operation. It is through this historical process that
tobacco has become a universal addiction for consumers, for growers and
for governments.
Indeed, this is the overall theme of the book. Dependence unifies the
history of tobacco whether seen from the vantage point of the consumer,
of the producer or of the institutions concerned with its promulgation. In
Amerindian cultures the sacredness of tobacco sustained its use at the
same time as being sustained by it. Shamans depended on tobacco’s
unique pharmacological properties as they themselves became
dependent upon it through its addictive powers. Under European control
early colonial settlement became dependent upon tobacco and early
settlers were addicted both as consumers and as producers to the culture
of the plant. Governments, too, have become dependent on the tax
revenue they derive by controlling its distribution. Those who grow
tobacco describe their attachment to the plant in language more
commonly used by those who consume it. This multi-faceted structure of
dependence is what makes the history of tobacco fascinating while
explaining why it has become so deeply entrenched throughout the
world.
The organization of this book is simple and corresponds to a thematic
division designed to develop the overall theme. Part I is concerned with
two fundamental questions. First, what role did tobacco play in
Amerindian cultures, and what meanings were given to, and derived
from, the use of tobacco in the Americas before contact with Europeans?
This is the subject of Chapter 2. The following chapter addresses the
other question: how did Europeans react to Amerindian tobacco use, and
how did they, and other cultures in their wake, extract tobacco from
what was to them an incomprehensible cultural pattern, and incorporate
it within their own?
Part II explores the consumption of tobacco in comparative perspective.
Chapter 4 examines the structures and patterns of consumption before
the emergence of the cigarette and generally before the isolation of
nicotine, and its recognition as tobacco’s primary pharmacological
substance. Chapter 5 focuses primarily on the rise of the cigarette and its
WHAT IS TOBACCO? 13
changing meanings and fortunes since the second half of the nineteenth
century.
Tobacco was one among many exotic plants and substances that
Europeans encountered in the New World, but none of the others was so
successfully, and so rapidly and permanently, diffused cross-culturally.
The worldwide spread of Amerindian tobacco generally preceded the
appropriation of the plant, and its method of cultivation, by Europeans.
Once, however, its value as a commodity was understood, tobacco
rapidly became the plant of early colonization and, through its
commercial circuits and cultures of consumption, acted to bind disparate
economic regions in common purpose. The culture of tobacco cultivation
and its relationship with colonialism is the general theme of Part III.
Chapter 6 examines tobacco’s transformation from a medicinal,
uncommodified panacea into a commodity in the service of colonialism,
and Chapter 7 pursues the meaning of tobacco to planters during the same
period.
Part IV, the final section of the book, is concerned with two main
themes. The first, covered in Chapter 8, is the antagonism in tobacco
culture between the worlds of the small and the large producer that has
underpinned the globalization of tobacco since the beginning of the
nineteenth century, and has produced a class of dependent cultivators.
This dependence is a historical process that also involved, and was
shaped by, the transformation of tobacco from a commercial to an
industrial product. The industrialization of tobacco was accompanied by
the emergence and total domination of tobacco manufacture by huge
companies and by the increasing involvement of the state in supporting
both tobacco production and consumption. This is examined in
Chapter 9.
The book ends, in Chapter 10, with an analysis of what many observers
have termed a ‘smoking epidemic’. Issues of health, ecology and the
Third World, and the possible future of tobacco are discussed there.
This book should be read, in the first instance, as a history of tobacco
from the past to the present. It is hoped, however, that it can also be read
as an interpretation of certain grand themes in history and other
disciplines, particularly, colonialism, cultural contact, consumption and
its meanings, the growth of big business and dependence, using tobacco
as a unifying concept. This is the principal objective of an historical
approach which, in recent years, has been gaining in interest (Price
1984b). As an example of commodity history this study of tobacco shares
the aspirations of other examples of this genre, such as Salaman on the
potato, Mintz on sugar and, most recently, Adshead on salt and Foust on
rhubarb, in believing that the study of the historical transformation of key
commodities provides a rich perspective on the way we understand the
world about us (Salaman 1949; Mintz 1985; Adshead 1992; Foust 1992).
14 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
The material upon which this study is based is drawn chiefly from
published secondary studies primarily in the fields of history,
anthropology, medicine and agriculture. Primary sources, both published
and manuscript, have also been used. Though the secondary material
provides an enormously rich and varied storehouse of information, it is not
comprehensive. This study attempts a coherent and interpretative
historical analysis of tobacco, but much fundamental research remains to
be done.
WHAT IS TOBACCO? 15
Part I
Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far
beyond all panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, a
sovereign remedy to all diseases…But, as it is commonly
abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ’tis a
plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, limb, health,
hellish, devilish, out damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow
of body and soul.
Robert Burton (1577–1640) Anatomy of Melancholy II.4.2.2
2
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS
Shamanism, healing and tobacco in Amerindian
cultures
Metsé inhaled deeply, and as he finished one cigarette an
attending shaman handed him another lighted one. Metsé
inhaled all the smoke, and soon began to evince considerable
physical distress. After about ten minutes his right leg began
to tremble. Later his left arm began to twitch. He swallowed
smoke as well as inhaling it, and soon was groaning in pain. His
respiration became labored, and he groaned with every
exhalation. By this time the smoke in his stomach was causing
him to retch… The more he inhaled the more nervous he
became… He took another cigarette and continued to inhale
until he was near to collapse… Suddenly he ‘died’, flinging his
arms outward and straightening his legs stiffly… He remained
in this state of collapse nearly fifteen minutes… When Metsé
had revived himself two attendant shamans rubbed his arms.
One of the shamans drew on a cigarette and blew smoke
gently on his chest and legs, especially on places that he
indicated by stroking himself.
(Dole 1964:57–8)
The scene described above was witnessed among the Cuicuru Indians of
central Brazil in the twentieth century. It is a description of the ‘death’
and restoration of a tobacco shaman. Metsé was experiencing what seems
to be an ordeal of self-inflicted pain and discomfort while being attended
by other shamans. That, however, is a modern reader’s perception. For the
Cuicuru, Metsé is performing a central and ancient tradition, dating back
well before Europe discovered the New World. He is passing through a
hallucinatory experience accompanied by specific physical changes. Both
the experience and the physical changes are sought by the shaman, and
their meanings are clear to the Cuicuru. What is perplexing about the
scene, however, is that the hallucination is induced by tobacco. Why
tobacco? To answer that we need to begin by considering the meaning
and importance of hallucinogenic plants and altered states of
consciousness to Amerindian societies before contact with Europe.
The evidence on the Amerindian use of hallucinogenic plants and
tobacco on which the following account is based is drawn from a variety
of sources, some historical, some ethnographic, some archaeological. The
problems of marrying these sources and extracting from them an account
that corresponds to Amerindian, as opposed to perceived European,
reality is, of course, extremely difficult. These issues have been discussed
by many in the field but there seems to be no perfectly satisfactory way
of achieving the desired results (von Gernet 1988; 1992; Trigger 1991b).
Dating Amerindian practices on the basis of the available evidence is also
fraught with difficulties, but an attempt has been made to describe these
practices as they might have existed on the eve of contact. This has
required a degree of back projection, especially when using ethnographic
information, but, with all its faults, it is a technique that achieves results,
often confirmed by other sources (Wilbert 1987; Trigger 1991a).
Amerindian societies knew and employed as many as seven or eight
times more narcotic plants than corresponding societies in the Old World
(Schleiffer 1979:1). According to Richard Schultes, a long-time student of
hallucinogenic plants, the New World has as many as 130 separate plants
that could be classified as hallucinogenic. The best endowed regions are
to be found in South America and Mexico, though there is growing
evidence that the United States and Canada were endowed with more
hallucinogenic plants than earlier believed (Schultes and Hofmann 1979:
27, 29; von Gernet 1992:8).
Our understanding of Amerindian hallucinogenic use remains
incomplete, partly because many of the narcotic mixtures have not been
thoroughly investigated botanically, and partly because the concoctions
themselves are often complicated mixtures of various hallucinogenic and
non-hallucinogenic plants. Nevertheless, it is possible to pick out major
groups or families of plants that provide a considerable proportion of the
hallucinogenic function (Schultes 1972). Although the age and
importance of any particular hallucinogenic plant is still an open
question, most authorities on the subject would agree to the following
propositions: a very large number of New World hallucinogenic plants
have been in continual use since the earliest peopling of the Americas:
that the use of these plants has been so widespread that it is possible to
speak about cultural networks of shared hallucinatory experiences: and
that the hallucinatory experience itself was paramount in Amerindian life
and played a critical role in its functioning (La Barre 1964; 1970; Dobkin de
Rios 1984a; von Gernet 1992).
The nightshade family (Solanaceae) is possibly the main source of New
World hallucinogenic plants. One of the most violent and certainly
widespread hallucinatory experiences is derived from the datura plant.
18 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Most North American Indian tribes used datura to a greater or lesser
extent (Schultes 1972:46). Eastern woodland Indians often used datura as
the base of a narcotic drink used in manhood initiation rites. These
rites, during which adolescents passed through a prolonged crazed
condition, were designed to transform boys into men (La Barre 1980:76).
The violent, mind-altering nature of the cultural rite and the powerful
toxicity of the datura brew are, of course, related. To put it another way,
datura was chosen as the drug for this rite because of the effects it had on
the individual. Datura and its cultural manifestation were thus
inseparable in both effect and meaning. Datura was also used in the
North American south-west, California and in north-western Mexico (La
Barre 1980:76). In South America datura use was widely distributed
throughout Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and in certain parts of
the Amazon (La Barre 1980:77; Dobkin de Rios 1984a:38, 41).
The toxicity of datura was well understood by Amerindians. They used
datura in specific cultural rites precisely because the violent hallucinations
it produced were deemed necessary for the ritual, but they took great
care in its use. There is no evidence that datura and other hallucinogenic
plants were used casually (von Gernet 1992:11–13). Where less violent
experiences were required, Amerindians used less powerful
hallucinogenic plants. Many non-dangerous narcotic snuffs in South
America and the Antilles, for example, were prepared from plants
belonging to the legume family (Schultes 1972:24–8). Included in this
family is the mescal or red bean used extensively as a narcotic in northeast Mexico as well as among some of the largest Indian tribes of the
North American central and south-west, including the Apache,
Comanche, Pawnee, Iowa and Wichita (La Barre 1980:78). The antiquity
and widespread nature of the use of the mescal bean have led some
authorities to describe its consumption in cult terms and to identify, as in
examples above, great social networks of shared hallucinatory
experiences (La Barre 1957; Howard 1957). Other plant families that
provide New World narcotics include the agaric family—the divine
mushroom; the cactus family—peyote; the Ilex family and the family of
Malpighiaceae (Schultes 1972:7–17, 33–40; La Barre 1938; Dobkin de Rios
1984a; Hudson 1979; von Gernet 1992:12–16).
That so many hallucinogenic plants were widely used in the New
World provides evidence of the importance of narcotic substances and
hallucinatory experiences in Amerindian cultures. Yet one can go further.
It seems clear that, even though few Amerindian societies were without
some narcotic, there were several important areas of the New World
where narcotic use and the availability of hallucinogenic plants were
particularly concentrated. Two areas, in particular, were well-endowed
with hallucinogens—the Mexican culture area, circumscribed by Nahuatl
speakers, and the Colombian area of Chibchan cultures (Schultes 1977; La
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 19
Barre 1977). A full list would include hundreds of hallucinogenic drugs
but very little is known about them. Many of the drugs mentioned in the
herbals and chronicles of the Conquest period remain unidentified
(Guerra 1967). Many others that are in use today are only now being
investigated. And many others have been lost in the destruction of the
collective memory of Amerindian cultures.
The abundance and extent of New World hallucinogenic plants and
their use has led one eminent anthropologist to speak of a New World
narcotic complex. His argument is not, however, confined to plant
geography, but embraces the cultural meanings attributed to the main
types of hallucinogenic plants. These were regarded as sacred because
they had physiological effects characteristic of supernatural powers (La
Barre 1970:77).
The classification of plants in this way derived partly from Amerindian
religious ideology. Across the New World details of religious belief
varied considerably, but there were certain features that most
Amerindians shared. Reality consisted of a natural and a supernatural
world. The natural world was continuous, expected and comprehensible;
the supernatural was just the opposite (Hultkrantz 1979:10). The
Amerindian reality envisaged a social space in which the supernatural
world impinged upon, and was visible within, the natural world. The
space was inhabited by both human and supernatural beings. Spirits,
inhabitants of the supernatural world, may have resided at the four
cardinal points of the sky but they also resided in the natural world.
Particularly potent and significant spirits found a home in hallucinogenic
plants (Schleiffer 1979:2). When someone consumed a hallucinogenic
substance, they were introjecting the supernatural power within the plant
into themselves. What they experienced, and what onlookers witnessed,
was interpreted as a flight of the soul to the supernatural world. In other
words, not only was narcotic use a method of altering the state of
consciousness but, more importantly, it was only in an altered state of
consciousness that communication with the spirits of the supernatural
world was possible.
The fact that hallucinogenic plants were sacred, and that the
hallucination was a spiritual communication, meant that their
consumption was strictly regulated. The responsibility of experiencing,
and employing, an altered state of consciousness fell to the shaman, the
most spiritually gifted vision seeker in Amerindian societies (Hultkrantz
1979:74–80). The vision quest was fundamental to Amerindian religious
experience. Often these visions were sought en masse; sometimes in
special groupings, such as medicine societies; and sometimes by
individuals on their own. The shaman, however, stood above all other
vision seekers. Though he or she (women were frequently shamans) did
not monopolize religious experiences (as did the shaman in Siberia),
20 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
shamans nevertheless dominated religious life (Eliade 1989:297–336).
Being more spiritually adept than common visionaries, the shaman not
only travelled extensively through the spirit world but also had access to
many more spirits, particularly those helpful to mankind, than anyone
else.
While vision seeking was not unique to the shaman, as a healer he/she
had no rivals. It is this vision, or, as some scholars have put it,
ecstatic performance, that distinguished the shaman from what has been
called the medicine-man. This distinction is not simply one of semantics:
rather it is cultural and practical. The shaman was the one who mediated
between the natural and spiritual world with the aid of ecstatic devices;
the medicine-man typically without these (Hultkrantz 1985). Yet in most
cases it was to the shaman that patients went (the exception was in the
case when the disease could not be connected directly to some accident
or misfortune—a broken bone or a wound, for example) (Hultkrantz
1989:334–5). The reason for this lay principally in the Amerindian belief
that illness was caused by supernatural forces. These forces acted on the
body through disease to make the subject ill. Generally there were two
main causes of disease. The first was intrusion, that is, when the illness
was caused by the presence in the body of a foreign spirit or object. In
some societies the intrusion was considered as a literal but magical
object, injected by a malevolent spirit; in other societies the intrusion was
not so much the physical object as its essence (Hultkrantz 1979:88–9;
Silver 1978:209; Lamphere 1983). The second cause of disease was soul
loss. The sufferer’s soul was believed to be drawn away, and/or to have
wandered off into reaches of the supernatural world, often into the land
of the dead. Regardless of its precise cause, illness was the result of an
intervention by the supernatural into the natural world. To cure illness,
and heal the victim, was to restore the patient to this world. Healing
required a deep understanding of the ways of the supernatural.
Naturally enough, because of his visionary experiences and the fact that
he was so spiritually acute, only the shaman could be expected to heal.
The shaman was required to travel through the contours of the
supernatural, locate and extract the magical object or its essence, in the
case of disease by intrusion, or retrieve the runaway soul. The shaman’s
function was positive but not without danger; if, for example, the
sufferer’s soul had crossed into the land of the dead, the shaman’s soul
itself might be caught by the inhabitants of that land (Hultkrantz 1979:89;
Eliade 1989: 327–8).
Access to the supernatural world was through an altered state of
consciousness, perceived by onlookers as a trance. These trances were
induced primarily by ingesting hallucinogenic plants, and, though some
writers associate the use of hallucinogenic plants with settled agriculture,
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 21
there is some evidence that hunter-gatherers also followed the practice (La
Barre 1980; Wilbert 1987:149–50; von Gernet and Timmins 1987:41–2).
Shamanistic trances, healing and narcotics formed the complex of
Amerindian medicine. The entire system was very carefully and precisely
handled. In particular, it appears that certain hallucinogenic plants were
used for certain purposes, depending on the extent and nature of the
shaman’s flight as well as on the nature of the cure (Dobkin de Rios
1984a). In much the same way as hallucinogenic plants were
differentiated by use in cultural rites previously described in this chapter,
they had specific uses in medicine. Datura and ayahuasca, for example,
produced very different hallucinatory experiences and contributed to
different kinds of healing programmes: the former as a diagnostic tool for
prescribing remedies and the latter for identifying ill-doers (Dobkin de
Rios 1984b: 38–42). It is also true that shamans made use of whatever
hallucinogenic plants were at hand, a shaman in the Brazilian rain forest
having access to different plants than his/her counterpart in northern
Canada.
However, when one looks more carefully at what plants shamans
actually used, one discovers a most remarkable phenomenon: regardless
of location, the one plant used more than any other was tobacco. Virtually
every Amerindian society knew tobacco. In the pre-Columbian period
tobacco consumption was certainly common from Canada’s eastern
woodlands to southern Argentina; from the Atlantic to the Pacific and
stretching up the north-west coast towards the Aleutian Islands (Brooks
1937:18; Wilbert 1987:9–132). Wherever it could be grown, it was, and its
cultivation was often isolated from that of other crops, especially
foodstuffs, in specially designed gardens (Herndon 1967:296–7; Hurt
1987:31–3, 47; Russell 1980, 160–4; Linton 1924:4–6; Heidenreich 1978:381,
385; Trigger 1986: 159–60). Even among Amerindians who practised no
other form of agriculture, tobacco was planted and cared for (Bean and
Vane 1978:667; Linton 1924:7); the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte
Islands, off the coast of British Columbia, and the Tlingit Indians further
to the north in Alaska, both typified as hunter-gatherers, nevertheless
reserved some of their time and precious land for tobacco cultivation
(Turner and Taylor 1972:249). The same was true of the Siuslawans,
Coosans and Takelma Indians of the Oregon coast, all hunters and fishers
(Zenk 1990:573; Kendall 1990:590); and of the Plains Indians, notably the
Blackfoot, Crow and Sarci Indians (Lowie 1919; Haberman 1984:270). The
more agricultural societies from Mexico southward all grew tobacco, to a
greater or lesser extent, with the exception of the north-eastern coastal
region of South America where, under Inca rule, coca cultivation and
consumption prevailed (Wilbert 1987:4, 21, 30–41, 51, 65; Cooper 1963:
525–8).
22 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Most narcotics and stimulants used by Amerindian societies in the New
World had very specific, though limited, uses. Datura, for example, was
used mainly in magico-religious functions, specifically on shamanistic
occasions, and only rarely in other instances (Cooper 1963:555).
Ayahuasca use among the Jivaro of eastern Ecuador, and the Mestizos of
the Peruvian Amazon, was concentrated on its hallucinogenic qualities in
achieving trance-like states and visions (Dobkin de Rios 1984b). Peyote
was employed in much the same way (Stewart 1987). What made tobacco
unique among New World plants was that its effects were largely
predictable, relatively short-lived and not life-threatening (as datura
could be) and thus had a vast functional repertoire. Its uses ranged from
the purely symbolic to the medicinal; from its role as a hallucinogen in
shamanistic practice and ritual to ceremonial and formal social functions;
from profane to religious use; from its identification with myth and the
supernatural to the formal ritualism of social experiences. As we shall see,
none of the uses was mutually exclusive and, though there is a
temptation in some scholarly circles to distinguish tobacco use north and
south of the Mexican border, the distinctions are not as clear as some
argue (Cooper 1963: 535–6; von Gernet 1992:17). Tobacco use formed a
complex continuum.
Tobacco’s main function was to induce hallucinations in shamanistic
rituals. It may seem surprising to find tobacco in this role, but it is
important to recognize that there are big differences between the way
tobacco was used then and now. First of all, it is certain that the species of
tobacco used were Nicotiana rustica and Nicotiana tabacum or varieties of
them. Nicotiana tabacum was generally used south of Mexico and
Nicotiana rustica north of that country (Goodspeed 1954). Whatever the
species, there is little doubt that the nicotine content was many times
greater than that of present-day commercial species and varieties, and
that it was capable, by itself, of inducing hallucinations (Haberman 1984;
Adams 1990; Wilbert 1987:134–6; von Gernet 1992:20–1). There is also
some evidence that alkaloids other than nicotine are present in
noncommercial varieties. These may be hallucinogenic in their own right,
and possibly even more so in combination with high concentrations of
nicotine (Janiger and Dobkin de Rios 1976). Finally, there is also some
evidence that tobacco was often mixed with other more potent substances
(Siegel et al. 1977; Wilbert 1987:27–8, 100–1). Growing evidence leaves
little doubt that at the time of contact tobacco was valued primarily for its
psychoactive powers, especially since they were mild when compared to
other substances (La Barre 1980; Dobkin de Rios 1984b:37–51; von Gernet
1992).
Tobacco was regarded as having supernatural origins as well as
supernatural powers. Myths of tobacco’s origins that have been
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 23
documented make this clear. This is how the Winnebago Indians of
southern Lake Michigan explain tobacco in a father’s advice to his child:
Earthmaker created the spirits who live above the earth, those who
live on the earth, those who live under the earth, and those who live
in the water; all these he created and placed in charge of some
powers… In this fashion he created them and only afterwards did
he create us. For that reason we were not put in control of any of
these blessings. However, Earthmaker did create a weed and put it
in our charge, and he told us that none of the spirits he had created
would have the power to take this away from us without giving us
something in exchange. Thus said Earthmaker. Even he,
Earthmaker, would not have the power of taking this from us
without giving up something in return. He told us if we offered him
a pipeful of tobacco, if this we poured out for him, he would grant
us whatever we asked of him. Now all the spirits come to long for
this tobacco as intensely as they longed for anything in creation, and
for that reason, if at any time we make our cry to the spirits with
tobacco, they will take pity on us and bestow on us the blessings of
which Earthmaker placed them in charge. Indeed so it shall be, for
thus Earthmaker created it.
(Tooker 1979:74–5)
It is remarkable how often versions of the Winnebago origin myth crop
up throughout the New World. In the mythology of the Pilaga Indians of
the Gran Chaco, in Paraguay, for example, tobacco first appeared out of
the ashes of a cannibal-woman killed by the culture hero (Wilbert 1987:
151). The Fox Indians, on the western side of Lake Michigan, inherited
tobacco from the Great Manitou (Wilbert 1987:182). As the Manitous
were addicted to the plant, and as they could not grow it themselves,
they entered into a contract of mutual benefit with humans, tobacco in
return for care and protection (Callender 1978:643). Among the
Chippewa of Lake Superior, tobacco was held in a similar supernatural
esteem (Ritzenthaler 1978:754). The Yecuana of Venezuela believe that
women were created from clay over which tobacco smoke was blown
(Wilbert 1987: 154); among the Yaqui, on the other hand, tobacco came
into existence through the metamorphosis of a woman (Moisés et al. 1971:
95).
Offering tobacco to the spirits in exchange for their care and good
works was clearly an important way to reinforce and maintain the mutual
dependence between humans and supernaturals. Gifts to the spirits often
took the form of smoke from tobacco thrown on a fire or leaves left at
some sacred spot. Among the north-east woodland Indians, for example,
the guardian spirits and patrons were considered to be both the source
24 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
and the means of material wealth; medicine bundles frequently contained
expressions of this material wealth, such as glass beads, together with
tobacco (Hamell 1987:77). Many times upon first contact with Europeans
these Amerindians offered tobacco by casting it at the feet of the
newcomers; or even, in the extraordinary case of the chief of the
Menomini, upon encountering his first white man rubbed the sacred plant
into the stranger’s forehead (Hamell 1987:88). For the tobacco shaman,
however, the offering took the form of ingested tobacco which, in the first
instance, allowed contact to be made with the supernatural world. This
happened, of course, through the shaman’s own hallucinatory experience
as he/she, disembodied, travelled to the spirits. Tobacco smoke
symbolized this contact (Hugh-Jones 1979:231). One such tobacco trip has
been recorded among the Tapirapé of the Central Brazilian rain forest.
I smoked much and then I smoked again… I travelled singing as
I walked. I spent three days walking. I climbed a large mountain on
the other side of Araguaya. There it is that the sun comes up…
There were many…souls of shamans. I did not talk but came back.
(Wagley 1977:209)
In addition to facilitating the trip, the ingested tobacco was the food of
the supernaturals. When the shaman consumed tobacco, he was feeding
the spirits within him. The craving for tobacco that the shaman
experienced through nicotine addiction was the hunger pangs of the
spirits who crave tobacco (Wilbert 1987:173, 177; von Gernet and
Timmins 1987:40).
The significance of tobacco for the magico-religious reciprocity
between the shaman and the spirits lay in two areas. First, the
pharmacological properties of nicotine and its manifest symbolic
expression were structurally related. Both of these were clearly perceived
and exploited by shamans. From the pharmacological viewpoint
nicotine’s biphasic effects reinforced the shamanistic act. The rapid
pharmacological impact of nicotine, manifested in the shaman’s physical
and mental changes, symbolically translated into the shamanistic trance
and flight. The rapid metabolism of nicotine likewise translated itself into
the shaman’s return to this world both physically and mentally. The
actual time between flight and return was shorter for tobacco than for any
other narcotic substance available in the New World (Wilbert 1987:157).
Second, ingested tobacco fed the spirits within. Tobacco smoke was the
symbol of life-giving energy and carried the supernatural food upwards,
to appease the spiritual craving (Wilbert 1979: 29–32).
The extent of tobacco shamanism in the New World is not entirely
clear, but the recent and exhaustive study by Johannes Wilbert certainly
convinces one of a wide distribution on the South American continent.
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 25
The Warao of Venezuela, for example, practise tobacco shamanism today
as they have done for centuries. It is their only form of shamanism. This
is all the more remarkable since the Warao do not themselves grow
tobacco but are dependent upon others for their supply of this spiritual
food (Wilbert 1972). The extent of tobacco shamanism in North America
is less well documented, though recent work suggests a comparatively
wide distribution, from the west and south-west to the eastern
woodlands (Kroeber 1941:20; Bean and Vane 1978:667; Mathews 1976;
von Gernet 1992).
As a medical expert the shaman mediated between health and illness.
Tobacco was universally upheld as a medicine of unrivalled application
and efficacy, and used in all stages of treatment, from diagnosis to
remedy. As a diagnostic tool tobacco was particularly revered when
intrusion was suspected of causing illness. The shaman would blow
smoke over the patient’s body in order to locate the bodily dysfunction.
The Yuman and Piman shamans of the American south-west used
tobacco in this way to ‘see’ evil substances (Lamphere 1983:760, 762).
Blowing smoke over the sick body also symbolized the power of the
shaman, as this was frequently associated with breath (Métraux 1949:592;
von Gernet 1992:23). In a more practical sense, tobacco smoke prepared
the body for the shaman’s surgery:
The shaman takes deep puffs until about a quarter of the cigar is
consumed and then starts to blow large mouthfuls of smoke over
the afflicted part of the patient’s body. He places his lips close to the
skin of his patient and lets the smoke roll out from his mouth so
that the smoke will hover over the diseased area for some time.
After the smoke has rolled away, the shaman repeats the process until
he believes that the patient’s skin has been ‘softened’ sufficiently…
The time needed to soften the skin of the patient varies greatly
according to the disease…
(Wilbert 1987:187–8)
Once the body, or afflicted area, was sufficiently softened, and the precise
location of the intrusion ascertained, the shaman would begin to extract
the foreign body by sucking it out through a straw, or directly from the
patient’s skin (Hultkrantz 1979:88–9). The object, such as a stone, was
displayed and then disappeared—the patient recovered (Silver 1978:209;
Smith 1978:441). Tobacco smoke was also employed in a more direct
way. Blown by the shaman, the smoke would penetrate the patient’s skin
and, depending on the precise nature of the illness, would either drive out
the evil essences or appease those spirits in the body who had a
particular liking for tobacco (Wilbert 1987:189–90). Whether the patient
experienced physiological changes during such practices is unclear.
26 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Girolamo Benzoni, one of the first Europeans to witness tobacco therapy
in the New World, certainly thought so. In his History of the New World,
Benzoni made the following observation:
In La Española and the other islands, when their doctors wanted to
cure a sick man, they went to the place where they were to
administer the smoke, and when he was thoroughly intoxicated by
it, the cure was mostly effected. On returning to his senses he told a
thousand stories, of his having been at the council of the gods and
other high visions.
(Benzoni 1857:82)
This practice would appear to have had wide circulation in the New
World with the possible exception of the Aztec, Maya and Inca. Though
their medical philosophy clearly allowed for a supernatural cause of
illness, their practice did not include sucking at the intrusion (Hultkrantz
1979: 184–285; Guerra 1964; Guerra 1966a, b; Ortiz de Montellano 1989;
1990). Yet their medical philosophy included magical incantations in
which tobacco was particularly esteemed. In the Treatise of Ruiz de
Alarcón, written in 1629, which describes Indian superstitions and
practice in Mexico, tobacco played a central role in conjuring and fortunetelling (Andrews and Hassig 1984). Among the Quiché Maya of Highland
Guatemala tobacco was used in divination in medical diagnosis (Orellana
1987: 57).
Shamans would also cure patients by directly appealing to the spirits
for help by offering them tobacco. In an example of a Winnebago curing
ritual the shaman offers tobacco consecutively to the spirits of the earth,
almost all of whom inhabit animal bodies, and each of whom has
bestowed on the shaman during his trip to their world certain powers of
healing. He asks for these powers to aid him in his patient’s cure, in
return for tobacco offerings. The offering is also extended to the Sun, the
Moon, the Earth and to the one called Disease-Giver (Tooker 1979:96–8).
Once the diagnosis was completed, tobacco was often prescribed as a
remedy. As an analgesic tobacco was used widely in Amerindian
medicine. Several methods of application were practised. One way to
reduce pain was for the shaman to massage the afflicted part of the
patient’s body with tobacco spit (Wilbert 1987:190; Barbachano 1982:38–
9). Other methods involved applying wet tobacco leaves, snuff plasters
and tobacco juice to the body (Wilbert 1987:143–4). Toothache was a
common source of pain, and here the use of tobacco was particularly
important. Among the Quiche Maya the painful tooth was first washed
with tobacco juice, after which a wad of tobacco was applied directly on
to the tooth (Orellana 1987:84); most Mayan texts refer to tobacco as a
treatment for toothache (Robicsek 1978:42–3). The Indians of central
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 27
Mexico used pounded green tobacco leaves together with a few drops of
copal (Andrews and Hassig 1984: 172–3). The Iroquois of New York
followed a similar course, placing tobacco leaves inside tooth cavities to
relieve pain (Vogel 1970:247). The Tunebo of Colombia and the Campa of
Peru both employed tobacco preparations as a remedy against toothache
(Wilbert 1987:189). Earache, like toothache, could be treated with tobacco.
Among the Indians of central Mexico, tobacco not only acted as an
analgesic in the cure of earache but also performed a magical function. In
the incantation for earache, tobacco was used to search for the location of
the pain; chest pains received similar treatment and tobacco was ordered
by the healer to pursue the pain (Andrews and Hassig 1984:289, 292). The
Cherokee also used tobacco as a pain killer (Tooker 1979:286). In the
treatment of open wounds, snake and insect bites tobacco was used for
its alleged antiseptic characteristics (Wilbert 1987:189). Among the Maya
tobacco was widely used in this way (Thompson 1970:118–19). The
Guatemalan Indians squeezed tobacco juice on to the open wound and
then placed tobacco leaves which they had chewed up on to the bite
(Orellana 1987:81–2). Aztec medicine also made use of tobacco for bites
(Elferink 1984:55–6).
These were tobacco’s most common medicinal uses but there was
hardly an ailment for which tobacco was not prescribed somewhere in
the New World—asthma, rheumatism, chills, fevers, convulsions, eye
sores, intestinal disorders, worms, childbirth pains, headaches, boils,
cysts, coughs, catarrh and so on. Few complaints did not respond to
tobacco therapy, according to Amerindian beliefs. Tobacco also found use
as a preventative (Barbachano 1982:37–8). The Mazatecs, a Mesoamerican
nation on the Pacific coast, believed that a paste mixture of tobacco and
lime protected pregnant women from witchcraft (Robicsek 1978:30). The
Aztecs believed that tobacco protected the unborn child, as it protected
adults, from poisonous snakes, insects and evil spirits (Robicsek 1978:30).
Tobacco was widely held to alleviate the pains of hunger and thirst, to
vitalize and to strengthen (Wilbert 1987:154, 172–3; Andrews and Hassig
1984:84–6).
Tobacco as a medicine in Amerindian societies cut across areas of
pragmatic, spiritual and magical experiences. There is nothing
contradictory in any of this since, as we have seen, medicine, health and
illness were deeply embedded within a cosmology including
supernatural and natural phenomena. The shaman, medicine-man and
high priest were often one and the same.
As the next chapter will show, what impressed Europeans most about
tobacco was its use in healing. It was this function that Europeans
understood though, of course, in their own terms. Nevertheless, it will be
argued, this fact alone meant that tobacco could be incorporated easily
into European medical philosophy. For Amerindians, however, the
28 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
medical role of tobacco could not be separated from any of its other
functions since their approach to tobacco was holistic. Not surprisingly,
tobacco played a central role in a large body of ceremony and ritual in
which the plant’s sacredness was displayed and confirmed—as a
spiritual offering, it had no equal (Kroeber 1941:19). To describe all of the
various themes and their variations in the Amerindian ceremonial use of
tobacco would fill volumes. Rather than attempting an in-depth coverage,
what follows should be taken as representing the deep ideational and
practical significance of tobacco in Amerindian belief systems.
The ceremonial use of tobacco was based firmly on the idea of the
reciprocal gift. Among the south-western Chippewa, for example, the
spirits of the supernatural world who inhabited living and non-living
things and resided in the earth, sky and water were soothed and
honoured by propitiatory offerings of tobacco. All religious and
ceremonial occasions began with the ritual smoking of tobacco. The
smoke ascended to the spirits who were comforted, as their demands for
tobacco were satisfied, and were made aware that the Chippewa were
mindful of their presence (Ritzenthaler 1978:754). The Lacandon Maya
offered the first harvest of tobacco to the gods in cigars:
Each is lighted in the new fire or with the aid of a crystal to
concen trate the sun’s rays. It is momentarily held in front of the
mouth of a sacred jar, and then is leaned against the mouth of the
god whose head is in relief on the side of the incense burner and
who is the recipient of the offering.
(Thompson 1970:112)
Among the Aztecs tobacco was regarded as an incarnation of the body of
the goddess Cihuacoahuatl, and also offered to the war god
Huitzilopochtli and to lesser gods (Robicsek 1978:28). The Tlaxcalans,
another Mexican tribe, also offered tobacco to their war god (Robicsek
1978:29).
Tobacco and divination were inseparable in both North and South
America (Robicsek 1978:30). The Chippewa, for example, would leave a
pinch of tobacco on a rock to alert the spirit to ward off a bad storm
(Ritzenthaler 1978:754). The Highland Guatemalans consumed tobacco to
learn of future events and ‘to consult on the requests and petitions of
others with which they had been entrusted’ (Orellana 1987:57). Other
uses of tobacco included smoke offerings in rain-making ceremonies but
there were many others as well (Mason 1924:8; Robicsek 1978:30; Bolton
1987:151; Kroeber 1941; Springer 1981:219).
The Maya deified tobacco—many of the deities represented in stone
monuments, ceramics and in paintings are depicted as smokers, either
heavy or occasional. Mythological animals, too, appear in Mayan
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 29
depictions as smoking tobacco (Robicsek 1978:31, 59). Tobacco gourds
and pouches were described as symbols of divinity, and were the insignia
of the Aztec priesthood, as well as that of women doctors and midwives
(Thompson 1970:111–12, 119). Tobacco’s association with sacredness thus
permeated gods, spirits and people. The Tzotzil Maya’s tobacco worldview shows the interconnections between the supernatural, the
environment and mankind:
Tobacco was an anhel, a term used to describe the rain and
mountain deity and protector of mankind, because it takes care of
our bodies… There are people who chew moi (ground tobacco)…
every day from the time they get up in the morning… On hearing
thunder, people will bring out their moi and keep it in their cheek
and in that way it will not thunder too loudly. When we die the moi
defends us.
(Thompson 1970:116)
As a social offering tobacco also played an important role. Tobacco
smoking was already well established among the Aztec upper classes as
an after-dinner activity before Europeans first witnessed it. In an early
description of the court of Montezuma III the after-dinner scene is
remarkably modern:
very handsome women served Montezuma when he was at table…
They also placed on the table three tubes, much painted and
gilded, in which they put liquid amber mixed with some herbs
which are called tobacco. When Montezuma finished his dinner, the
singing and dancing was over and the cloths had been removed, he
would inhale the smoke from one of the tubes. He took very little of
it and then fell asleep.
(Robicsek 1978:4)
Fray Bernardino Sahagún, who witnessed the social lives of merchants
and nobility, frequently commented on the use of tobacco in ceremonial,
as well as social, occasions (Sahagún 1950–69). Among the Chippewa
tobacco usually accompanied an invitation to a feast, and when it was
offered to a shaman he was obliged to undertake the request of his client
(Ritzenthaler 1978:754).
Tobacco was ceremoniously offered in the harvesting and gathering of
food crops (Ritzenthaler 1978:754). The Hasinais of eastern Texas offered
the first cutting of tobacco to bless the harvest and at the same time they
blew tobacco smoke to the four winds (Bolton 1987:161). This link
between tobacco and the fertility of the land had parallels in the use of
tobacco for enhancing the fertility of game, and of women, a practice
30 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
common among South American Indians (Wilbert 1987:153–5). The Plains
Indians acknowledged the remarkable power of tobacco and went even
further. Neither the Blackfoot nor the Crow cultivated any crops except
tobacco. For both tribes tobacco cultivation was attended by an elaborate
ceremonial and cultural experience. Among the Crow tobacco culture
formed the basis of an institution that not only underlined the centrality
of tobacco but also provided Crow society with a structure. Tobacco
cultivation was a privilege. The responsibility for cultivation rested in a
tobacco society, a substructure of Crow social life. The tobacco society was
itself organized into chapters. These chapters were founded on
individual revelations, and chapter members shared in the essential truth
of these revelations. The revelations conferred the right to cultivate
tobacco; each of them was different enough in detail to produce different
ceremonies and rituals, as well as different procedures in cultivation. In
one detail, however, all the revelations agreed: that tobacco was
identified with the stars. Each chapter alleged that tobacco came to the
Crow in mythic time when a star was planted. Tobacco was therefore the
botanic fusion of heaven and earth; not surprisingly, it was upheld as the
distinctive medicine of the Crow (Lowie 1919).
In communicating between the natural and the supernatural world,
whether in healing, in divination or in offering, tobacco was critical to the
Amerindian concept of the relationship between the individual and the
spiritual world. This is how the Iroquois understood tobacco and its
magical power in forging this relationship. It can be considered typical of
Amerindian tobacco belief:
The Iroquois believed that tobacco was given to them as the means
of communicating with the spiritual world. By burning tobacco they
could send up their petitions with its ascending incense, to the
Great Spirit, and render their acknowledgements acceptably for his
blessings. Without this instrumentality, the ear of Ha-wen-ne-yu
could not be gained. In like manner they returned their thanks at
each recurring festival to the Invisible Aids, for their friendly offices,
and protecting care.
(Springer 1981:219)
The power of tobacco was not, however, limited to the individual.
Special social functions exploited tobacco’s magical qualities. Any
agreement or obligation sealed in the presence of tobacco, typically by
passing the pipe, made it binding. Amerindian societies, especially of
eastern North America, developed this function of tobacco into an
elaborate ritual known as the calumet, one of the most important
formalized uses of the pipe.
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 31
The calumet ceremony consisted primarily in an exchange of political
obligations or goods (Springer 1981:221–7). The ceremony was often
accompanied by a dance and singing, but at its core was the ritual pipe or
calumet shared among participants. Anthropologists and historians have
long been fascinated by the calumet ceremony, and many attempts have
been made to explain its origin and diffusion (Turnbaugh 1975; Blakeslee
1981; Brown 1989). Most agree that the calumet was not a unique
expression of the power of tobacco but part of a larger smoking complex
which diffused throughout eastern North America (von Gernet 1988: 291–
302). This complex also included, according to a recent commentator, the
Eagle Dance of the Iroquois and the medicine bundles of the Plains
Indians. Though the purpose of each ritual was different, what was
common to all was the presence of tobacco and, to a lesser extent, the
pipe (Springer 1981:228–9).
What is so striking about tobacco in the New World is the extent of its
penetration through both continents, and the way it was so deeply
integrated into so many diverse cultures, to the extent that even societies
who practised no form of agriculture nevertheless cultivated some
tobacco. Despite variations across Amerindian societies it is remarkable
how widely diffused were the spiritual meanings and the functions
attributed to its power.
By the time Europeans made contact, Amerindians had experimented
with every conceivable method of consuming tobacco and had developed
the technology necessary for its use. Amerindians practised five principal
methods of tobacco consumption: smoking, chewing, drinking, snuff and
enemas. Smoking, without any doubt, headed the list, an observation
which is perhaps not surprising given the symbolic value of smoke and
the fact that smoking is the most efficient and potent way of absorbing
nicotine. It is probably safe to say that, south of the Mexican border, the
most common way of smoking was in cigars. Smoking was not a simple
act. It could consist either of inhaling or, less commonly, smoke-blowing.
Lionel Wafer, a surgeon on an expedition to Panama in the 1680s, left a
particularly vivid account of one of these smoke-blowing sessions:
These Indians have Tobacco among them… When ’tis dried and
cured they strip it from the Stalks: and laying two or three Leaves
upon one another, they roll up all together side-ways into a long
Roll, yet leaving a little hollow. Round this they roll other Leaves
one after another, in the same manner but close and hard, till the Roll
be as big as ones Wrist, and two or three feet in length. Their way of
Smoaking when they are in Company together is thus: a Boy lights
one end of a Roll and burns it to a Coal, wetting the part next to it to
keep it from wasting too fast. The End so lighted he puts into his
Mouth, and blows the Smoak through the whole length of the Roll
32 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
into the Face of every one of the Company or the Council, tho’ there
be 2 or 300 of them. Then they, sitting in their usual posture upon
Forms, make, with their Hands held hollow together, a kind of
Funnel round their Mouths and Noses. Into this they receive the
Smoak as ’tis blown upon them, snuffing it up greedily and strongly
as long as ever they are able to hold their Breath, and seeming to
bless themselves, as it were, with the Refreshment it gives them.
(Wafer 1934:63)
In South America the cigar also predominated. The length of cigars
varied considerably—they could be up to a foot in length and an inch in
diameter (Wilbert 1987:64–121). Pipe smoking was less common in South
America, being confined principally to the Gran Chaco in Paraguay, and
the Peruvian Amazon (Wilbert 1987:66, 121–3). The Maya and Aztecs
smoked cigars, though pipes were not unknown (Mason 1924:6–8).
Mexican Indians used tubular pipes, and there are examples of elbow pipes
from Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Some pipes had two stems, and were
used for nasal inhalation (Robicsek 1978:9). Small cigars were often
smoked in the form of crushed tobacco leaves in a reed cover (Mason
1924:6).
North American Indians, by contrast, were generally pipe smokers
(Linton 1924:8–20). The smoking complexes described above clearly point
to the enormous symbolic value of the pipe to North American Indian
cultures. The mythology surrounding the pipe was no less cosmic than
that of tobacco itself (Paper 1988). The pipe was a work of art. Its
features, shapes and, above all, the highly sculpted bowls carried
enormous symbolic meaning (Turnbaugh 1980:16; Mathews 1976; von
Gernet and Timmins 1987). The manufacture of a pipe was no less sacred
than the tobacco itself (Furst 1976:30). The pipe became an elaborate
article, especially in the calumet ceremony, when it would symbolically
represent peace or war (Linton 1924). The enormous symbolic value of
the pipe derived partly from the close association between its stem and
the shaman’s device for sucking illnesses from patients (Hultkrantz 1979:
80; von Gernet 1992: 23).
In South America tobacco chewing, snuff taking and drinking were
probably equally common. The latter two were common among Peruvian
and Guianese Indians (Wilbert 1987:30, 51). Tobacco chewing—or, more
accurately, mastication—by contrast appears to have been much less
geographically concentrated. Frequently the tobacco was mixed with
lime or with ash in order to release nicotine more efficiently. How
tobacco was chewed is not known. The Yanomamö of present-day Brazil,
who are inveterate tobacco chewers, masticate tobacco by inserting a wad
of prepared tobacco between the lower lip and teeth (Chagnon 1983:65).
Whether this method was followed by other Amerindians is not certain.
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 33
The ancient Maya also chewed tobacco together with lime (Robicsek
1978: 21–2). In North America tobacco chewing was far less common, and
concentrated entirely on the western side of the continent. The Haida and
Tlingit Indians of the north-west coast chewed their tobacco mixed
together with lime prepared from burning shells, as did the Indians of
coastal central California, though further inland, among the Shoshone of
Death Valley, tobacco eating with lime was more common (Turner and
Taylor 1972:251; Kroeber 1941:17–19). Interestingly, it was not until the
late eighteenth century, when Russian fur traders introduced them to the
pipe, that the Tlingit started to smoke (de Laguna 1990:212).
Finally, some Amerindian societies adopted tobacco in rectal
administrations, using enema syringes and clysters, both ritually and
medicinally. How common this was is not known but it had a following
(Furst 1976: 27–9). Ritual enemas were certainly practised by the Maya,
Incas and Aztecs though what substances were used is debatable (de
Smet 1983: 150–2). The famous Aztec herbal, known as the Badianus
Codex and written in 1552, recommended the tobacco enema, mixed with
other herbs and flavourings, for abdominal rumblings:
For one whose bowels are murmuring because of diarrhea, make a
potion, let him take it with an early clyster, of the leaves of the herb
tlatlanquaye, the bark of quetzalaylin, the leaves of yztac ocoxochitl
and these herbs…, the tree tlanextia quahuitl ground in bitter water
and ashes, a little honey, salt, pepper and alectorium, and finally
picietl (Tobacco).
(Robicsek 1978:38)
Other examples of tobacco enemas have been noted for both North and
South America (de Smet 1983:142–3: Wilbert 1987:46–8).
There was very little about tobacco that Amerindians did not
know. Everything about it, from the shape of the leaf to the effect of
nicotine, was incorporated within a rich cosmology imbued with
enormous symbolic significance. There were thus no contradictions about
the plant, no asymmetry between it and religious and medical ideology.
The stupefaction of Metsé by tobacco, the description of which
introduced this chapter, is perfectly understandable within an
Amerindian world-view. To modern readers it is counter-cultural: to
Amerindians it was culture itself. The last word can be left with the
Winnebago who, in their Night Spirits Society ceremony, capture the
very essence of tobacco as the interface between the world of spirits and
the world of people. In his greeting one of the guests turns to tobacco:
This instrument for asking life is the foremost thing we possess, so
the old people said. We are thankful for it. We know that
34 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Earthmaker did not put us in charge of anything, and for that
reason the tobacco we received is our greatest and foremost thing…
Those whom we call Nights have been offered tobacco, and the
same has been offered to the four cardinal points, and to all the lifegiving plants. To this many tobacco has been offered. It will
strengthen us. This is what we call imitating the spirits, and this is
why we are doing it. Children of the night-blessed ones who are
seated here, I greet you all. The song we will now start is a pipelighting song.
(Tooker 1979:134–5)
FOOD OF THE SPIRITS 35
3
WHY TOBACCO?
Europeans, forbidden fruits and the panacea gospel
On 15 October 1492 Columbus was offered a bunch of dried leaves as a
present and, one month later, two of his crew members, returning from a
trip into the interior of Cuba, reported seeing Indians smoking leaves
(Columbus 1990:39, 73). A bunch of dried leaves would have made very
little impression on the Admiral—not only was he interested in
something with a little more glitter, but he would have entirely missed
the point of being offered these dried leaves (Morison 1974). We do not
know how the sailors reacted to the sight of smoking. This episode in the
contact between Amerindians and Europeans was not publicized for
many decades but it was the beginning of a long series of encounters
between the two cultures in which tobacco was exchanged.
As the previous chapter showed, Amerindian societies located tobacco
within a specific cosmology of which the art of healing was a critical
component. The Amerindian cosmology was certainly incomprehensible
to Europeans, and even those who attempted to understand it—in
particular people such as the historian and champion of Amerindian
rights, Bartolomé de las Casas, and the inveterate chronicler of the Aztec
way of life, Bernardino de Sahagún—could not accept it for what it was.
The meaning of the bunch of tobacco leaves presented to Columbus was
incomprehensible to him. Yet within no more than fifty years of
Columbus’s first voyage tobacco made a formal appearance in Europe, at
the Portuguese court in Lisbon. By 1570 the plant was growing in
Belgium, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and England, though on a very small
scale (Brooks 1937; Dickson 1954; von Gernet 1988:60–1). By the turn of
the century tobacco was also growing in the Philippines, India, Java,
Japan, West Africa and China. Chinese merchants introduced the plant
into Mongolia, Tibet and eastern Siberia so that, only one century after
Columbus’s voyage, tobacco was either grown or consumed in most of the
known world. Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe was a
remarkable achievement; tobacco’s was no less so.
How was it then, that a substance embedded within an
incomprehensible cosmology, with meanings that were bewildering to
outsiders, could find a place not only within European culture but within
so many diverse cultures throughout the world, in such a relatively short
time?
The story, naturally enough, begins in the New World. There
Europeans encountered a world of flora (and fauna and indigenous
peoples) that was utterly puzzling (Elliott 1972; Ryan 1981; Greenblatt
1991; Sauer 1976: 815). In the first half century of exploration few learned
men crossed the ocean to report on the plant world; their understanding
and perceptions were drawn largely from accounts offered to them by
explorers, administrators, ships’ captains and sailors (Talbot 1976:834–5,
838). In vain early botanists searched through the classical literature
hoping to match the received descriptions with the written word (Sauer
1976:823).
The process of cataloguing and classifying New World flora was not,
however, inspired simply by an intellectual challenge to assimilate New
World phenomena within European cultural traditions, though this was
important. Precious metals notwithstanding, Spanish interests in the New
World (as well as those of later colonizers) recognized plants as economic
assets. Of particular significance were plants with medicinal value—
edible plants, it should be noted, were not given much attention
(Hamilton 1976; Davies 1974:141–96). Philip II, the architect of Spanish
colonialism in the New World, clearly understood the value of medicinal
plants, but found the indirect method of gathering information less than
satisfactory for his purposes. In 1570 he took personal charge of gathering
information about his New World possessions. He issued a royal edict
appointing Francisco Hernandez as a special protomedico (or royal
physician) for New Spain (Risse 1987:31). The written instructions to
Hernandez made the purpose of his visit clear: ‘to gather facts from all
physicians, surgeons, Spanish and native herbalists, and other inquisitive
persons with such abilities who can possibly know something, and, in
general, obtain an account of all medical herbs, trees, plants, and seeds
that exist in a given place’—the place was originally within a radius of
fifteen miles of Mexico City, but in the event his travels took him farther
afield (Risse 1987:31, 43). According to one recent authority, Hernandez’s
task was monumental—the medicinal flora of Mexico at the time has
been estimated at 5,000 plants (Risse 1984:35). Nevertheless Hernandez,
over a period of seven years, collected and described over 3,000 plants—
he even ran clinical trials, on patients in the Royal Hospital for Indians in
Mexico City, to establish indications for their use (Risse 1984:36).
Economic considerations prompted Philip’s remarkable project. One
important consideration was the extent to which a colony could supply
commodities that were being imported from elsewhere. Medicines were
perhaps the single most important commodity that Europe imported from
the East, and there was every justification for Spain in the sixteenth
century (as well as for England, France and Holland in the seventeenth
WHY TOBACCO? 37
century) to reduce their dependence upon the Venetian and Portuguese
middlemen (Wake 1979; Lane 1940; Steensgaard 1985; Roberts 1965). To
find substitutes for such expensive substances as Chinese rhubarb; to
grow in the colonies medicinal plants imported from abroad; and to be
able to export prepared medicines from Spain to the New World—these
were the economic motives lying behind Hernandez’s mission (Dermigny
1964: 373–87). Some of these objectives were already satisfied before 1570:
jalap, from Mexico, was already ousting rhubarb from the Spanish
pharmacopoeia; ginger was introduced into Mexico in 1530 leading to the
abandonment of ginger imports from China and India; cassia fistula was
introduced into Santo Domingo from Ethiopia as early as 1514; and
finally, simples and compounds prepared in Seville were already bound
for the New World (Guerra 1966b:38; Fernández-Carrión and Valverde
1988:29). Seville imported sarsaparilla from the New World, in part
because the alternative cure for syphilis, guaiacum, was handled by the
Fugger family whose monopoly controlled the prices for this so-called
wonder drug (Munger 1949; Guerra 1966b:38; Lorenzo Sanz 1979:604–5).
Notwithstanding these achievements in reducing Spain’s import bill for
medicines, much remained to be done.
Hernandez’s long sojourn in the New World has been acknowledged
rightly as a pioneering botanical investigation and one which would be
replicated in later centuries of European colonialism throughout the
world. Philip’s desire to know his assets was not, however, confined to this
single act. Lesser officials were enjoined to gather ‘information on the
herbs, aromatic plants the Indians use to cure themselves, and their
medicinal virtue or poisonous characters they have’ (Guerra 1966b:49).
The problems encountered in collecting this information must not be
discounted, but they were probably not as great as those encountered in
interpreting the evidence. Sixteenth-century Europeans were poorly
equipped to make sense of the New World. Not only did their own
prejudices stand in the way, but even when they attempted to interpret
with an open mind, their own lack of knowledge proved a constraining
force. The botanist was unfortunately severely hampered in interpreting
floral evidence because, although he relied upon one of the greatest
herbals of antiquity, the materia medica by Dioscorides, this compendium
of some 600 plants naturally featured only those of Mediterranean origin
(Stannard 1966). Once the stage of cataloguing and classification was
completed then the task of evaluating and classifying the plant’s
medicinal properties began.
Medicinal remedies, including spices, were all interpreted through the
Galenic or humoral system (Teigen 1987). The main characteristics of this
medical philosophy can be summarized as follows. All matter had an
essence formed from the binary combination of four opposing qualities—
hot and cold, moist and dry. The human body, at the core of Galenic
38 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
medicine, had four humours—blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.
Each of these humours, because they were matter, had an essence.
Phlegm, for example, was cold and moist; blood was hot and moist. A
healthy body was defined as a body in humoral equilibrium: an
unhealthy body was in humoral disequilibrium, caused by a disease, the
symptom of which was the ailment. A physician’s agenda was to
diagnose the nature of the humoral disturbance and restore equilibrium
by drawing off the excess humour through bloodletting, purging,
vomiting and sweating. This could be accomplished either directly, by
using leeches, or by prescribing remedies that effected the fluid depletion.
The medicinal therapy conformed to the theory of opposites: a hot
remedy for a cold ailment, and a cold remedy for a hot one. It is important
to understand that humoral disequilibrium defined not only a
physiologically unhealthy state but also what we would now call
psychological illnesses including mood changes. This medical system also
extended to diet, and the use of spices therein: physicians and cooks were
encouraged to co-operate in order to regulate health and temperament
(Sass 1981).
Despite Philip II’s patronage and direction, Hernandez’s work in
Mexico was a failure on the whole. Very few New World medicinal
remedies managed to cross the Atlantic and find their way into the
European pharmacopoeia. The gulf between the aims and the results is a
problem that has attracted the historian’s attention. Charles Talbot, a
student of the European drug trade, has attributed the lack of European
assimilation of New World medicines to a combination of ignorance,
conservatism and fear, especially of the unknown. European physicians,
he argues, were not willing to commit themselves to prescribing exotic
simples and compounds when known and trusted substances were
available (Talbot 1976). Additionally, even if physicians had been less
sceptical, by the time the medicinal plants arrived in Europe they were
frequently in such a poor physical state as to render their medicinal
properties ineffective (Talbot 1976:837–8). It is not easy to dispute these
claims for conservative attitudes, and practical problems in shipping
certainly existed. Yet these same circumstances did not affect the import
of exotica from the East which, since the early Middle Ages, had defined
European foreign trade. The incorporation of Chinese and Indian
medicinal remedies must have been at least as difficult as those from the
New World but the former succeeded whereas the latter did not. Talbot
may, however, be too pessimistic about the extent of transmission. If one
widens the definition of medicinal remedies to include spices, as would
have obtained in the sixteenth century, then the failure to accept New
World products does not appear as great as Talbot argues (Lorenzo Sanz
1979; Roberts 1965).
WHY TOBACCO? 39
Other historians of New World medicine, notably Guenter Risse,
contend that the Galenic system was the filter through which New World
medicines passed on their way to Europe: those that could not be
assimilated within the Galenic system were rejected; those that could be
incorporated stood a much better chance of being transferred (Risse
1984). This assertion has led to the suggestion that native informants
‘whose views on disease actually resembled those of classical
humoralism…had arrived at a set of physiological notions remarkably
similar to those held by their European conquerors’ (Risse 1984:37).
Medical anthropologists have been debating this point for decades: that
is, whether South and Central American Indians followed a humoral or
some other medical philosophy; the debate turns on the question of
whether the resemblance between Spanish medicine and native medicine
was genuine or depended too much on the interpretations of Spanish
physicians (Foster 1987; 1988; Messer 1987; Logan 1977).
Risse is certainly correct in pointing to the Galenic system of late
Renaissance Europe as the cultural framework through which European
physicians and herbalists confronted New World medicines. To argue,
however, that medicines stood or fell on the Galenic system itself would
be to attribute to it a degree of canonical force it did not possess. Not only
did the Galenic system incorporate a high level of subtlety, but it allowed
for a fair degree of empirical investigation and differing opinions (Teigen
1987). Moreover, given the fact that diseases far outnumbered medicinal
therapies, one might expect physicians to use the Galenic system to
assimilate rather than reject exotic substances.
The Galenic system did not really act as a filter because exotic
substances were often transferred before they were placed under the lens
of the learned physician. Its main use was to ascribe properties to
medicines after they had crossed the cultural divide. The prevailing
medical philosophy legitimized rather than determined choice. It still
remains, therefore, to explain the choice in the first place. An argument
put forth recently by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins will help to
clarify the issues involved (Sahlins 1988). Sahlins was interested in
exploring a process he terms commodity indigenization; in other words,
the way in which native cultures responded to, and absorbed,
commodities brought to them by Europeans (Sahlins 1988:5). Drawing on
the experiences of the Chinese in the eighteenth century, the Hawaiians
in the nineteenth century and the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia
both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he argues that native
cultures were not passive in their contact with European commodities
but employed them actively in their own social, political and cultural
modes of behaviour. Native cultures, he points out, accepted European
commodities actively by providing them with meanings derived from
their own belief systems (Sahlins 1988:6–9). One can elaborate this
40 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
argument into a possible model of cultural contact; the success with
which a commodity crosses from one culture to another depends on
whether this new object can be given a meaning within the host culture.
This notion of commodity indigenization can be applied to the
European case, in reverse, so to speak, and help to explain how tobacco
became incorporated in the European materia medica. As previously
argued, Europeans encountered a New World containing an enormous
range of exotica. It was not the first, nor would it be the last, time that
Europeans encountered exotic commodities. In the Middle Ages,
Europeans saw and tasted the products of India and China, none of
which were indigenous to Europe itself. Aside from raw silk, the eastern
commodities imported into Europe were primarily what we now call
spices. To Europeans of the sixteenth century spices were medicines.
Pepper, ginger, nutmeg, anise and cinnamon, all imported from the East
before the sixteenth century, were the stock in trade of urban medicine
and cookery, both of which were intimately related. What the New World
might offer in the area of medical therapy was not insignificant to
sixteenth-century Europeans.
The success of tobacco in crossing cultures is one of the most intriguing
aspects of the sixteenth-century European encounter with the
Amerindian world. Analytically, what occurred largely supports Sahlins’
model. To understand why tobacco was so successful we need to explore
the European cultural context of the sixteenth century as well as the paths
of cultural transmission.
One part of this cultural context involved the use of narcotics.
According to historians such as Piero Camporesi and Carlo Ginzburg, the
urban and rural poor lived in a world where what we would now call
hallucinatory or ecstatic experiences were common (Camporesi 1989;
Ginzburg 1990). These experiences can be conveniently divided into two
kinds: those which were induced by the regimen of poverty and those
principally associated with witchcraft. Hallucinations were, as
Camporesi points out, a byproduct of a world of subsistence. The worst off
in society did not actively search out hallucinatory experiences, but
became victims of them through the lack of adequate and frequent
nourishment; through eating either contaminated food or bread made
with grains spoiled by fungi that were themselves hallucinatory—ergot,
for example; or by mixing together various plants as food substitutes
(Camporesi 1989:26–39, 120–50). Camporesi is persuasive on this point.
Certainly, prescriptions for how to deal with famine were not uncommon.
Hugh Platt wrote one such pamphlet in 1596 urging his readers to
consider the following possibilities when faced with nothing edible to
eat: try, he wrote, eating fresh turf or a clod of earth, sucking one’s blood,
drinking one’s urine, or eating wheat-straw bread (Platt 1684:163–5). The
importance of suppressing hunger was one of tobacco’s main attributes
WHY TOBACCO? 41
and was repeated frequently in the medical literature of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Witchcraft, and the witch’s sabbath, were
undoubtedly associated with hallucinatory plants. Ergot, according to
Ginzburg, is one possibility, but other writers have suggested plants of
the solanaceous family—that is deadly nightshade, henbane, mandrake
and especially datura or thorn apple—and cannabis (Ginzburg 1990:303–
5; Harner 1973; Abel 1980:106–8). Despite the paucity of the evidence, the
impression of European culture as being punctuated by hallucinatory
experiences can be sustained, but only if it is understood as being a
phenomenon of a particular social class, or of folk culture, and not
institutionalized. One hypothesis hinted at by Ginzburg, and worth
following up, is that the matrix of mind-altering substances in Europe
belonged to what Ginzburg calls female medicine, or to what Camporesi
refers to as the medicine of the poor (Ginzburg 1990:304; Camporesi 1989:
108–14).
If one accepts the hunger/mild-hallucination pairing as representing
certain aspects of European society and culture, then it can be argued
that the possibilities existed here for the incorporation or acceptance of
some non-food substance that suppressed hunger, without inducing
violent mind-altering effects. The four solanaceous plants would not have
served this purpose since, whatever their influence on appetite, their
hallucinations were violent and thus counter-productive—hence their use
in witchcraft (Harner 1973).
It is likely, therefore, that there was a cultural wisdom about
psychotropic plants, and that this wisdom was concentrated in the
folklore of urban and rural populations. Much more research is needed in
this area, but enough has already been done to portray sixteenth-century
Europeans as inhabiting a very complex cultural space where mindaltering substances and their experiences played a significant role.
Those Europeans who set out to chart the resources of the New World
were certainly not searching for hallucinogenic plants and experiences.
Yet it would not be stretching the imagination too far to suggest that
those they employed, sailors in particular, had some acquaintance with
hallucinogenic preparations. We know, by what was said of them, that
sailors did return to Europe with tobacco and it is not inconceivable that
their first few puffs produced an experience that was not entirely
unfamiliar and one that was entirely pleasing (Dickson 1954:44–5; von
Gernet 1988:23).
Plant investigators, Hernandez among them, by contrast, were
primarily interested in plants that would feature in a healing therapy. In
the sixteenth century, there were relatively few curative agents which
were capable of treating a large array of diseases (Slack 1979; Peter 1967).
Specific remedies were of limited use, and there was a widely held belief
in the existence of a universal panacea, among both Galenists and
42 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Paracelsians (Teigen 1987; Pagel 1982; Akernecht 1964:8). The roots of this
belief extend far back into European history but were rekindled by the
renaissance of classical medicine in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Galenists held firmly that panaceas were organic, since herbal substances
were considered more natural than inorganic types. Followers of
Paracelsus, however, contended that the most efficacious remedies were
inorganic, indeed mineral—in the treatment of syphilis, for example,
Galenists prescribed guaiacum or sassafras, while Paracelsians advocated
mercury (Risse 1987:24; Webster 1979; Multhauf 1954). For Galenists, at
least, the cornucopia of New World flora promised to yield a panacea of
greater efficacy than so far uncovered in the Old World.
It was into this context that the plants of the New World vied for
assimilation, and it was this bundle of assigned meanings that
determined the fate of the exotic substances, One of the first to get
attention was tobacco, a plant of the solanaceous family which includes
the psychotropic plants mentioned above as well as the potato and the
chilli pepper. Following the accounts of tobacco that were published, or
available in manuscript form, in Europe between Amerigo Vespucci’s
description of tobacco-chewing witnessed in 1499 (but not published
until 1505), and the 1570s, it is clear that tobacco was becoming accepted
as a herbal therapy capable of curing an increasingly large number of
ailments. Under the scrutiny of a host of European botanists, physicians,
churchmen and bureaucrats, who either grew tobacco in their gardens,
tried it themselves, read about it in the Spanish accounts of the New
World or spread the gospel about it, tobacco picked up one accolade after
another (Dickson 1954:31–56).
Until 1571, however, in the world of printed books, tobacco was
frequently mentioned alongside other plants, though a reading through
this literature suggests that, in relative terms, the space devoted to
tobacco was growing, and the terms in which it was being discussed
were becoming more expansive. One of the most important landmarks in
the history of the formal recognition of tobacco in European literature
was the publication, in 1571, of the celebrated and widely read second
part of Nicolas Monardes’ history of medicinal plants of the New World.
Monardes himself had not been to the New World but, as the leading
physician of Seville, he did grow the plant in his own garden and was
keenly aware of what was being said and written about tobacco as well
as being involved in commerce between Seville and the New World (Pike
1972:83–4, 89–91; Guerra 1961: 24–6, 79–82). Monardes provided all the
justification needed for locating tobacco at the heart of the European
materia medica. Not only did he establish its humoral essence—hot and
dry in the second degree—but he listed more than twenty specific
ailments which tobacco cured, from toothache to cancer. He also
emphasised that tobacco alleviated hunger and thirst (Monardes 1925:75–
WHY TOBACCO? 43
91). Writing several years later in Mexico, Juan de Cardenas, a Spanish
physician, echoed Monardes and in many ways showed just how great an
influence Monardes had on nicotian thinking (Dickson 1954:95–7). He
wrote thus:
To seek to tell the virtues and greatness of this holy herb, the ailments
which can be cured by it, and have been, the evils from which it has
saved thousands would be to go on to infinity…this precious herb is
so general a human need not only for the sick but for the healthy.
(Dickson 1954:95)
Besides listing and extolling its curative qualities, Monardes had
commented favourably on tobacco’s mind-altering effects, a not
inconsequential fact. In a section in which he described the use that
Indians made of tobacco, he referred to its role in inducing visions and
quickly legitimized the experience therein by reminding his readers that
no less an authority than Dioscorides wrote about ancient herbs that
induced similar states (Monardes 1925:86–7).
Monardes made it clear that there were three main methods of using
tobacco: green wet leaves, usually warmed, were prescribed in topical
applications mostly for pain, as well as for sores, cuts, wounds, etc.; leaves
mixed with lime could be chewed to alleviate both hunger and thirst;
finally, dried leaves could be smoked, to counteract weariness and induce
relaxation. Writers on tobacco, from Monardes on until at least the turn
of the nineteenth century, often simply reproduced his arguments and
indeed his prose. Much of the medical literature debated points of
humoral argument—such as pinpointing who should and should not
take tobacco; or attempted to refine Monardes on particular aspects. For
example, Monardes suggested in his treatise that it was the juices of the
tobacco wad which alleviated hunger and thirst directly (Monardes 1925:
90); Edme Baillard, a Parisian physician who advocated the use of snuff,
argued instead that tobacco silenced those membranes and fibres that
gave the soul of the body the idea that it was hungry or thirsty—this was
written in 1668 (Baillard 1668:93–4). The Counterblaste on tobacco written
by James I and published in 1604 constructed its argument against the
use and abuse of tobacco by debating humoral points and the alleged
existence of a panacea (James I 1982:87–99).
Monardes’ discussion of nicotian therapy included smoking, though it
is not given great prominence in his discussion. Undoubtedly he was
drawing on observations by André Thevet, whose Les singularitez de la
France antartique had been published in 1557 and contained a description
of Amerindian smoking practices, reproduced below:
44 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Another curiosity is a plant, which they call in their language petun,
which they generally carry with them, because they believe it to be
wonderfully useful for several things. It resembles our ox-tongue.
They carefully gather this herb, and dry it in the shade in their little
cabins. When it is dry they enclose a quantity of it in a palm leaf,
which is rather large, and roll it up about the length of a candle.
They light it at one end and take in the smoke by the nose and
mouth. They say it is very good to drive forth and consume the
superfluous moisture in the head. Besides, when taken in this way,
it makes it possible to endure hunger and thirst for some time.
Therefore they use it often, even when they are taking counsel they
inhale this smoke and then speak; this they do ordinarily one
after the other in war, where it is very useful. Women do not use it
at all. It is true that if they take too much of this smoke or perfume it
will go to their head and make them drunk like the smell of strong
wine. The Christians here today have become very attached to this
plant and perfume…
(Dickson 1954:119)
Monardes does not appear to have drawn on information from Benzoni’s
history of the Americas published in 1565—quoted in the previous
chapter —and indeed it was by avoiding his account of tobacco
shamanistic practices that Monardes could assimilate smoking into the
humoral paradigm (Dickson 1954:121; Benzoni 1857). In the English
edition of Monardes translated by John Frampton and published in 1577,
an addition was made to Monardes’ original description but was not
written by him; rather, it was translated from Charles Estienne and Jean
Liébault’s manual on agricultural techniques first published in 1567
(Dickson 1954:36, 76). The addition contains a succinct, if not entirely clear,
description of smoking, moving beyond tobacco’s ability to alleviate
hunger and thirst to its humoral powers in expelling excess moisture from
the body, and, significantly, evoking the image of sucking the smoke up
through a pipe: in the original Spanish version the discussion about
smoking is set within a description of Amerindian ways and not offered,
directly, as a method for European consumption:
The leafe of this hearbe being dried in the shadowe…being caste on
a Chaffying dishe of Coales to bee burned takying the smoke
thereof at your mouth through a tonnell or cane, your hed being
well covered, causeth to avoyde at the mouthe great quantitie of
slimy and flekmaticke water, whereby the body will be extenuated
and weakened, as though one had long fasted, thereby it is thought
by some, that the dropsie not having taken roote, will bee healed by
this Perfume.
WHY TOBACCO? 45
(Monardes 1925:97)
Monardes was not alone in singing the praises of tobacco. More than any
of his contemporaries, however, this physician from Seville added a voice
of authority to advocates of nicotian therapy and, thereby, legitimized its
use among physicians and herbalists and put it squarely within a
European cultural framework. Monardes’ compendium and commentary
on the medicinal plants of the New World was translated into the major
European languages and appeared in a number of editions and, for at
least two centuries, little of substance was added to his account of tobacco
by all those who followed him (Dickson 1954:83; Talbot 1976:836; Stewart
1967).
The critical position of Monardes in the history of tobacco and
of nicotian therapy—a medical practice that continued well into the
nineteenth century in official circles and later on the fringe of orthodox
medicine—has been generally acknowledged by historians of tobacco
(Brooks 1937; Dickson 1954; MacKenzie 1984; Kell 1965). It is, however,
important to remember that tobacco was being consumed in Europe, to
some extent, before Monardes published his work. The manufacture of
pipes in London, for example, is believed to have begun around 1570
(Ayton 1984:4). What happened in the 1570s was that two historical
trajectories fused. The first consisted of the exchange of tobacco between
Amerindians and European explorers, sailors and settlers along the
eastern seaboard of the Americas. Matthias de l’Obel, in his celebrated
herbal of 1570, gave a clear account of how the intrepid Europeans
appeared after being initiated into nicotian rites:
For you may see many sailors, all of whom have returned from
there carrying small tubes…[which] they light with fire, and,
opening their mouths wide and breathing in, they suck in as much
smoke as they can…in this way they say that their hunger and thirst
are allayed, their strength is restored and their spirits are refreshed;
they asseverate that their brains are lulled by a joyous intoxication.
(Dickson 1954:44–5)
The second was the intellectual assimilation of the New World ‘herbe’,
which Monardes participated in and developed. Once the fusion
occurred, the process of the exchange of tobacco across two cultures was
completed.
It is clear that European herbalists and physicians learned about
tobacco from several sources: the written accounts of Amerindian
practices; empirical investigation of the plant itself; and, perhaps most
importantly, oral reports of returning sailors. What also seems to be clear
is that tobacco permeated all European social classes at about the same
46 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
time, in contrast to other exotic substances of the period such as sugar,
chocolate, coffee and tea, all of which appear to have entered at the top
and percolated downwards (Mintz 1985:74–150; Braudel 1981:249–60;
McCracken 1988). Even as herbalists and physicians were raising its
therapeutic profile, tobacco was given a seal of approval higher up the
social scale. Again this came from several directions. In France Jean Nicot,
who was the French ambassador to the court in Lisbon from 1559, was
perhaps more important than anyone else in promoting tobacco not only
as a superb remedy but as one that was perfectly suited to life at court.
Nicot had obtained a specimen of the species Nicotiana tabacum (probably
originating in Brazil) while in Lisbon from Damião de Goes, the
Portuguese humanist and keeper of the Crown’s manuscripts (Dickson
1954:68; von Gernet 1988: 32). Having witnessed its miraculous curative
powers, Nicot sent seeds and plants to the French court, in particular to
the queen mother, Catherine de Medici (Baudry 1988: Falgairolle 1897:50;
Laufer 1924b: 49–50). Jac ques Gohory, in his treatise on tobacco
published in 1572, argued that, because the queen mother herself was
responsible for its cultivation in France, it should be named ‘Medicée’
(Bowen 1938:356). Nicot was the source for Liébault’s work that
presented tobacco as a herbal panacea and, in return, Liébault
popularized the story about Nicot, as well as suggesting that, in his
honour, the plant be called nicotiane (Dickson 1954:72–5). The wonder
plant was introduced to the papal court in Rome by Prospero di Santa
Croce, the papal nuncio in Lisbon in 1561; and in Tuscany credit is given
to Bishop Niccoló Tornabuoni who, between 1560 and 1564, was the
Grand Duke of Tuscany’s ambassador to the French court (Dickson 1954:
151–2). The royal and noble associations of tobacco on the Continent were
clearly important in providing a meaning for the plant and legitimating
its use. In England, it was not noble approval so much as distinguished
approval which proved salient in tobacco’s acceptance. Thomas Hariot,
the highly respected scientist who accompanied the first English colonists
to Roanoke Island, in 1585, reported on tobacco use among the Indians,
but also described his own experiences:
We our selves during the time we were there, used to sucke it after
their maner, as also since our returne, and have found many rare
and woonderfull experiments of the vertues thereof: of which the
relation would require a volume by itselfe: the use of it by so many
of late men and women of great calling, as els, and some learned
Physicians also, is sufficient witnesse.
(Quinn 1979:146)
WHY TOBACCO? 47
The allusion above to ‘Physicians’ included a reference to Monardes, a
copy of whose book Hariot took on his voyage, in order to help him
identify the flora present (Quinn 1979:146).
In accounting for the incorporation of tobacco into European culture
several factors have been emphasized. First, during the sixteenth century,
Europeans were being introduced to tobacco and smoking both directly,
in their encounter with Amerindians in the Americas, and indirectly,
through those returning from transatlantic voyages, including those
Amerindians who appeared in Europe from time to time. Most of those
with such first-hand knowledge of tobacco did not record their
impressions but we can learn a great deal from those very few who did.
Thomas Hariot’s account is one such revealing testament. That Hariot
became addicted to tobacco, and introduced the practice to others, is well
established, but his experiences could not have been unique—Hariot, it
should be added, died of cancer of the nose, caused, no doubt, by the
practice of exhaling smoke along the nasal passage (Shirley 1983:432–4).
Second, the language of tobacco, employing terms such as panacea, holy
herb, sacred weed, did much to attract medical and popular attention to
the plant’s wondrous curative powers—‘holy herb’ first appeared as a
description of tobacco in Damião de Goes’s chronicle of the reign of King
Manoel (Dickson 1954: 65). Matthias de l’Obel, as one of the strong
advocates of nicotian therapy, placed tobacco as a panacea beyond
question when he wrote, ‘it should be preferred to any panacea, even the
most celebrated’ (Dickson 1954:44). Finally, one must take account of the
fact that tobacco was being hailed as a miracle plant in the seats of
European power, where publicists such as Jacques Gohory suggested
nomenclatures appropriate to its status: thus, Nicotiane, l’herbe du Grand
Prieur, Medicée and Tornabona (Dickson 1954:151–2). Other factors are
more difficult to support with evidence, but it is not too far-fetched to
argue that the novelty of smoking must have been an attraction as were
the undoubted psychological effects, from hallucinations to feelings of
comfort and ease, that were reported (von Gernet 1988:26).
Tobacco was grafted on to European culture by several different agents
operating contemporaneously. Which agents were the most important is
impossible to judge but there is no doubt that each reinforced the other.
Monardes, for example, did not address his remarks to a specific
audience: the information in herbals rapidly diffused through both
literate and non-literate societies. These are the factors that operated on
the European side of the exchange, but there were also factors present in
the Americas that helped tobacco’s passage. The important ones have
already been discussed in the previous chapter but it is well to repeat
them briefly. First, tobacco had a very wide geographic distribution. In
terms of contact, this meant that no one set of European explorers had a
unique encounter with tobacco. Portuguese, Spanish, French and English
48 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
had experiences broadly similar. Second, tobacco had the status of a
panacea in Amerindian medicine and, therefore, the work of identifying
which plant might acquire this standing had already been done. Aside
from its special use in shamanistic practices, tobacco was not used by
Amerindians to promote any special political or social authority: the
divisions between sacred and profane, between popular and reserved,
were blurred. Tobacco was widely consumed for a great many reasons
(von Gernet 1982). Tobacco’s sacredness was there to be shared, not
monopolized. Offering tobacco to the newcomers from across the waters
was a reflection of the significance of the plant in engaging social contact.
This social role of tobacco would prove to be highly mobile across the
cultural chasm, as the next chapter will argue (von Gernet 1988).
To complete this analysis of the cultural transfer of tobacco it is useful
to contrast tobacco’s success with coca’s failure. Coca was not ‘discovered’
by Europeans until after the conquest of the Incas, that is until after 1531;
though Ramon Pané, a missionary on Hispaniola, did refer to something
like it, in a manuscript written around 1497 (Gagliano 1979:39). Coca thus
entered European perceptions of the New World some three decades
after tobacco. Coca was used by highland Indians for reasons that were
not unlike those of tobacco-using Indians (Martin 1975). That is,
the medicinal use prevailed, with certain uses being reserved for
shamanism and divination. Unlike tobacco, however, which was widely
consumed throughout the Americas, coca use concentrated in the Inca
kingdom, principally, of course, in Peru. Coca was also central to many
Inca religious rites and was one of the privileges of the royal family and
priests. There is some evidence, in fact, that before the conquest coca was
not used in peasant communities and that its use after the mid-sixteenth
century occurred in the wake of the destruction of Inca rule (Parkerson
1983). Nevertheless, as far as Europeans were made aware, the early
accounts of the use of coca virtually ignored its significance as a medicinal
plant. Indeed coca became the subject of a very intense debate among
missionaries, administrators and merchants, but mostly among
missionaries (Gagliano 1963). Basically the debate centred on the question
as to which of two aspects of coca consumption would hold sway. One
group of missionaries was convinced that coca use thwarted the
missionaries’ attempt to christianize the Indians since coca not only
linked the Indians to the Inca past but also was used in what were seen as
heathenish practices. These prohibitionists appealed to the crown to
destroy the coca plantations. Other missionaries took the opposite line:
that coca served as a nutritive and stimulant substance for the
undernourished Indians and, more to the point, without their ration of
coca they would refuse to work in the silver mines.
The fact that a substance was being debated on points that had nothing
to do with its medicinal efficacy made it very difficult to prescribe for use
WHY TOBACCO? 49
by Europeans. Indeed Pedro de Cieza de Léon, one of the early
chroniclers of Peru, went so far as to decry coca chewing, as he put it, as a
habit fit only for Indians (Gagliano 1979:40). The coca controversy raged
on for more than a century. In the seventeenth century in every
accusation of witchcraft that came before the judges in Peru, coca was
implicated (Gagliano 1979:43). Monardes wrote about coca in the third
part of his history of New World medicines, but aside from one sentence
pointing out that coca chewing alleviated hunger and thirst the entire
description of coca (only two pages) concerns the plant’s botany while
tobacco is given twenty-four pages of text (Monardes 1925:31–2). Avid
readers of Monardes, and there were many among physicians and
scientists, would find little here to kindle an interest in coca. Even when
towards the end of the sixteenth century scattered reports of coca’s wide
medicinal applications were circulating, coca was still not being taken
seriously by European physicians, and the reason here had nothing to do
with the coca controversy. The reports spoke about coca’s power in
healing diseases among the sierra and altiplano Indians (Gagliano 1979:
39–44; Saignes 1988). This alone would have precluded its use in Europe,
since it was commonly believed that diseases and their cures occurred in
the same location. Thus the highland Indian diseases were believed not to
be the same as those of Europeans since coca did not grow in Europe. It
might be argued that this problem applied also to tobacco since it was
found growing in the New World and not Europe. European herbalists of
the first half of the sixteenth century, however, thought tobacco was the
third variety of henbane, the first two of which grew in Europe. One of the
first to do this was Pier Andrea Mattioli, the personal physician to
Archduke Maximilian and the author of a celebrated commentary on
Dioscorides, but other herbalists, notably Rembert Dodoens, agreed with
this classification (Anderson 1977:163–80; Dickson 1954: 33–9).
Coca remained outside of the European materia medica. It was not
until the very end of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century
that Spanish officials urged the Crown to consider marketing coca in
Europe as a substitute for coffee and tea (Gagliano 1965:166–7; Gagliano
1979:46–7). The suggestion was turned down and it was left to others,
Sigmund Freud included, later on that century to extol the virtues not of
coca but of its principal alkaloid, cocaine.
The Europeanization of tobacco was fundamental in the plant’s
subsequent history for it was Europeans who were active in its initial
diffusion beyond the Americas. While this is beyond doubt, the precise
timing of tobacco’s appearance in other cultures remains obscure as do
the routes of transmission. But despite these problems and reservations,
it is remarkable how quickly tobacco was absorbed into very different
cultural systems. On the other hand, the reason why tobacco passed
50 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
through the cultural divide separating Europe from Asia and Africa was
strikingly similar to the transmission from the Americas to Europe.
It is generally accepted that tobacco travelled next to Asia after its
initial appearance in Europe, but this did not happen until the European
meanings so succinctly described by Monardes were established. Tobacco
first made its appearance in Asia around 1575 when the Spanish brought
the plant to the Philippines from Mexico, as part of the galleon trade that
the Spanish had established in 1571 when they first arrived in Manila
(Reid 1985:535). In the Philippines the tobacco plant established itself
quickly as a satisfactory cash crop, as both people and land were well
suited to its cultivation (de Jesus 1980:2–3). Chinese, particularly
Fukienese, sailors and merchants were responsible for its introduction
into the Fukien province of south-eastern China around the turn of the
seventeenth century, although a more precise dating is not possible
(Goodrich 1938:648–9; Spence 1975:146–7). The Spanish themselves were
not responsible for the diffusion of tobacco from their base in the Far
East. It was the Portuguese who from their base in Macao carried the
tobacco plant to other parts of the region. Their role in tobacco’s
movements has been documented for India, possibly as early as 1595
(Gokhale 1974:485); Java in 1600 (Reid 1985:535; Höllmann 1988:35); Japan
some time around 1605 (Laufer 1924b:2; Satow 1878). These areas became
the staging post for tobacco’s journey to other parts of the Far East. From
Japan tobacco spread to Korea (Laufer 1924b:10); from India to Ceylon
around 1610 (Laufer 1924b:14); and from China to eastern Siberia,
Mongolia, Turkestan and Tibet (Laufer 1924b:15). By the 1630s, tobacco
was being cultivated in Indochina as well as in Taiwan (Höllmann 1988:
24, 28, 50–1).
Tobacco seems to have reached the Near East at about the same time as
it appeared in the Far East. By the turn of the seventeenth century its use
was known in Persia having been introduced, according to one authority,
by the Portuguese (Comes 1900; Laufer 1924b:15). It was introduced into
the Ottoman Empire at about the same time by the English (Birnbaum
1957:24–6).
As for Africa, the whole issue of tobacco’s introduction is steeped in
controversy. Yet it is clear that by 1630, at the very latest, tobacco had
penetrated West Africa (Ozanne 1969:24). On the eastern side of the
continent tobacco was being cultivated in Madagascar as early as 1638
(Laufer 1930:11); and in the Maghreb definitely by the turn of the
seventeenth century (Ozanne 1969:35). Given the nature of the historical
contacts between different regions of Africa and other parts of the world,
there is growing evidence that the introduction of tobacco into Africa was
made at different points by different people: Morocco by the English
(Ozanne 1969:36–7); West Africa possibly by the French (Philips 1983:
WHY TOBACCO? 51
317–18); and East Africa by a combination of Portuguese and Arabic
intermediaries (Laufer 1930:10).
We can therefore safely argue that by the third decade of the
seventeenth century tobacco had completed its circumnavigation not only
as a substance but also as a cash crop. How can we explain this
remarkable penetration?
In the same way as Europeans were attracted to tobacco because of its
avowed efficacy as a herbal panacea, so too, to the extent that it is
possible to be precise, were the Chinese, Javanese, Japanese and Indians.
One of the first Chinese to write about tobacco underscored its beneficial
medicinal properties. Chang Chieh-pin, a physician from Shan-yin in
Chekiang province, in tones that are strongly reminiscent of
contemporary European medical authority, particularly that of Monardes,
recommended tobacco for expelling colds, for reducing swellings in cases
of dropsy, for malaria and cholera (Laufer 1924b:3; Goodrich 1938:648).
Its efficacy in counteracting malaria was, according to Chang, the main
reason for its success. In his words:
Inquiring for the beginnings of tobacco-smoking we find that it is
connected with the subjugation of Yünnan Province. When our
forces entered this malaria-infested region, almost every one was
infected by this disease with the exception of a single battalion. To
the question why they had kept well, these men replied that they all
indulged in tobacco. For this reason it was diffused into all parts of
the country. Every one in the south-west, old and young without
exception, is at present addicted to smoking by day and night.
(Laufer 1924b: 3)
It is interesting that Chang, as well as his contemporary the poet and
essayist Yao Lü who also wrote about tobacco, refer only to smoking and
not to other methods of tobacco consumption. Yao Lü is precise in his
description of tobacco:
There is a plant called tan-pa-ku produced in Luzon… You take fire
and light one end and put the other in your mouth. The smoke goes
down your throat through the pipe. It can make one tipsy but it can
(likewise) keep one clear of malaria… It is commonly called goldsilk-smoke.
(Goodrich 1938:649)
Other accounts stress tobacco’s role in alleviating diseases brought on by
‘extreme cold’ (Goodrich 1938:651). The fullest account of tobacco as a
panacea appeared in a Chinese herbal written some time between 1644
and 1661.
52 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Tobacco has an irritating flavor and warm effect and contains
poison. It cures troubles due to cold and moisture, removes
congestion of the thorax, loosens the phlegm of the diaphragm, and
also increases the activity of the circulation. The human alimentary
and muscle systems are aided in their smooth operation as the
smoke goes directly from the mouth to the stomach and passes from
within to outside, circulating around the four limbs and the
hundred bones of the body…it gives man satisfaction whenever he
is hungry…it makes man hungry when he is sated. If a person
smokes when he is hungry, he feels as though he has taken plentiful
food; and when he smokes after eating sufficiently, it affords good
digestion in a most satisfactory manner. For this reason many
people use it as a substitute for wine and tea, and never get tired of
it, even when smoking all day long.
(Laufer 1924b:8–9)
The first introduction of tobacco into India was made under the guise of a
remedy. Asad Beg, a chronicler of India, wrote in 1605 that the Mughal
Emperor Akbar was introduced to tobacco as a medicine which European
doctors had praised in their writings (Elliot and Dowson 1875: 166; Sangar
1981:207–11). In south-east Asia tobacco also assumed a medicinal role
(Höllmann 1988:101–3). While the Chinese yang-yin (hot-cool) medical
system easily absorbed and defined tobacco use, in south-east Asia a
similarly easy incorporation of tobacco was effected by the striking
similarity of medical systems in this region (a combination of Indian
Ayurvedic and Greek and Arabic theories) to the humoral system
prevailing in contemporary Europe (Reid 1988:52–7). While tobacco was
smoked, in both pipes and cheroots, it also became incorporated in the
ritual associated with betel chewing, though precisely when tobacco was
so used remains unclear (Reid 1985:535–8). As a supplement to betel
tobacco was also appreciated for its narcotic properties and was assigned
ritualistic meanings derived from betel consumption, namely as a polite
offering to a guest, as a relaxant and as a substitute for food (Reid 1985:
530–2).
Moreover, in the same manner that tobacco entered systems of healing
in Europe as a herbal panacea, south-east Asian medicine employed
herbal remedies to great effect. Betel in particular was employed to
prevent tooth decay, aid digestion and prevent dysentery (Reid 1988:54).
No wonder then that tobacco, with its avowed properties, could not only
take its place alongside betel as a medicine but could be consumed
together with it.
In the Near East tobacco seems to have had the same meanings as it did
in south-east Asia. Simon Contarini, the Venetian ambassador to the
court in Constantinople, in his report to the Doge in 1610 referred to
WHY TOBACCO? 53
tobacco as ‘a certain herb which comes as a medicine from England’
(CSPV 1607–1610:505–6). İbrahim Peçevî, in his history of the Ottoman
Empire written in the sixteenth century, confirms that ‘about the year
[1600/1601] the English infidels brought it [tobacco] and sold it as a cure
for “wet” diseases’ (Birnbaum 1957:24). Later in the same century, John
Fryer, an official of the East India Company, on his travels through Persia
was impressed by tobacco’s role in social relationships. ‘Tobacco is a
general companion’, he wrote, ‘and to give them their due, they are
conversable Good-Fellows, sparing no one his Bowl in their turn…’
(Fryer 1912: 210). In contrast to the use of tobacco as a supplement to betel
in India and south-east Asia, in the Near East tobacco was clearly
associated with coffee and with the coffeehouse, itself a Near Eastern
social invention (Fryer 1899:234; 1915:34; Hattox 1988).
Whether medicine was the vector for tobacco’s incorporation into
African cultures is less certain. Available sources make no mention of
tobacco as a remedy. On the contrary, what is stressed in these sources is
the juxtaposition of tobacco with other narcotic substances, principally
kola and cannabis (Philips 1983: Ozanne 1969: Laufer 1930). Until further
research is carried out, the relationship between tobacco and medicine in
Africa must remain unclear.
The Europeanization of tobacco in the sixteenth century involved
offering tobacco as a herbal panacea rooted firmly within European
medical tradition. It thus entered European culture as a popular remedy
though there were strong objections to its use. Nevertheless, Europeans
offered tobacco to the rest of the world in their terms. From the Near East
to China medical systems embraced the notion of herbal remedies, as
well as understanding their actions in terms broadly similar to those
prevalent in Europe. Just as in the European case, a suitable niche for
tobacco was already present in these diverse cultures, and incorporation
was virtually automatic.
54 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Part II
Custom, in this small article I find
What strong ascendance thou hast o’er the mind.
My friend’s advice the first inducements were
‘Take it’, said she, ‘it will your spirits cheer.’
All resolute the offered drug to take
But in the trial sickened with my hate.
By repetitions I was brought to bear,
Then rather liked, now love it too, too dear.
Be careful, oh, my soul! how thou let’st in
The baneful poison of repeated sin;
Never be intimate with my crime,
Lest Custom makes it amiable in time.
Elizabeth Teft (1747), from Roger Lonsdale, Eighteenthcentury Women Poets: an Oxford Anthology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Peart and chipper and sassy,
Always ready to swear and fight,—
And I’d larnt him ter char terbacker,
Jest to keep his milk-teeth white
John Hay, from ‘Little Breeches’ (1871)
4
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL
DISCOURSE
Tobacco consumption before the cigarette
It was probably not until the 1570s that tobacco began to enter into
consumption patterns outside of North and South America. Its role as a
medicine has been outlined in the previous chapter where it was also
argued that it was tobacco’s avowed and advertised therapeutic value
that made it acceptable in many diverse cultures. An obvious question
that presents itself is: when did the underlying reason for tobacco
consumption change from therapy to recreation? This is a difficult
question to answer with any degree of confidence but, before attempting
to do so, it is necessary to outline consumption patterns in more detail.
There is little doubt that within a relatively short period of time after its
introduction into European culture the demand for tobacco grew at a
bewildering rate. Statistics on the importation of tobacco into England
during the seventeenth century provide the clearest evidence of this
phenomenon. In 1603, the first year for which there are satisfactory data,
25,000 pounds of tobacco, all of it from Spanish America, was imported
into England; in 1700 the corresponding figure was almost 38 million
pounds (Gray and Wyckoff 1940:18, 24).
The pace of increase of imports was greatest in the second half of the
century but, according to a recent interpretation of the tobacco
phenomenon in England, tobacco was a commodity of mass consumption
certainly by c. 1670 and possibly several decades before: that is, enough
tobacco was available for at least 25 per cent of the adult population to
have a pipeful at least once daily (Shammas 1990:78). If one accepts this
definition, then tobacco was the first of the range of non-European
exotica to establish itself permanently as a European commodity, well
before chocolate, coffee, tea and even sugar. In England the latter was not
a commodity of mass consumption until the end of the seventeenth
century and tea did not have a similar status until the 1720s (Shammas
1990:81, 84). Evidence from other parts of Europe suggests a rapid
penetration by tobacco, though, with the possible exception of Holland,
neither the pace nor the extent was as great as in England. Using the
above definition of a mass-consumption commodity, tobacco was not in
this class in France until the middle of the eighteenth century (Price 1973:
8).
The progress of tobacco consumption in England until at least the
eighteenth century is much easier to chart than elsewhere, largely
because of the relative abundance of information. The availability of
fairly reliable trade and demographic statistics allows us to witness the
rise of tobacco consumption on a per capita basis. Table 4.1 outlines the
trend as best as can be done though it is far from perfect. With the
exception of the final entry around the turn of the century, the figures
refer only to legal consumption and therefore exclude smuggled or
contraband tobacco. Though there is more than enough evidence that
smuggling occurred it has not been possible to quantify it, but most
authorities seem to agree that smuggling did not become a very serious
problem until towards the end of the seventeenth century when customs
duties rose considerably in a very short time (Rive 1929:554–8; Ramsay
1952; Nash 1982:357; see also Chapter 7).
Much less is known about tobacco consumption in other European
countries. Historians give a strong impression of the Dutch as avid
tobacco consumers, and, although precise data are lacking, an amount of
judicious manipulation of figures and assumptions does provide general
support for this assertion (Schama 1987:193–201). Around 1670 the Dutch
consumed about 3 million pounds of tobacco, or 1.5 pounds per
inhabitant (Roessingh 1978:42; Price 1961:90; Price 1973:186). In other
words, tobacco was being mass-consumed in Holland and possibly even
earlier than in England. Certainly, there is sufficient literary and pictorial
evidence that attests to the widespread use of tobacco by all social classes
from early in the seventeenth century; there is also evidence that the
Dutch paid less for their tobacco than did the English, and, given their
highly efficient and extensive inland water transport, there is every
likelihood that imported and domestic tobacco was more easily available
in Holland than in England (Schama 1987:193–201; Price 1973:852; de
Table 4.1 Tobacco consumption, England and Wales 1620–1702
Source: Shammas 1990:79
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 57
Vries 1978). French consumption, as already stated, was relatively low
during the seventeenth century, probably no more than 0.33 pounds per
person towards the end of the century (Price 1973:10). This level
increased considerably in the eighteenth century but it was probably not
before the middle of that century that tobacco became mass-consumed
(Price 1973:377–8). Portugal is the only other country for which an
estimate of per capita consumption can be made, in the absence of precise
data. At the turn of the eighteenth century Portugal consumed about 1
million pounds of tobacco, equivalent to a per capita figure of 0.5
pounds, but by mid-century tobacco was being massconsumed (Lugar
1977:36, 47–9; Hanson 1982:156–7). Other evidence also points to
increasing per capita consumption. The output of snuff from the royal
manufactory in Lisbon increased by 30 per cent between 1700 and 1750
(Nardi 1986:19). It is possible to give an indication of the extent of tobacco
consumption in Austria though this is for the end of the eighteenth
century. The Austrian State Tobacco Monopoly, with its manufacturing
facilities in Vienna, began operations in 1784 to supply tobacco
consumers in the Austrian state with manufactured tobacco, snuff and
smoking tobacco. In its first year of operation the monopoly produced
just over 14 million pounds of tobacco, which translates into a per capita
consumption of more than 1 pound, suggesting that Austrians were mass
consumers of tobacco by the mid-eighteenth century (Hitz and Huber
1975:195). Information for other parts of Europe is not available but it
would be reasonable to argue, in general, that tobacco emerged as a
European mass-consumed commodity in the eighteenth century,
probably by 1750.
While it is possible to get some idea of the amount consumed, it is
quite another matter to find out who was consuming tobacco. Some
commentators on tobacco and its medical uses and abuses were clear in
their prescription as to who would benefit from nicotian therapy. James
Hart, writing in 1633, agreed with the prevailing wisdom, as derived from
Monardes, that tobacco expelled phlegm and generally warmed and
dried the body (Hart 1633:317). Children, he advised, should not
consume tobacco, for they tended to be hot-brained, as he put it; and the
same proscription was extended to pregnant women. Hart went on to
add that tobacco was best for older men, ‘where the brain is cold and
moist’, and generally for all those who live in ‘moist, fenny, waterish…
places; as in Holland, in Lincolnshire’ (Hart 1633:320). Towards the end
of the century another famous tobacco polemicist argued, in opposition
to Hart, that pregnant women should smoke, as they cannot properly
nourish the foetus if the stomach is not working properly: tobacco smoke
was understood to stimulate gastric functions (van Peima 1690).
Interestingly, except for the references to pregnant women, there is little
sense in seventeenth-century tobacco literature of any prohibition of
58 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
tobacco use by gender. Women were constituted, according to humoral
theory, as cold and moist, and could theoretically withstand or benefit
from tobacco consumption (Maclean 1980). Dutch genre painting of the
seventeenth century often portrayed women smoking, though it is not
clear whether the depiction of smoking women is a form of opprobrium
(Schama 1987:203–13).
It is doubtful whether we will ever know if there was any gender or
age prohibition about smoking before the nineteenth century. Odd
references do appear that give some indication of who was consuming
tobacco but no conclusive statement is possible. Both Egon Corti and
G.L.Apperson, two early writers who were particularly interested in the
social history of tobacco, could not be definitive about the social profile of
smokers (Corti 1931; Apperson 1914). Until other evidence is forthcoming
it is best to leave the issue as it stands, by stating that no conclusive proof
exists that points to any proscription against anyone of whatever age,
gender or social class consuming tobacco. Though we may find the image
of a pipe-smoking woman uncomfortable because of our own gender
assumptions and constructions, there is little evidence of this in the
seventeenth century. In a typical example of a seventeenth-century
allegory on the abuse of tobacco and its dire effects, both physical and
moral, Bacchus’s Wonder Wercken by the Dutch engraver Gillis van
Schenyndel, published in Amsterdam in 1628, both men and women are
depicted smoking pipes and succumbing to the temptation of the weed
(Schama 1987:214–15). David Teniers, the seventeenth-century Flemish
painter, who often chose tobacco as a subject for his canvases, depicted a
woman smoking a pipe in one of his paintings. In it a woman is sitting in
an inn or tavern with a man who has just filled her pipe with tobacco.
The woman, smartly dressed, is at the point of lighting her pipe in a
distinctly elegant way. The scene is extremely serene, even touching, an
atmosphere created not only by the lack of commotion (so typical of
many other tavern scenes of the period) but also, and more importantly,
by the warmth implied by the gaze of the woman’s companion as well as
by another, older woman, looking in from a nearby window (Brongers
1964:195). The entire feeling of the painting is of refined dignity, an
atmosphere which is replicated in another, delicate, painting entitled The
Sleeping Beauty by the seventeenth-century Dutch master Gabriel Metsu.
Refinement is also the theme in an eighteenth-century engraving by
N.Arnoult of a smoking tavern in France. Entitled La Charmante Tabagie,
the engraving shows a group of three elegantly dressed women sitting
around a table. Two of the women are smoking long-stemmed clay pipes
at the table while the third woman is standing up cutting the tobacco roll
in preparation for smoking (Vigié 1989:79). But perhaps the most famous
painting of a woman smoking a pipe is a portrait of the painter Madame
Vigée-Lebrun in the second half of the eighteenth century. In this picture
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 59
the painter is depicted elegantly dressed smoking a long-stemmed clay
pipe at a table on which are two or three other pipes as well as a few
devices for lighting pipes (Corti 1931:206). Other literary references to
women smoking are scattered but include the famous botanic
compendium of Paul de Reneaulme published in Paris early in the
seventeenth century where, in a passage devoted to the therapeutic value
of tobacco, he singles out women for particular mention: ‘How many
women have I seen, almost lifeless from headache or toothache or catarrh
in the lungs or elsewhere, restored to their former health by the use of
this plant?’ (Dickson 1960:155–6). In the English-American colonies both
visitors and travellers, when commenting on the habits of the colonists,
stressed the near-universal use of tobacco. One such traveller reported in
1686 his observations on a backwoods settlement:
Everyone smokes while working and idling. I sometimes went to
hear the sermon; their churches are in the woods and when everyone
has arrived the minister and all the others smoke before going in.
The preaching over, they do the same thing before parting. They
have seats for that purpose. It was here I saw that everybody
smokes, men, women, girls and boys from the age of seven.
(Robert 1952:99)
Peter Kalm, the Swedish botanist who was dispatched by the Swedish
Academy in search of plant seeds, left vivid descriptions of tobacco
consumption in Canada and Pennsylvania around the middle of the
eighteenth century, both of which refer to the ubiquity of the habit. In
referring to the people of French Canada he wrote:
It is necessary that one should plant tobacco, because it is so
universally smoked by the common people. Boys of ten or twelve
years of age, as well as the old people, run about with a pipe in their
mouth… People of both sexes and of all ranks, use snuff very much.
(Kalm 1966:510–11)
On his way to Philadelphia Kalm made the following observation about
the inhabitants of the region:
The English chewed tobacco a great deal, especially if they had been
sailors. Not an hour passed when they did not take as much cut
tobacco as they could hold in the fingers of the right hand and stuff
it in the mouth. Young fellows of from fifteen to eighteen years of
age were often as bad as the older men.
(Kalm 1966:637)
60 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Despite the fragmentary nature of the evidence it is reasonable to argue
for a widespread diffusion of the tobacco habit. If anything constrained
the pace of diffusion, it was probably only economic factors of price and
availability: specific social proscriptions, if they existed at all, were
unimportant. At the beginning of the seventeenth century tobacco was
a luxury product, but this situation did not last long. Fragmentary retail
prices suggest that Spanish-American tobacco averaged £1. 10s. per
pound and this price remained stable until the middle of the second
decade (Lorimer 1973:270). At the time a labourer could expect a wage of
8d per day (Clarkson 1971:222). As supplies of tobacco increased,
especially after the Virginia colony started to concentrate entirely on this
crop, the price of tobacco fell precipitously. The farm price of Virginia
tobacco, which in 1618 stood at an average of 40d. per pound, collapsed to
3d. per pound in the 1630s and to 2d. in 1660 (Menard 1976:404–8). For the
rest of the century farm prices rarely reached one penny per pound
(Menard 1980: 158–60). Wholesale prices in 1683 stood at 5½d. pence per
pound and farm prices at ⅞d. per pound (Nash 1982:369; Menard 1980:
159). Meanwhile, a labourer’s wage had risen to 12d. per day (Clarkson
1971:222).
The sharp drop in price certainly affected the demand for the product
and it is reasonable to argue that as tobacco became cheaper it was
consumed more widely. Yet this would be a hasty conclusion to draw.
During the first half of the seventeenth century prices came down much
faster than per capita consumption rose. Farm prices in 1640 had fallen to
a tenth of their 1620 level; the wholesale price in London fell from 8s. to
1s. per pound and prices for Virginia tobacco in Amsterdam show a
similar fall (Menard 1980:150). Retail prices are not available for the
period but it seems reasonable that they should fall also though perhaps
not as quickly as wholesale prices and certainly not as steeply as farm
prices. Yet, over the same period, as Table 4.1 shows, per capita
consumption barely changed. In 1640 one can estimate per capita
consumption at a shade under 0.02 pounds (Menard 1980:158; Wrigley
and Schofield 1981:532).
One likely reason for the lack of growth of per capita consumption was
the problem of availability. For the first half of the seventeenth century
London dominated the tobacco trade. In the 1620s and 1630s London’s
share of tobacco imports fluctuated between 80 per cent and 90 per cent
(Gray and Wyckoff 1940:18–19; Pagan 1979:256–62; Williams 1957: 418–
20). The remainder was imported through south coast ports such as
Plymouth and Southampton as well as Bristol. Shipments of tobacco
inland or coastwise must have raised the final price of tobacco, offsetting,
to some extent, the fall in wholesale price at the port of entry.
Direct evidence pertaining to the spatial diffusion of English tobacco
consumption is lacking, but remains of clay pipes (the chief way of
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 61
consuming tobacco in this period) confirm the predominant role of
London. Clay pipe manufacture began in London towards the end of the
sixteenth century, probably in the 1570s, and the capital continued to be
the centre of this industrial activity until the middle of the following
century (Walker 1983:2; Atkinson and Oswald 1969; Oswald 1960:42).
Pipes found in sites outside London dating from before the middle of the
century tended to be London-made (Lawrence 1979:68). The provincial
pipe making industry did not get off the ground until well into the
seventeenth century. The available evidence suggests that the industry
diffused from London in accordance with the primary trade routes
linking the capital with the rest of the country. It is therefore not
surprising to find that the clay pipe production outside London before
the 1640s was mostly confined to Bristol, Newcastle and Gateshead which
between them had seven pipe makers established in the 1630s (Davey
1988:4; Oswald 1960:43–4; Walker 1971; Walker 1983:3). Pipe making was
established in Northampton, Hull, Liverpool, Chester and York by the
1640s and Norwich by 1660 (Watkins 1979:85; Wells 1979:123; Karshner
1979:295). Once established in the provincial centres, pipe making
continued to grow for the rest of the century and into the early decades
of the eighteenth century. Table 4.2 presents a partial outline of the
growth of pipe making in England by assembling available data for Hull,
Chester, Newcastle and Gateshead.
Though it is not complete, in that it includes only a few centres, the
message from the data displayed in Table 4.2 confirms what the import
data showed: namely, that after 1640 or 1650 there was a substantial
increase in the availability of tobacco in England. That smoking spread
after 1640 and possibly diffused throughout the social structure in rural
England is also confirmed by remains from Cheshire which show that
pipes from the gentry-owned priory dated from 1600, whereas those from
the village dated from the mid-1650s (Davey 1985:164).
The art of pipe making spread from England to Germany, Scandinavia,
possibly to France, but most especially to Holland (Laufer 1924b:57–8).
Table 4.2 Pipe makers in England 1630–1700
Sources: Watkins 1979:104; Rutter and Davey 1980:49; Davey 1988:4
62 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Dutch pipe makers were to be found in Holland’s major cities, including
Amsterdam, Haarlem and Groningen, but their greatest concentration
was in Gouda. There were in the seventeenth century as many as fifteen
thousand workers in this industrial activity, about half of the city’s
labour force (Schama 1987:195). The main period of activity of the Gouda
pipe industry was after mid-century but Gouda pipes were widely
exported to France, Germany and Scandinavia (Israel 1989:267). Even as
late as the middle of the eighteenth century there were over 350 pipe
makers in Gouda (Kellenbenz 1977:507).
The pipe was the symbol of tobacco smoking in most of northern and
north western Europe. Horatio Busino, a visitor to London in the second
decade of the seventeenth century, recorded his impressions of the
capital’s smoking public. His description of the ritual of the pipe, as he
witnessed it in 1618, is particularly striking:
One of the most notable things I see in this kingdom and which
strikes me as really marvellous is the use of the queen’s weed,
properly called tobacco, whose dried leaves come from the Indies,
packed like so much rope. It is cut and pounded and subsequently
placed in a hollow instrument a span long, called a pipe. The
powder is lighted at the largest part of the bowl, and they absorb
the smoke with great enjoyment. They say it clears the head, dries
up humours and greatly sharpens the appetite. It is in such frequent
use that not only at every hour of the day but even at night they
keep the pipe and steel at their pillows and gratify their longings.
Amongst themselves, they are in the habit of circulating toasts,
passing the pipe from one to the other with much grace, just as they
here do with good wine, but more often with beer. Gentlewomen
moreover and virtuous women accustom themselves to take it as
medicine, but in secret. The others do it at pleasure…
(CSPV 1617–1619:101–2)
Pipes were generally made of clay, but more elaborate constructions
existed, including silver pipes, and, as ceramic techniques were
perfected, sumptuous, sculpted and decorated pipes began to appear
(Laufer 1924b: 35: Brongers 1964). It was not, however, the only
accoutrement of the smoker. Tobacco boxes were an indispensable
accompaniment and these contained not only the smoking tobacco but all
of the devices necessary to produce the smoke, including flint and steel
and ember-tongs, in addition to the pipe itself (Laufer 1924b:38). These
boxes could be simple and made of domestic wood; or they could be
quite extravagant, constructed out of scarce woods such as nutwood,
expensive metals such as silver and copper, or exotic materials such as
ivory, tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl (Laufer 1924b:38). It was the
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 63
box, rather than the pipe, that was coveted: tobacco boxes were
frequently exchanged as gifts and they also appeared in long-distance
commerce—the Portuguese, for example, imported lacquered and gilded
tobacco boxes into Japan in 1637 (Laufer 1924b:38; Schama 1987:195; Boxer
1959:196).
Sources pertaining to the culture of pipe smoking present a mixed
image of the pipe smoker. On the one hand, pipe smoking was part of a
social, public occasion. Smoking clubs and smoking schools appeared in
England and France in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century
(Mackenzie 1984; 90–2). The pipe at the mouth and the glass in the hand
were a common image portrayed in seventeenth-century French, Dutch
and Flemish paintings, as well as in personal accounts (Schama 1987:193–
201; Brongers 1984:137–56; Vigié 1989:56–61). The French referred to these
smoking taverns as tabagies and in descriptions of them the parallel with
Amerindian smoking sessions was often drawn (von Gernet 1988:113–19).
On the other hand there is little doubt that tobacco was being consumed
in a private manner, as many still-life paintings evoking a tranquil
domestic scene suggest. Perhaps pipe smokers puffed in the confines of
their own home for medicinal reasons while choosing the public space of
the tavern for recreational consumption.
For the most part Europeans, whether in Europe or the New World,
consumed tobacco by smoking it: pipes in northern Europe, and the
corresponding colonies across the Atlantic, and the cigar in Spain,
possibly Portugal and its possessions. Whether Europeans smoked pipes
or cigars seemed to depend on which form of consumption they had
encountered in the New World. The smoking of cigars, that is prepared
tobacco leaves wrapped either in tobacco leaves or some other vegetable
matter, was the preferred Amerindian form of smoking in Central and
South America while the pipe was common elsewhere (Wilbert 1987:64–
121; von Gernet 1988). Unlike the pipe and its manufacture which was
diffused widely across Europe (and to other parts of the world), the
cigar, in Europe, at least, remained confined to the Iberian peninsula
until the end of the eighteenth century. The royal tobacco manufactories
in both Seville and Cadiz were producing both large and small cigars by
the end of the seventeenth century (Perez Vidal 1959:90–5). But for the
rest of Europe, the sight of a cigar was still unusual. John Cockburn, an
English traveller in Costa Rica in 1735, left this account of cigar-smoking,
a description that confirms the novelty of the practice to his eyes at least:
These gentlemen [he had just encountered three friars] gave us
some seegars which they supposed would be very acceptable. These
are leaves of tobacco rolled up in such a manner that they serve both
for a pipe and tobacco itself. These the ladies, as well as gentlemen,
are very fond of smoking; but indeed, they know no other way
64 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
here, for there is no such thing as a tobacco-pipe throughout New
Spain, but poor awkward tools used by the Negroes and Indians.
(Mackenzie 1984:225)
Chewing tobacco, another form of consumption that Europeans
witnessed among Amerindian tobacco consumers, remained distinctly
marginal in European culture. It is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify
the amount of tobacco that went into chewing in Europe. The records of
the French tobacco monopoly, which give some of the best indications of
the distribution of forms of consumption, yield little concrete information.
In 1708, for example, the Dieppe manufactory’s specifically designated
chewing tobacco represented less than 1 per cent of the year’s output:
more than two-thirds of the output, however, was of the standard rolled
form —called an andouille—that could be cut up by the consumer and
either smoked, snuffed or chewed (Price 1973:193). On the other hand, in
the same year, the tobacco monopoly purchased 500,000 pounds of
Brazilian tobacco—one-sixth of the year’s total—particularly renowned in
Europe as a chewing tobacco (Price 1973:187). This figure should not,
however, be taken as anything more than an indication of the potential
use of Brazilian leaf in chewing tobacco. André Antonil, the author of an
important description of Brazil near the beginning of the eighteenth
century, makes it clear in his account of tobacco growing around Bahia
that the best leaf was used for smoking, chewing and snuffing (Antonil
1965:315). Partly because of the vogue for snuff which was sweeping
Europe at the time, Antonil included in his account a detailed description
of how to grind and perfume tobacco, the results of which he praises: he
was far less impressed by chewing, not because of any lack of therapeutic
efficacy, but because if used continually, he noted, ‘the [beneficial] effects
decrease, it alters taste, taints the breath, blackens the teeth and fouls the
lips’ (Antonil 1965:315–17, 321).
The fact that Antonil chose to criticize chewing tobacco on the grounds
of the appearance of the consumer, rather than the virtues (or not) of the
product, has more to do with the issue of respectability than of the use of
chewing. Père Labat, writing about a slightly earlier period, while
acknowledging that the tell-tale effects of chewing tobacco were
unsightly —as he said, ‘the bad odour of the breath…cannot be corrected
even after bathing the mouth with a quantity of eau-de-vie’—
nevertheless recommended it for its therapeutic effects, including the
well publicized influence on hunger and thirst (Labat 1742:280). Edme
Baillard, who wrote a very influential treatise on tobacco in the second half
of the seventeenth century, was, however, impressed by chewing tobacco,
highlighting its efficacy in standard humoral terms as well as praising its
power in suppressing hunger (Baillard 1668:93–4). Yet even such a
distinguished physician had little impact on consumption patterns and it
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 65
must be assumed that chewing tobacco in the seventeenth century was
confined to sailors and those who worked outdoors or where the danger
of fire was great. It should be pointed out that while Europeans sought to
imitate, or absorb, Amerindian habits of consuming tobacco, they were
least successful when it came to chewing. When Amerindians chewed
tobacco they did it with the addition of an alkalizing substance, usually
ash, but also burnt seashells. The effect of mixing tobacco with an alkaline
catalyst is to accelerate and intensify the action of nicotine, though
nicotine is liberated naturally by mastication (Wilbert 1987:138). Why
Europeans did not follow this example, as they did in smoking and
snuffing, is uncertain, but it may be that the inefficiency in nicotine
administration through chewing when compared to smoking led
Europeans to prefer the latter over the former.
If smoking and, to a lesser extent, chewing were un-European practices,
then snuffing must have appeared particularly bizarre. One of the first
accounts of tobacco consumption among Amerindians to circulate in
Europe was that of Friar Ramon Pané, a Catalan priest who remained in
Hispaniola on Columbus’s second voyage and whose writings were
reproduced in Peter Martyr’s history of the New World which appeared
in 1511. The passage is as follows: ‘wherefore, when their chiefs consult
the zemes (magical objects) about the outcome of a war, about the
harvest or about their health they go into the house dedicated to the
zeme, and there, having snuffed cohoba into their nostrils, they say that
the house is turned upside down’ (Dickson 1954:25). This description was
a paraphrase of Pané’s more detailed original.
The cogoiba (cohoba) is a certain powder which they take to purge
themselves, and for the other effects of which you will hear of later.
They take it with a cane about a foot long and put one end in the
nose and the other in the powder, and in this manner they draw it
into themselves through the nose and this purges them thoroughly.
(Dickson 1954:25)
Even if Pané’s original did not enjoy the wide circulation of other writers
in the sixteenth century, including Columbus himself and Oviedo y
Valdes, the description of snuffing must have entered into the European
imagination at the time. Imagination, however, is not the same thing as
practice. Despite the story that Jean Nicot delivered tobacco to Catherine
de Medici in the form of snuff—of which there is no corroboratory
evidence—snuffing tobacco was probably not practised until the second
or third decade of the seventeenth century, at least to any noticeable level
(Dickson 1954:92). Certainly snuffing tobacco must have been practised
by Spanish priests in Peru as early as 1588. In that year the rules about
priestly behaviour included the following statement:
66 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
It is forbidden under penalty of eternal damnation for priests, about
to administer the sacraments, either to take the smoke of sayri, or
tobacco, into the mouth, or the powder of tobacco into the nose,
even under the guise of medicine, before the service of the mass.
(Dickson 1954:150)
This charge against Spanish priests in the New World was repeated in
other parts of Spanish America and in Spain itself. A Papal Bull of 1642
expressly forbad clerics to ‘take tobacco in leaf, in powder, in smoke, by
mouth or nostrils in any of the churches of Seville, nor throughout the
archbishopric’ (Dickson 1954:154). The practice of snuffing seems to have
become particularly popular in Spain, not only by clerics, who
clearly enjoyed tobacco in this way, but by less endowed individuals
(Perez Vidal 1959:73–4). Snuff was being produced by the Spanish royal
monopoly by the second half of the seventeenth century (Rogoziński
1990:68).
As a European form of tobacco consumption, snuff, therefore, had its
origin in Spain. The Portuguese followed suit very quickly; in one of the
first years of its operations, the snuff manufactory of the royal tobacco
monopoly in Lisbon produced nearly one-third of a million pounds of
snuff (Nardi 1986:19). The significance of this should not be overlooked.
Snuff in both Lisbon and Seville was a manufactured product and can be
considered as the first example of manufactured, as opposed to processed
tobacco. Indeed, wherever tobacco manufacture and distribution were
the responsibility of a state monopoly as in Spain, France, Portugal and
Austria, an important, if not the most important, aspect of the monopoly
was to provide centrally produced snuff. The manufacture of snuff
entailed not only the washing and grinding of the tobacco leaves but the
addition of both colours and perfumes (Brooks 1937:158). Snuff was thus
a tobacco product distinctly different from tobacco for chewing and
smoking in which manufacturing consisted only of cutting or shredding.
Spain and Portugal were the leading producers of snuff in seventeenthcentury Europe but by the end of the century snuff was being
manufactured in many other parts of Europe. The French tobacco
monopoly was one of the first to manufacture snuff centrally, providing
either prepared snuff, or tabac ficelé, which could be ground into snuff by
the consumer (Price 1973:174–5, 187–8, 465–76). On the eve of the
Revolution snuff, in both of these forms, represented over 80 per cent of
the 15 million pounds of manufactured tobacco (Price 1973:426).
Other tobacco monopolies followed the lead into snuff. The Portuguese
royal tobacco monopoly, as previously stated, began producing snuff at
its Lisbon manufactory in 1675 (Nardi 1986:15, 19–20). At the beginning
production focused on the finest snuffs, but over the following century
there was a shift towards cheaper types, reflecting the appeal of snuff to a
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 67
wider market (Nardi 1986:19–20). Italy, too, seems to have been gripped
by the snuff fashion. Comparative data are unavailable but the reign of
snuff is confirmed by the fact that in 1821, for example, more than half of
the tobacco sales in Lombardy and Venetia was snuff (Rogoziński 1990:
56). Evidence from Austria and Scandinavia shows a similar trend
towards snuff production during the eighteenth century (Hitz and Huber
1975: 195; Price 1961:97–8; Rogoziński 1990:103–4).
Elsewhere in Europe, where tobacco monopolies did not exist, snuff
production also expanded. In Holland, the making of French-style
carottes (pressed and shaped tobacco) dates from the 1740s, for example
(Roessingh 1976:401). Snuff mills were located in the vicinity of the Zaan,
which was also the location of the shipbuilding industry (Roessingh 1976:
403–4). Dutch tobacco farmers benefited particularly from the upsurge in
the European demand for snuff even if they themselves continued to
smoke pipes. Snuff prices on the Amsterdam bourse began to rise steeply
after 1740 (Roessingh 1976:456). In response Dutch tobacco farmers began
to produce a heavier leaf well suited to snuff manufacture: heavy
manuring was the key to the cultivation of this leaf (Roessingh 1978:31).
What would have been totally unsuitable for smoking tobacco soon
found a ready market outside Holland. As the differential between
Havana leaf and Dutch domestic leaf widened after 1740, Dutch snuff
manufacturers began to export their product to southern Europe and it was
only as manufactories were established, principally in Italy, that the
Dutch switched from exporting snuff to exporting leaf (Roessingh 1978:
46).
British consumers also turned to snuff. When, precisely, is hard to
ascertain, but certainly the habit was not uncommon around the middle
of the seventeenth century, more in Scotland and Ireland than in England
(Brooks 1937:160; Mackenzie 1984:115, 164). There is little doubt that the
practice of snuffing grew over the course of the eighteenth century
(Mackenzie 1984:165–72). Direct evidence is lacking, but it is suggestive
that the number of pipe makers in selected English towns shows an
unmistakable decline, especially after the middle of the eighteenth
century. In Chester, for example, pipe making as an industrial activity
peaked in the 1730s, in Bristol in the 1740s and in Newcastle and
Gateshead and Hull possibly two or three decades earlier (Rutter and
Davey 1980:49; Davey 1988:4; Watkins 1979:104; Walker 1983:3).
According to one authority on the subject, the English pipe making
industry was in decline during the second half of the eighteenth century
(Oswald 1960:45).
This evidence certainly supports other, anecdotal, evidence pointing to
the growing popularity of snuff particularly during the second half of the
eighteenth century. Dr Johnson in 1773 proclaimed that ‘smoaking has
gone out’ and the number of snuff manufacturers and the range of snuffs
68 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
were growing (Kiernan 1991:27; Mackenzie 1984:170). One tobacco
manufacturer, Lilly and Wills, the forerunner of the more famous firmW.
D. and H.O.Wills in Bristol, produced both smoking tobacco and snuff, in
roughly equal proportions (Alford 1973:27).
One of the problems that has puzzled historians of tobacco
consumption in the eighteenth century is the apparent slowdown in per
capita consumption in England over the century. Alfred Rive in 1926
summarized the most reliable statistics of the amount of tobacco kept for
home consumption and these showed an unmistakable change during
the eighteenth century. In per capita terms, he argued, consumption fell
from just under 2 pounds per annum in 1700 to under half that amount in
1786 (Rive 1926:63). With a fuller data set and better population statistics
Jacob Price was able to refine Rive’s figures but essentially arrived at the
same conclusion: that per capita consumption, despite fluctuations, fell
through the eighteenth century but mostly during the first half (Price
1954b:89–90; Nash 1982: 356; Shammas 1990:79). Recently, however, the
entire exercise has been thrown into doubt because the arguments were
based entirely on statistics of legal imports and, even though all
participants to the discussion acknowledged that smuggling was a
problem that affected the confidence of the results, none was able to offer
a quantitative assessment of the extent of the contraband trade, until
Robert Nash who constructed a new series of per capita consumption for
the period 1698 to 1752 reproduced in Table 4.3. What these figures show
clearly is that consumption did not fall during the first half of the
eighteenth century but remained stable at around 2 pounds per capita
per annum. Figures for the second half of the eighteenth century have not
been adjusted for the contraband element. These show a small decline in
per capita consumption to around 1.5 pounds—during the years of the
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 69
American Revolution and the wars at the end of the century the figures
fell below this level (Shammas 1990:79).
Attempts have been made to explain either the decline, as it was, or the
stability, as it is perceived now, in consumption. These have included the
suggestion that the growth of spirit consumption especially between 1720
and 1760 might, in some way, have dampened the demand for tobacco
(Price 1954b:90–2); and more recently that, when in the later eighteenth
century the alehouse began to fall into decline as a social institution,
tobacco consumption suffered since publicans were a cheap and ready
source of both tobacco and pipes (Shammas 1990:81). Neither explanation,
however, has much merit: the first begs the question—why should
increased spirit consumption affect tobacco consumption? Alcohol and
nicotine are not substitutes for each other. One could in fact just as easily
make the argument that increasing alcohol consumption leads to an
increase in tobacco consumption. Besides which, the social history of
drinking in the eighteenth century is much more complicated than a
simple statement of the correlation between alcohol and tobacco
consumption would allow (Clark 1988; Brennan 1991). As for the role of
the alehouse, this again begs a question about the comparative social
history of drinking and smoking, about which we know very little.
Moreover by the eighteenth century the alehouse was only one of many
retail outlets for tobacco (Earle 1989:47).
A more likely explanation is the one that Alfred Rive suggested earlier
on this century: that of an increase in the consumption of tobacco in the
form of snuff rather than smoke (Rive 1926:63–4). The evidence for the
increasing preference for snuff over smoking tobacco in eighteenthcentury Europe is very strong and there is more than a suggestion that
snuff taking may have resulted in less pressure on per capita
consumption of tobacco leaf. A given amount of tobacco leaf was
Table 4.3 Tobacco consumption, England and Wales 1698–1752 (lb per capita annual
average)
Source: Nash 1982:367
70 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
stretched further in the manufacture of snuff than in that of smoking
tobacco: not only did snuff contain many additives absent in smoking
tobacco but there was much less waste in the former (Rive 1926:63; Price
1961:98; Price 1973:423–5, 788). The fact that the English consumer was
becoming increasingly attracted to snuff also suggests that the problem
of explaining the stability in English consumption needs to be viewed
within a European context. Where data are available, the slowdown in
consumption levels was apparent in other parts of Europe. In Portugal,
for example, the production of snuff at the Lisbon and Oporto
manufactories fluctuated considerably over the century, though in the
long run output kept pace with the rise in the country’s population (Nardi
1986:19–20). In Norway tobacco consumption appears to have levelled off
after 1760 from a maximum of 2.5 pounds per inhabitant and then fell off
to a level of 1.5 pounds per inhabitant around 1815: the shift to snuff has
been implicated in this decline (Hodne 1978:118–20). If we take a total
European perspective, the trend of consumption registered for individual
countries is confirmed. In 1710 one can estimate that western Europe
consumed about 70 million pounds of tobacco and towards the end of the
century this figure had likely risen to 120 million pounds (Price 1973:732;
Lugar 1977:48; Roessingh 1978:42–7). In per capita terms, however, the
rise in consumption was far less, from about 1 pound to 1.2 pounds.
Snuff taking differed from tobacco smoking in many ways. In the first
place, the taking of snuff became highly ritualized. For those who
prepared their own snuff, a practice that became increasingly fashionable
during the eighteenth century, the principal devices were the snuff box
and the rasp. The former had its origins in the tobacco box of the
seventeenth century but, unlike its predecessor, it contained only the
tobacco product and therefore could be quite small. Snuff-box making
became an art in the eighteenth century and the range of design,
materials and size was bewildering. Not only was every known metal
used but so were natural materials such as ivory and shell as well as the
increasingly popular fine porcelain. In late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury France the manufacture of snuff boxes became the nexus of
creative forces involving artists and artisans; some of France’s leading
artists were involved in designing snuff boxes for an aristocratic clientèle
(Le Corbeiller 1966; Vigié 1989:68–9). Giving a snuff box as a present
became a sign of exalted gift-giving: Marie-Antoinette had fifty-two gold
snuff boxes in her wedding basket (Vigié 1989:70). While this may seem
extravagant, it should be remembered that in the eighteenth century the
snuff box was the equivalent of jewellery and not only did the snuff box
change with artistic fashion but anyone who was anyone needed to have
a variety of these boxes. As Louis Sebastian Mercier noted in his
description of Paris in the second half of the eighteenth century: ‘One has
boxes for each season. That for winter is heavy; that for summer light. It’s
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 71
by this characteristic feature that one recognizes a man of taste. One is
excused for not having a library or a cabinet of natural history when one
has 300 snuff boxes…’ (Vigié 1989: 71). Not only was the passion for
snuff boxes enjoyed by the consumer but snuff boxes became a highly
demanded collector’s item—the Prince of Conti at his death had a
collection of more than 800 snuff boxes (Vigié 1989:73). Snuff rasps were
also elaborate, though because they were used to prepare the snuff the
material used was limited to ivory or metal (Brongers 1964:160).
The artistry manifested in the snuff box was matched by the ingenuity
in preparing snuff. Edme Baillard offered one of the first descriptions of
how snuff should be prepared and the precise purpose of each
ingredient. He recommended a formula of six parts Virginia to three
parts St Christophe tobacco as the foundation for the mixture and then he
goes on:
the virtue of melitiot purges it of its sulphurous narcotic and softens
it. The spirit of flowers of orange moderates its bitterness. The
sandalwood takes the edge off its heat. The dye of Indies wood or
alkanet gives it its colour. Angel water and its flowers takes away
its strong and piquant scent leaving the former in its place.
(Baillard 1668:87–8)
The whole process required an elaborate operation of moistening with
the liquors containing the flavourings, colours and essences and
consecutive drying processes taking at least three weeks before it was
ready (Brongers 1964:86; Vigié 1989:63–4). The results of preparing the
snuff were made available under a variety of names each of which carried
the message of the essence of the product. Thus in France tabac d’Espagne
was reddish, perfumed with civet, musk and cloves and tabac de Pongibon
was yellow, perfumed with civet and sweetened with sugar, orange
flowers and jasmine. Other ingredients included bergamot and mint, for
a refined snuff, or cumin and mustard for a stronger concoction (Vigié
1989:64; Brooks 1937:159). Snuffs also carried the name of their makers: in
eighteenth-century England there were at least 200 kinds of snuff
commercially avail able (Brooks 1937:159). The precise recipes were
jealously guarded either by the individual or more likely by snuff
manufacturers themselves. One Bristol snuff manufacturer presenting
evidence to a parliamentary committee of 1789 estimated that his recipes
were worth more than £1000—this at a time when the capital costs of a
typical tobacco manufacturer were less than a fifth of this (Alford 1973:
12, 20).
Once the devices and the snuff were in place, then there were well
followed rules governing the technique of taking snuff. One Dutch poem
of the period captures the essentials of taking snuff
72 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Bend with great pump
Two feet backward in space
Gracefully forward again
Now bend without disgrace
According to the manner of the French.
Now take from the pocket of your camisole—
As though you did at the command
Taught you at the French School—
Your snuff-box big, small or middling,
Tap it well-mannered,
Sniff with a noble grace,
Open it quickly,
Offer it to your friend
(Brongers 1964:157–8)
Outside the privileged circles, however, dignified and ostentatious
modes of snuff behaviour were of far less appeal. Most of the centrally
manufactured snuff destined for the mass market lacked the exotic
flavourings and colours and was no more than ground tobacco.
It is perhaps difficult to understand the appeal of snuff. Certainly
today, in the West at least, it is rare, but the change to snuff from smoke
was a remarkable occurrence in the social history of tobacco and one that
had important consequences for the future history of the plant. The
reasons for the shift to snuff can be found in two areas: the progress and
results of the medical debate on tobacco consumption, and changing
perceptions of respectable consumption.
In 1571, as the previous chapter related, Nicolas Monardes drew
together all of the information, botanic and medicinal, then current about
tobacco in the second part of his famous natural history of New World
plants. According to Monardes there were three principal ways of taking
tobacco, each having specific purposes. Green, fresh tobacco, often mixed
with its own juice, was to be employed topically against pains, sores,
wounds etc.; the same could be chewed to alleviate hunger and thirst;
while dried tobacco that was burned was to be taken internally as smoke
to dry the cold humours and expel excess phlegm. What he never
discussed was the snuffing of powdered tobacco into the nostrils, though
he does mention drawing smoke that way.
Monardes’ treatise was both popular, in that it went through several
editions and was translated widely throughout Europe, and very
fashionable. It also, however, inspired a controversy that lasted for at
least a century during which time many learned scholars, doctors,
moralists, writers and others took sides in the great nicotian debate.
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 73
Though this part of tobacco history has often been sited in England, in
truth the debate was Europe-wide.
The debate was about many things but in almost all cases it was carried
on within a medical discourse informed by the prevailing humoral
theory. Once tobacco had been ascribed with its humoral properties—hot
and dry in the second degree—the door was left open for debate and
disagreement about tobacco’s administration and efficacy. The reason for
this was quite simple. Humoral theory provided a dynamic
understanding of the human body: not only did the balance of humours
change as a result of illness or environmental conditions but it also
changed in the long term as the body grew older. Ageing was understood
humorally as the process of drying up and, therefore, old people were
frequently advised not to smoke. Disagreements about the use of tobacco
focused very much on its humoral effects and the main participants to the
debate fell naturally into two camps: those who were overwhelmingly
committed to nicotian therapy because of the wide range of disorders it
could cure; and those, less committed or even hostile, who felt that the
therapy was either at best, ineffective or dangerous. Those of the
Monardes school insisted on the therapeutic value of expelling moist
humours while extending the list of diseases and ailments that tobacco
alleviated. To a large extent Monardes’ followers from all parts of Europe
simply repeated his assertions or went a step further. Johann Magnen, for
example, published in 1648 a treatise on tobacco that not only summed
up the prevailing medical insights but provided a lengthier defence of
tobacco that included many more nicotian cures. Cornelis Bontekoe, the
Amsterdam doctor who was to tea what Monardes was to tobacco, stated
that the discovery of tobacco was one of humanity’s greatest
achievements; he advocated universal smoking not only to cure illnesses
but also to satisfy hunger and stimulate the brain (Brooks 1938:492;
Schama 1987:172). In England one of tobacco’s staunchest advocates was
William Kemp who, in 1665, wrote a treatise on the plague. In it the
author makes the interesting recommendation that smoking tobacco not
only fumigates the air—pestilence and bad air were inextricably linked—
but also draws out the unwanted humours. Nicotian critics, by contrast,
attacked tobacco more specifically. The 1602 anonymously penned
pamphlet Work for Chimney-Sweepers: or, A Warning for Tobacconists,
argued in an attack on nicotian therapy that was echoed in many other
publications afterwards, that the humoral qualities were dangerous, and
not efficacious as its promoters maintained. Smoking, the author warned,
‘withereth our unctious and radical moisture’; the sperm and seed of man
was greatly altered and decayed; it had a stupefying effect; it increased
melancholy and ‘wasteth the liquid and thin part of the blood’ (Philaretes
1602). Other commentators offered similar interpretations and, in the case
of Simon Paulli, who published an attack on tobacco in 1665, thoroughly
74 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
disapproved of the taking of tobacco to any extent, preferring to rename
it Herba Rixosa or Herba Insana, and advocating its total destruction
(Stewart 1967:262; Brooks 1938:378–80).
Both sides of the debate, and the themes they raised, continued to be
discussed into the eighteenth century and, for the most part, nothing very
new was added until the end of the eighteenth century. In addition to
medical and proto-medical authorities, a serious debate about tobacco
broke out among theologians and clerics. There were several issues that
emerged in the debate. One of the first, and one that was hinted at by
Monardes himself, was the paradox about the origin of tobacco. The
paradox was real and serious. That tobacco was a New World plant and
different from European henbane had become accepted among European
botanists by the time Monardes was writing. This meant, however, that
while tobacco was being hailed as a holy herb, in European discourse its
pagan origins among heathenish worshippers labelled it as the food of
the devil. Philaretes’s attack on tobacco concerned not only its purely
medicinal features but also its origins: ‘this hearbe seemed to bee first
found out and invented by the divell’, he wrote, ‘and first used and
practised by the divels priests, and therefore not to be used of us
Christians’ (Philaretes 1602: F4). Other similar and sometimes more
vicious remarks appear in some of the theological literature alluding to
tobacco practices (von Gernet 1988: 322–3; Dickson 1954:139–62). There
were, however, answers to the charge of the devilish origin of tobacco.
Leonardo Fioravanti, a physician, follower of Monardes and therefore an
early advocate of nicotian therapy, described in his publication of 1582
the wealth of cures effected by tobacco and urged that ‘everyone should
make use of tobacco, since it is the plant which has been revealed in this
century for human health through the goodness of God’ (Dickson 1954:91;
Dickson 1959:78). Those who argued that tobacco was divine, even
though it was discovered in the New World, finally held the day.
Once the debate about the origin of tobacco waned, an issue concerning
the use of tobacco by clerics during the service emerged. Part of the
problem had to do with the unclean state of the churches caused by
spitting, sniffing and a disagreeable odour (Dickson 1954:154). Several
Papal Bulls, of which the most important was that of 1642 (previously
referred to in this chapter), were proclaimed to counteract this annoyance.
But the problem was more serious than one of uncleanliness. It also
turned on whether the Blessed Sacrament might be expelled upon
sneezing or spitting after taking tobacco (Corti 1931:132). Another issue
that burned the ecclesiastical mind was whether tobacco was a food and,
therefore, when taken, broke the fast during Lent, a problem handled in
great depth by Antonio de Léon Pinelo in a book published in 1636 and
echoed by others after him (León Pinelo 1636; Tedeschi 1987; von Gernet
1988:331). As to the alleged aphrodisiac qualities of tobacco—an
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 75
observation made in some of the early narratives on the New World—
this seems also to have been turned on its head and ecclesiastical
authorities actually urged their clergy to take tobacco to combat lust (von
Gernet 1988:332–3). Benedetto Stella, who wrote an influential nicotian
treatise in 1669, in which he debated all of the issues about tobacco, also
pontificated on the connection between tobacco and lust and declared:
I say…that the use of tobacco, taken moderately, not only is useful,
but even necessary for the priests, monks, friars and other religious
who must and desire to lead a chaste life, and repress those sensual
urges that sometimes assail them. The natural cause of lust is heat
and humidity. When this is dried out through the use of tobacco,
these libidinous surges are not felt so powerfully…
(Tedeschi 1987:112–13)
In the same way as the medical debate settled down considerably in the
eighteenth century, so too did this ecclesiastical controversy. Many popes
were addicted to tobacco, and the final statement of the inevitable
surrender to tobacco came in an ordinance of Pope Benedict XIII of 1725
in which he permitted the use of snuff in St Peter’s (Tedeschi 1987:112). Not
to be outdone by secular initiatives, the Papacy opened a tobacco factory
of its own in 1779 (Camporesi 1990:167).
The trend of debate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
was towards an acceptance of what was an actual situation; that tobacco
consumption was increasing both geographically and socially. But the
debate was more than a backdrop. It was an essential part of the public
discourse about tobacco. Consumption and discussion, albeit through
publications, were interrelated. And as long as the therapeutic value of
tobacco was being debated, the use of the plant for medicinal purposes
could be invoked. Benedict XIII’s proclamation contained just such a
statement reflecting the inexorable link between medicine and
consumption. This is how the argument for permitting tobacco in the
Vatican was made:
To provide for the needs of everybody’s conscience, and especially
for the good order of the basilica, which is seriously compromised
by the frequent walking out of those who can’t abstain from the use
of tobacco which is so widespread today, partly due to the opinion
of the physicians who recommend it as a remedy against
many infirmities, especially for those people who are obliged to
frequent cold and humid places in the early morning hours.
(Tedeschi 1987:112)
76 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
The nicotian debate was at its height during the first half of the seventeenth
century and it is more than interesting that snuff does not appear
anywhere in it. Though Johann Magnen mentioned snuff in his 1648
publication, it escaped a full treatment until Louis Ferrant published his
treatise on the subject. Ferrant was the first to discuss snuff explicitly in
print focusing on the medicinal features of the product as well as offering
tips on how to prepare it. It was also Ferrant who apparently began
circulating the story that Jean Nicot, on his return from France, offered
Catherine de Medici a box of powdered tobacco to be used for the relief
of her headaches (Arents 1938:70; Laufer 1924b:50). Whether there is any
truth behind this story or not, there is little doubt that an association
between snuff and the French royal family could only raise its profile
among tobacco consumers (Dickson 1954:92).
Coming as it did towards the end of the most intense part of the
nicotian debate, Ferrant’s book did not, like others before his, receive any
rebuke from the anti-nicotian quarter. The next publications on snuff, by
Baillard in 1668 and Brunet in 1700, both of whom were, interestingly,
French, pushed the cause of snuff even further. Baillard, in particular,
argued that snuff evacuated unwanted humours, particularly phlegm,
simply through the action of sneezing; snuff did not pass into the brain as
some argued was the case with smoke (Baillard 1668:35–49). Brunet, by
contrast, dealt entirely with the preparation of snuff and did not comment
on its medical efficacy. That the panacea gospel, popularized by
Monardes and others and promoted through smoking and topical
applications of tobacco, had become transposed to snuff can be seen
clearly in the eighteenth century in texts other than those of a more
medical nature. Père Labat, the intrepid naturalist and traveller in the
Antilles, who reproached French colonists for abandoning tobacco in
favour of sugar, had only the highest praise for snuff. Drawing on the
words of others before him, Labat nevertheless put the case cogently.
Snuff, he wrote:
heals colds, inflammation of the eyes, involuntary tears, headaches,
migraines, dropsy, paralysis, and generally all those misfortunes
caused by the pungency of the humours, their too great amount and
their dissipation from their normal conduits. Nothing is better to
increase the fluidity of blood, to regulate its flow and circulation. It
is an unfailing sternutory to revive those with apoplexy or those in
a death trance. It is a powerful relief for women having the pains of
childbirth; a certain remedy for hysterical passions, dizziness,
restlessness, black melancholy, mental derangement. Those who use
it having nothing to fear from bad and corrupted air; the
plague, syphilis, purpura, one does not have to guard against
approaching those with popular illnesses that are easily
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 77
communicated. It strengthens memory, it stimulates the
imagination. Scholars are never afraid to tackle very abstract and
difficult problems with their nose full of tobacco.
(Labat 1742:278–9)
The anonymous author of an early eighteenth-century pamphlet praising
tobacco also advocated snuff in terms similar to those of Labat.
Contrasting it with smoking and chewing, the author put the use of snuff
in the following terms:
By its gently pricking and stimulating the membranes, it causes
Sneezing or Contractions, whereby the Glands like so many
squeezed Sponges, dismiss their Serosities and Filth. And it serves
for a drain to excessive Moisture in the Eyes or Head; so when a
sufficient Moisture is wanting, its quick and noble Spirit opens the
Vessels that afford Supplies thereto; and pure Snuff put into the
Corners of the Eyes is found to alter and destroy the sharp
Humours that occasion Bloodshot etc. So beneficial is this Powder
for the Preservation of that most dear and valuable of all our senses,
the Sight.
(Anon. 1712)
Even Simon Paulli, the inveterate critic of nicotian therapy, had to admit
that not only did he take tobacco as a ‘salutary medicine’ but snuffing
was not as dangerous as smoking (Paulli 1746:21, 25). The alleged efficacy
of tobacco in a powdered form that made one sneeze was a winning
combination. Sneezing was generally considered beneficial in many
ways, not least of all in its ability to expel ‘corrupt humours’. Since
classical times sneezing had been viewed positively. Aristotle thought
that sneezing was sacred, as it emanated from the head, a holy place; and
Socrates attached enormous significance to sneezing in making decisions
(Kanner 1931:553, 556). Pliny the Younger, in his natural history, related
remedies derived from sneezing, including heaviness of the head
(Kanner 1931:556). The association between sneezing and other human
passions was also widespread; sneezing and love, sneezing and luck,
sneezing and happiness. Girolamo Baruffaldi, a cleric and poet in
eighteenth-century Ferrara, praised the use of snuff not least because of
the fact that it made one sneeze. One formula, in which tobacco was
mixed with pulverized root of the white Hellebore, made one sneeze
frequently. This to Baruffaldi was all to the better, for the sneeze was
what mattered:
78 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
(as long as it isn’t a false sneeze
like that of a cold)
Welcome
Honoured
and worshipped as God (Baroni 1970:5)
There were a few who voiced complaints against snuffing—Johann
Cohausen in 1716 being the most important—but, generally speaking, the
tobacco discourse of the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century is positive about snuff. Perhaps one should not be surprised.
After all, snuff, as opposed to pipe smoking, had its alleged beginnings in
royal circles and was promulgated by the clergy who, judging by literary
accounts, were the first to use snuff habitually across Europe. The
association between snuff and respectability was extremely important in
the dissemination of the practice.
The association was perhaps most evident in France which, if not the
first country in Europe to take to snuff, certainly promoted it with the
greatest energy. Once the French state tobacco monopoly took over the sale
of tobacco, retail sales were licensed. At the beginning of the eighteenth
century there were between 1,100 and 1,200 tobacconists in Paris, but the
most frequented by the sophisticated snuffers of the city was in the Place
de Palais-Royal (Vigié 1989:61). The signs on the shops had since the
1670s changed from representing pipes to representing aspects of snuff—
the carotte itself, or the civet, from which animal the precious scent was
extracted that went into the finest snuffs (Vigié 1989:61).
French mores, fashions, language and culture, in general, were much
sought after in the eighteenth century and these criss-crossed Europe
(Jones 1973:207–10). Underlying this cultural movement was
respectability. This, perhaps more than the medical and moral
disputations, was the key to the success of snuff and its victory over
smoking.
It is difficult to provide a completely satisfactory definition of
respectability, but several elements of its construction and action are
clear. Of crucial importance to respectability was that it was
an assertion of a person’s moral worth as an individual, as
demonstrated primarily by behaviour…anyone could achieve or
lose respectable status by his or her behaviour…the essence of the
newer idea of respectability was behaviour—something over which
an individual had control…the display of respectable behaviour
constituted a demand (based in part on demonstrated moral worth)
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 79
The sneeze is a good omen
for deference from inferiors, acceptance by social peers and respect
from superiors—at any social level.
(Smith 1991:24)
As the claim of status shifted from gentility, based on descent, to one of
individual behaviour, so too did the rituals of consumption.
The nature of this new consumption has attracted a great deal of
interest from historians and others but most of the literature stresses the
fact that consumption became more individual and more private
(McCracken 1988). Certainly there is ample evidence that the
consumption of the new beverages of the period, tea, coffee and
chocolate, became structured within new rituals. The tea ritual as it
developed mostly in Holland and England in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries displayed the definition of respectable behaviour. It
was not ostentatious but refined; it was domestic and private; and it
engendered moderation (Smith 1991:24–5). The ritual of coffee
consumption also changed in the same period. In Paris, until the last
decade of the seventeenth century, coffee was available either from street
vendors or from shops frequented by the aristocracy and run by
Armenians: ‘the retreats where coffee was sold, were, however, merely
shops reeking of tobacco smoke’ (Leclant 1979:89). The café that opened
in 1686 was totally different from the normal coffee-drinking milieu. It
was elegant but spacious, luxurious but not over-bearing. In short, ‘the café
became a worthy meeting place for respectable people…’ (Leclant 1979:
90). Coffee drinking, like tea drinking, involved the use of a special set of
utensils, not only for preparation but also for consumption. Both drinks
had to be sipped and an air of respectability and security pervaded the
ritual (Bizière 1979; Bödecker 1990). In eighteenth-century Germany the
coffeehouse, as a social institution drawing upon and affirming these
crucial values, also struck out across the gender divide, in the form of the
Kaffeekränzchen, a daily or weekly social meeting of women (Albrecht
1988).
Into this new sensibility snuff accommodated itself perfectly in a
complex of soft drugs including the new beverages of tea, coffee and
chocolate, as well as alcohol. Snuff proclaimed the individual. The range
of concoctions was enormous; even those who were forced to purchase
from a monopoly or from small retailers could choose specific brands or
doctor the standard package to make the product more individual
(Alford 1973:10). A probable scene described by Brooks perfectly reflects
the individuality within the snuffing ritual:
Each leader of society and the coteries which attached themselves
had their favorite snuff, and, in consequence, an extraordinary
mingling of scents pervaded each court or ballroom where the well80 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
bred met. In a room where the conversation was punctuated by
discreet sneezes, the lady who adored Jassamena (made especially
precious to her because of the exquisite box from which she took it)
would condescend to take a pinch from the proffered box of the
dandy who preferred Orangery. This she would do in the approved
manner, whereby a delicate, bejewelled wrist and a well-turned arm
would be displayed to advantage, while her companion, on his
part, was in perfect position to indicate the handsome rings he wore,
without apparent ostentation. This exquisite technique for the
correct means of taking snuff was developed by the French mentors
of etiquette, to which native touches were given when the habit
invaded London, Rome and elsewhere.
(Brooks 1937:159)
This ritual was acceptable in other ways that reaffirmed notions of
respectability. Although it is difficult for us to appreciate it readily,
smoking in the seventeenth century was anything but dainty. Whether it
was the tobacco itself that did it, or for some other, unknown reason, pipe
smoking was accompanied by a considerable amount of expectoration
(Brongers 1964). A spittoon or cuspidor was an essential accompaniment
to a refined smoking scene, the floor for one that was not. The spittoon
seems to have been a Dutch invention, and certainly in many Dutch
engravings and paintings of the seventeenth century depicting pipe
smoking the spittoon is usually visible somewhere in the scene (Brongers
1964: 163–70; Schama 1987:196–217). It is very likely, as has been
suggested by several authorities on the subject, that in an age of
respectability the discharging of one’s glutinous liquids into a vessel
either on the table or at the foot became a sign of disgust (Douglas 1979:
21; Elias 1978:143–60). Jean-Baptiste-Louis Chomel, at the end of the
eighteenth century, echoing a debate that existed a century earlier about
the link between hunger and tobacco consumption, clearly drew a
connection between ingesting tobacco and expectoration and,
interestingly, also the disease of hypochondria, the male equivalent of the
eighteenth-century hysteria (Mullan 1988). As he wrote:
In a sense, one may say that Tobacco appeases one’s hunger and
thirst. The first thing, it does, by diminishing the sensation or
feeling, the other, by tickling the salivary glands in the mouth—thus
promoting the flow of saliva thither. From this it follows, that one
spoils one’s appetite by smoking a short time before a meal, and one
upsets one’s digestion if one smokes directly after a meal, especially
if one spits a lot,—as the saliva one ejects whilst smoking, should
have been a great help in the digestion of the food. This is more
serious than one generally imagines, for a slow weakening and
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 81
upsetting of the digestion is one of the causes of that unpleasant and
obstinate disease, called hypochondria… Even Hippocrates knew
that people who spit a lot, become melancholy; and even strong
youths rapidly tend to get thin, they eat little and become
melancholy if they chew things that promote the flow of saliva or
suddenly become heavy smokers.
(quoted in Brongers 1964:164–5)
As early as 1669 Benedetto Stella, in his treatise on tobacco,
advocated snuff principally for those who suffered from chronic spitting
(Stella 1669: 288). Snuff was not implicated in the production of spittle,
and, as we have seen, the sneeze was considered beneficial. Within the
snuff ritual, in respectable circles, even the sneeze became part of the
scene, and the trappings of the tobacco consumer now included a delicate
handkerchief (Vigié 1989:71–2). The daintiness of the sneeze, as part of
the snuff ritual, was emphasized in a telling way by André Antonil, in his
eighteenth-century work on Brazil. In relating the various methods of
taking tobacco and their medicinal effects, Antonil referred to a manner of
making small pellets of tobacco that were placed in the nostrils. These
pellets, kept in the nostrils either overnight or during the day, were
believed to draw moisture from the nasal cavities, clear the head, prevent
catarrh and promote breathing (Antonil 1965:321). Though he did not
think the method very efficacious, Antonil’s main criticism of taking
tobacco this way was that it was an unsightly activity. As he put it, ‘one
only recommends it to those who, in using it, can avoid the indecency
that appears when the pellets, being discharged from the nostrils and the
drop of snot that is always suspended, soils the chin and nauseates the
person with whom one is speaking’ (Antonil 1965:321).
Snuff was an improvement upon smoking in a practical sense too.
Before the nineteenth century and the invention of the safety match, pipe
smokers needed to carry with them a panoply of tools in order to set a
light. Steel and flint and tinder box, not to mention the tobacco box,
holding the pipes and the smoking mixture, were the essential
accompaniments of the smoker (Vigié 1989:66–8; Brongers 1964:107–16).
For the taking of snuff nothing more than the container, which could be
miniaturized, was required.
Eighteenth-century European snuffing rituals and practices may seem
a far cry from the Amerindian snuffers first witnessed by Europeans at the
end of the fifteenth century. While European methods may seem
peculiarly European, the ritual distance separating Europe from America
was not as great as we imagine. Europeans and Amerindians snuffing
tobacco were, as von Gernet has argued for pipe smoking, sharing a
cultural language that was a composite of the individual experiences (von
Gernet 1988). This language did not stop at snuff. It also involved the use
82 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
of enemas. In so far as Amerindians employed enemas in their medical
treatments before contact, the Europeans followed. And just as
Europeans appropriated the consumption of tobacco by smoking pipes
and cigars and by snuffing, so too they introduced the practice of using
tobacco smoke in rectal devices known as clysters. To whom the credit
for using tobacco smoke in this way is due is not certain but the practice
was referred to in one of the first publications on the use of clysters
written by Regnier de Graaf (de Graaf 1668; Brockbank and Corbett
1954). De Graaf was a physician who, among other distinctions, invented
a syringe and its accessories which not only would be safe to administer
but could be self-administered (Friedenwald and Morrison 1940a:83–8).
The tobacco clyster, using either smoke or an infusion, depending on
whose authority was being followed, was widely practised until well into
the nineteenth century (Warren 1919; Friedenwald and Morrison 1940b).
The possible erotic nature of the clyster injection did not escape some
eighteenth-century artists; Fragonard, Lavreince and Baudouin all
represented the clyster in this way (Wagner 1990: 273; Friedenwald and
Morrison 1940a:110). Tobacco clysters were used in the hope of treating
ailments of the colon and the bowel. They were also recommended in
attempts to resuscitate drowned individuals, as well as those who had
suffocated, had convulsions and fits, or were frozen (Society 1775:91–3;
Warren 1919:14–17).
In the eighteenth century tobacco was used in several different forms.
While the tobacco clyster may be said to be an example of a medical use,
can one assume that for the most part, whether taken by smoke with a
pipe or cigar, by chewing or by snuffing, tobacco had by the eighteenth
century become a recreational drug? Many commentators on tobacco
consumption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were keenly
aware that consumption was increasing and often warned about the
excessive and non-medical use of the plant. But it is important to
understand that their opprobrium was not strictly about the use of
tobacco for recreation but, rather, they were concerned that this drug was
being self-administered, rather than being dispensed by, or taken with
the approval of, the medical fraternity. Certainly one can be forgiven for
thinking that tobacco was a recreational drug given the vast amounts that
were consumed in Europe, both absolutely and per head of the
population. But this argument would be too hasty for the simple reason
that in the eighteenth century the dividing line between consumption of
commodities for leisure and for health was not as clearly drawn as it is
now. To keep the body in humoral balance was the objective, and tobacco
was clearly perceived as playing a key role in this. The recreational and
medical use were reaffirming parts of a culturally specific view of the
human body. It is impossible for us to say which was which. There is
little doubt, however, that the taking of tobacco for medical purposes did
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 83
decline in the nineteenth century. The transformation, however, was
neither as complete nor as fast as normally understood; but that is the
subject of the next chapter.
Europeans and Amerindians defined the culture of tobacco
consumption. As Europeans were responsible for diffusing the tobacco
habit around the globe, it is not surprising to find European methods of
tobacco consumption wherever Europeans spread the news. Chewing,
snuffing and smoking tobacco were all practised throughout Asia, the
first embarkation point for tobacco as it circumnavigated the globe after
its introduction into Europe. Smoking, however, appears to have been the
primary form of tobacco consumption, as it was through smoke that
Asians were first acquainted with the plant. Pipes and water pipes were
the preferred devices throughout the region. As a previous chapter
discussed, it was the Spanish, principally, who introduced Asians to
tobacco through the Philippines, from as early as 1575 (Reid 1985:535).
The Japanese were apparently introduced to tobacco and pipe smoking
by the Portuguese before the turn of the seventeenth century (Laufer
1924a:2). After the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1638 it was left to the
Dutch to keep the nicotian spirit alive and they possibly acquainted
Japanese smokers with the latest European tobacco fashions in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Portuguese can also be
credited with sowing the nicotian habit in India (Laufer 1924a: 11). Once
Europeans had made the first strike for tobacco, the habit spread very
quickly throughout Asia, though in this regard it was the Chinese, rather
than Europeans, who were principally involved in diffusing tobacco
consumption (Laufer 1924a:15).
The Europeans introduced the pipe, presumably made of clay, as well
as the cigar into Asia, but very soon after first contact and the exchange
of the tobacco ritual Asian tobacco consumers were adapting the
European methods of consumption to their own situation. Not only did
they employ local materials—wood and metals, rather than clay, in the
manufacture of the pipe—but the design of their pipes became quickly
distinguished from the European variety. Indeed, if anything, many of
the pipes extant of the period resemble more the Amerindian pipes of the
period rather than the European ones (Samson 1960; Laufer 1924a).
Moreover, it is clear that while European pipe smokers of the seventeenth
century could do no better, generally, than a pipe made of white clay,
Asian pipes were both simpler and then far more elaborate and
imaginative in their choice of materials. The simplest pipe in East Asia
was typically made of bamboo, either in one piece, that is bowl and stem,
or two pieces, the stem of bamboo and the bowl of wood (Laufer 1924a:
21). More elaborate pipes had their stems made of bamboo but the
mouthpiece of jade, ivory, metal or porcelain (Samson 1960:22). When
ivory was employed for the stem, the Chinese in particular frequently
84 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
inserted a copper tube into the stem to protect the ivory from cracking
(Laufer 1924a:21). Though bamboo appears to have been the most
common material for stems in China, specific woods, such as ebony and
other black hardwoods, were also used (Laufer 1924a:22).
Asian tobacco consumers also smoked their mixtures in pipes that
were not of American or European origin. These were water pipes,
known also as the hookah. One of the earliest, and possibly one of the
best, descriptions of the hookah comes from Edward Terry in his report of
1616. Terry, chaplain to Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to
the Mughal court, spent almost three years in western India, and
witnessed the cultivation as well as the consumption of tobacco in the
region. This is how he described the hookah:
They have little Earthen pots…having a narrow neck and an open
round top, out of the belly of which comes a small spout, to the
lower part of which spout they fill with water: then putting their
tobacco loose in the top, and a burning coal upon it, they having
first fastned a very small strait hollow Cane or Reed within the
spout…the Pot standing on the ground, draw that smoke into their
mouths, which first falls upon the Superficies of the water, and
much discolours it. And in this way of taking their Tobacco, they
believe makes it much more cool and wholsom.
(Samson 1960:227)
The inventiveness of the hookah was extraordinary. John Fryer, who
travelled throughout India and Persia in the last quarter of the
seventeenth century, also described the hookah and confirmed very
much what Terry described some sixty years earlier. Fryer, though, noted
that the hookah was a crucial part of the coffeehouse and that it was the
centrepiece of the ritual of the entire practice, including smoking,
drinking and conversation, as we can read from his description:
They are modell’d after the Nature of our Theatres, that everyone
may sit around, and suck choice Tobacco out of Cosy Malabar
Canes, fastene’d to Chrystal bottles, like the Recipients or BoltHeads of the Chymists, with a narrow Neck…the Vessel being filled
with Water: After this Sort they are mightily pleased; for putting
fragrant and delightful Flowers into the Water, upon every attempt
to draw Tobacco, the Water bubbles, and makes them dance in
various Figures, which both qualifies the Heat of the Smoke, and
creates together a pretty Sight.
(Fryer 1912:34).
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 85
The hookah was used throughout the Asian world and even in
Madagascar, where in 1638 Peter Mundy recorded its use (Mundy 1919:
384). Interestingly, Mundy’s observations included the custom that the
men he saw hung around their necks the mouthpiece for the pipe of the
hookah, suggesting that the hookah was a shared smoking device.
Who invented the water pipe is not known but most authorities point
to the Persians as the most likely candidates. And it was Muslims who
were responsible for its spread, along the east African coast and
throughout Asia, arriving in China by the turn of the eighteenth century
(Laufer 1924a: 26–8). When the water pipe was invented is another
mystery but it would appear to have succeeded the introduction of
tobacco rather than the other way around. In other words, the water pipe
appears to have been an invention of the Muslim world and was
designed within the context of a shared social experience as it existed
within the coffeehouse —unlike the Amerindian and European pipe the
hookah is not easily portable (Birnbaum 1957: Hattox 1988). Some writers
have persisted in the belief that the water pipe was used to smoke
marijuana long before the introduction of tobacco, denying, as it were,
the possibility of a spontaneous, and extremely imaginative, invention in
Islam (Benet 1975:48). Yet there is no evidence that marijuana was
smoked before tobacco was introduced; eating or drinking an infused
concoction were the most common methods of consuming marijuana, but
the debate on the connection between marijuana and tobacco smoking
continues (Abel 1980:3–57; Philips 1983:315–16).
Once it got into Chinese hands the hookah was refined to such an
extent, that, according to Berthold Laufer, it ‘was so convenient, simple,
graceful, and artistic that it may be put down as an invention wholly
their own’ (Laufer 1924a: 28). In the same way, when at the end of the
seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century the Chinese
became acquainted with snuff, they created a highly distinctive ritual
involving not only exquisitely produced snuffs but also delicately
designed bottles as containers. Whereas Europeans kept their snuff in
boxes, the Chinese preferred bottles made from material ranging from
gold, silver and brass to porcelain, jade, agate and coral (Laufer 1924a:34–
8). The reason why the Chinese were attracted to snuff was partly
medicinal and partly, one may suppose, because of its theatricality. This
is how a Chinese work of the early eighteenth century described the new
use of the tobacco plant:
Recently they make in Peking a kind of snuff which brightens the
eyes and which has the merit of preventing infection. It is put up in
glass bottles, and is sniffed into the nostrils with small ivory ladles.
This brand is made exclusively for the Palace, not for sale among
the populace. There is also a kind of snuff which has recently come
86 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
from Canton and which surpasses that made for the Palace. It is
manufactured in five different colours, that of apple colour taking
the first rank.
(Laufer 1924a:33)
Snuff appears to have been confined mostly to China, with a small
amount being consumed in Japan and India. By far the most popular form
of tobacco consumption was smoking. The pipe, whether long-stemmed
or in the form of the hookah, was the most widely adopted method of
smoking but there were others. One of the most important was the
bunkus, a cigar composed of shredded tobacco and wrapped in a dried
leaf of banana or maize (Laufer 1924a:20). These appeared in Java as early
as 1658, having been introduced via the Philippines and the Moluccas
earlier in the century. From Java the route of diffusion headed westwards
towards Burma and India where they were being consumed by 1711, and
called cheroots (Reid 1985:536).
While smoking was universal throughout Asia and snuff confined
pri marily to China, tobacco chewing was confined mostly to those parts
of Asia—India, the Malay archipelago and Indonesia—where betel
chewing predominated. As far as we can tell, the tobacco was not chewed
by itself, as was customary in Europe and America, but rather it was
added to the betel leaves, much in the same way as other ingredients,
principally areca nut, gambier and opium (Reid 1985:536–7). The tobacco
and betel chewing mixture appears to have been a relatively late practice,
in Indonesia at least, possibly as late as the latter part of the eighteenth
century or as much as a century and a half after the introduction of
tobacco smoking: no one seems to know the reason for this (Reid 1985:
537).
Elsewhere, in Africa and colonial America smoking seems to have been
the preferred method of consuming tobacco. In Africa the pipe
predominated, as it did in North America, receiving impetus from Arab
traders who diffused the water pipe along the east African coast and across
the Sahara trade routes, and from Europeans who visited the western coast
(Laufer 1930; Philips 1983; Samson 1960).
RITUALS, FASHIONS AND A MEDICAL DISCOURSE 87
5
‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
Cigarettes, health and the hard sell
Before the nineteenth century snuff was the tobacco product that carried
the characteristics of later forms of tobacco consumption. Both its
manufacture and distribution can clearly be viewed as ‘modern’. That is
to say, snuff alone, of all tobacco products, can be considered in that class
of goods that historians have identified as belonging to the first stirrings
of modern consumerism in the eighteenth century (McKendrick et al.
1982). Even so, in general, tobacco remained a pre-modern consumer
commodity, much more connected to the commercial, rather than the
burgeoning industrial, system. As we shall see in Chapter 9, one of the
ironies of tobacco was that, despite the fact that it was probably the first
mass-consumed food-like substance, it was one of the last products to be
mass-produced.
Usually snuff is viewed as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, an
aberration in the history of tobacco consumption, with smoking
considered as the norm. In fact snuff taking was the most popular form
of tobacco, in Europe at least, well into the nineteenth century and, in a
few cases, into the twentieth century. Far from being just the fashionable
accessory of a few fops, it was the normal way of consuming tobacco in
the early industrial age.
Despite the general lack of information on the type of tobacco
consumed, that which is available presents a clear picture of the
continuing importance of snuff consumption in the nineteenth century.
Because of their centralized operations, the figures from the various
European state monopolies furnish the clearest evidence. The strongest,
and perhaps the most surprising, evidence comes from the sales of
tobacco by the French state monopoly. On the eve of the Revolution (as
pointed out in the previous chapter) the monopoly sold about 15 million
pounds of tobacco of which more than 12 million pounds was either in
the form of manufactured snuff or in carottes, from which individuals
grated their own snuff (Rogoziński 1990: 96). Until the 1860s the sales of
snuff, especially that already manufactured at source, rose considerably,
reaching a maximum level of almost 28 million pounds in 1861
(Rogoziński 1990:96). In per capita terms snuff consump tion rose from
around one-third of a pound per annum in 1789 to almost three-quarters
of a pound per annum in 1861 (Rogoziński 1990:96). It was not until after
this date that snuff consumption began to fall for the first time since the
early part of the eighteenth century. Even so, it was as late as 1925 before
the total sales of snuff fell back to their level of 1789 (Rogoziński 1990:96–
7). In relative terms, however, the reign of snuff as France’s most popular
tobacco product ended in the 1830s when the sales of cut tobacco, for
pipe smoking, overtook those of snuff (Rogoziński 1990:94). What these
figures suggest is that existing French consumers of tobacco continued to
use snuff for most of the nineteenth century but that new consumers
were increasingly introduced to tobacco through smoking.
Pipe smoking became much more popular in France during the first
half of the nineteenth century than it had ever been before. Sales of cut
tobacco, intended mostly for pipe smoking, though possibly used for
rolling cigarettes, soared during the nineteenth century from around 6
million pounds in 1819 to 60 million by the turn of the twentieth century:
this prodigious growth was, of course, accompanied by a marked
increase in its relative popularity, rising from 28 per cent to 72 per cent of
total consumption over the intervening period (Rogoziński 1990:94–7).
Cut tobacco accounted for over half of the monopoly’s sales until after
the Second World War: it was only at this point that the cigarette became,
in terms of its relative position in the monopoly’s sales, France’s most
popular form of tobacco consumption (Rogoziński 1990:97). The image of
the French cigarette smoker, so familiar in western culture, is, therefore,
of only recent date.
The French attachment to snuff and its slow displacement in
consumption patterns by smoking tobacco, whether in the form of the
pipe, the cigar or the cigarette, was repeated elsewhere in Europe. In Italy,
for example, sales of tobacco products by the monopolies in both
Lombardy and Venetia show a rather similar pattern to that in France. In
the former snuff accounted for at least 50 per cent of sales until the 1840s
whereas in the latter the domination of snuff continued until the 1860s
(Rogoziński 1990:102). When the monopolies were reorganized in the
aftermath of the unification of the peninsula the newly created Italian
state monopoly was faced with a varied market, yet even so, across the
country, snuff still commanded an important position. Even as late as
1880 over 20 per cent of the monopoly’s sales was in the form of
manufactured snuff, and this proportion was maintained until the end of
the century (Rogoziński 1990: 103). During the second half of the
nineteenth century cigars and cut tobacco gained prominence as the
preferred form of tobacco consumption, a situation that was maintained
until the eve of the First World War (Rogoziński 1990:103). Cigars then
began to lose favour while sales of cut tobacco remained fairly stable, but
it was now the turn of the cigarette. Around 1930 the majority of Italians
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 89
were cigarette smokers, and the figure continued to rise thereafter: by
1950, for example, almost 80 per cent of the state monopoly’s sales was
accounted for by cigarettes (Rogoziński 1990:103). Sales by the Austrian
state tobacco monopoly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
confirm that the pattern of consumption in central eastern Europe was
broadly similar to that of western Europe. Snuff consumption in absolute
terms continued to maintain a significant position until the end of the
nineteenth century, even though its relative position became eroded: cut
tobacco and cigar consumption grew in the nineteenth century, as the most
popular forms of tobacco consumption until the second and third decade
of the twentieth century: then after the First World War, and then
especially in the 1930s and 1940s, the cigarette eclipsed all other means of
consuming tobacco (Rogoziński 1990:90).
Of those European regions served by state tobacco monopolies, the
exception to the general trend was the Scandinavian tobacco consumer,
especially those in Sweden and to a lesser extent those in Iceland,
Norway and Denmark. The case of the Swedes is the most exceptional
and remarkable. In the first place snuff consumption grew steadily both
absolutely and relatively from the late eighteenth century until the 1930s,
while that of spun and cut tobacco fell, while cigars had a brief but
unremarkable rise in consumption during the second half of the
nineteenth century: snuff consumption finally gave way to the cigarette
but not until after the Second World War (Rogoziński 1990:105). The shift
to smoking from snuffing, present in most of Europe in the nineteenth
century, did not therefore occur in Sweden until well into the present
century. The second difference between Sweden and other European
countries is that the Swedes preferred moist oral snuff, placed behind the
upper lip, to dry nasal snuff (Rogoziński 1990:105–7). Smokeless tobacco,
whether in the form of snuff or of chewing tobacco, still accounted for
more than one-quarter of tobacco consumption in other Scandinavian
countries, principally in Iceland and Denmark (Rogoziński 1990:114).
In so far as Sweden presented an unusual example of a tobaccoconsuming population committed to snuff rather than any form of
smoking tobacco for far longer than elsewhere in Europe, the American
tobacco consumer also displayed an unusual pattern of consumption.
Rather than snuff Americans preferred chewing tobacco: even as late as
1900 chewing tobacco was the most popular form of tobacco
consumption in the United States accounting for 44 per cent of total
consumption (Rogoziński 1990: 111). The absolute growth of the
consumption of chewing tobacco was reversed only just before the First
World War, and though the fall in consumption was rapid the United
States was consuming over 100 million pounds of chewing tobacco in
1940 (Gottsegen 1940:34; Rogoziński 1990: 124). The consumption of
snuff, taken orally rather than inhaled into the nostrils, actually increased
90 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
from the late nineteenth century until after the Second World War and
has recently been experiencing a revival, but, in relative terms, the
consumption of snuff has been limited, representing at most 5 per cent of
total consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Rogoziński
1990:124; Christen et al. 1982). Though the consumption of the cigarette
increased sixtyfold in the space of thirty years between 1900 and 1930, it
is often not appreciated that the cigarette continued to compete with all
other forms of tobacco consumption, and that the rise of the cigarette to a
dominant position in tobacco consumption was a long process (Gottsegen
1940:28; Rogoziński 1990:124): it was not until 1941 that 50 per cent of
total American tobacco consumption took the form of the cigarette
(Rogoziński 1990:113).
Britain, too, entered the nineteenth century with more than half the
tobacco market represented by snuff, but this declined very quickly
through the nineteenth century to the point at which, by the turn of the
twentieth century, snuff accounted for only 1 per cent of total British
tobacco consumption: this proportion has been maintained for most of
the century (Rogoziński 1990:132). The pipe returned to the British
tobacco scene with a vengeance in the nineteenth century. Already by the
middle of the century the age of snuff had definitely passed. Some 60 per
cent of British consumption near mid-century was accounted for by pipe
tobacco, most, if not all of it, destined for smoking in the pipe. Moreover
the pipe itself was changing during the nineteenth century, as it became
manufactured of briar instead of clay (Alford 1973:110–11). Interestingly,
while most European and American tobacco consumers took some time
to become cigarette smokers, the British consumer found this form of
tobacco consumption highly appealing from a relatively early time. For
example, in 1900, barely twenty years after the introduction of the
machine-made cigarette, more than 10 per cent of all British tobacco sales
were cigarettes (Alford 1973:480). In most countries of the world the
comparative figure was nearer 2 per cent (Rogoziński 1990:111). By 1920,
well in advance of most other countries in the world, more than 50 per
cent of British tobacco sales was in the form of cigarettes (Alford 1973:480).
While generalizing about the pattern of tobacco consumption in
Europe and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries is difficult, and in some cases entirely misleading, certain
features are clear enough. First, over the period there occurred not only
an enormous increase in consumption in absolute terms, as one might
expect, but also a quite astonishing rise in per capita use. During the
nineteenth century per capita consumption was low by present
standards, and within a range that was already established in the course
of the eighteenth century. Levels of 1 or 2 pounds per capita were fairly
common (Rogoziński 1990:81–108). By the turn of the century only the
United States and Denmark had per capita consumption exceeding 3
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 91
pounds: the former with a figure of 5.3 pounds per capita (Rogoziński
1990:111). In 1950 consumption in most European countries exceeded 3
pounds per capita, many countries approaching 5 pounds per capita and
a few above this figure: the American per capita consumption was still
the highest at 7.5 pounds per capita (Rogoziński 1990:113). Per capita
tobacco consumption ceased to increase, in most western countries, in the
1960s and 1970s (Lee 1975:4–5; Laugesen and Meads 1991:1,346). Second,
the increase in per capita consumption has occurred along with a
changing pattern of consumption. Broadly, with the exceptions discussed
above, the trend was towards smoking tobacco, and away from
smokeless forms. And within the category of smoking tobacco there has
occurred a vast transformation of the tobacco consumer from one with
pipe in hand, or cigar or hand-rolled cigarette, to manufactured cigarette
brands. Table 5.1 provides a picture of this phenomenon by comparing
the relative position of cigarette consumption in 1950 with the year at
which cigarette consumption accounted for 50 per cent of total tobacco
consumption in a selection of countries.
The main point about Table 5.1 is that it shows a relatively late switch
to the cigarette, in most countries after the Second World War. What the
table also shows is that it would be inaccurate and misleading to relate
the pattern of consumption, especially the switch to cigarettes, to any
crude measure of economic development. Certainly any correlation
between the level of industrialization or per capita income and cigarette
consumption is not supported by the data.
In Asia and Africa the pattern of consumption in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries was as varied as in Europe. Japan and China, for
example, were rapidly converted to cigarette consumption. In Japan this
had certainly occurred by the 1920s and possibly earlier (Rogoziński
1990: 158). Japan was one of the first foreign markets to be targeted by
Table 5.1 Cigarette consumption
Sources: Rogoziński 1990:113; Alford 1973:480
92 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
W.Duke and Sons and the American Tobacco Company, the forerunner
of British American Tobacco (Durden 1976). Japanese consumers were
exposed to western commodities and culture in the aftermath of the Meiji
restoration and this included the cigarette. British and American tobacco
companies were quick to take a financial stake in Japanese cigarette
manufacturing companies, but these were liquidated in 1904 when the
state tobacco monopoly was formed. Japanese cigarette manufacturing
technology was generally considered to be the best in the Far East
(Durden 1976; Alford 1973:218; Cochran 1980:56–7). The cigarette also
swept through China during the first half of the twentieth century. British
American Tobacco played an important role in converting Chinese
tobacco consumers to the cigarette and away from the traditional pipe
and snuff. Before the arrival of BAT, tobacco was consumed on its own or
in a mixture with opium (Spence 1975). Pressure was, however, mounting
for the substitution of opium by tobacco. It is, therefore, difficult to
determine whether Chinese cigarette consumption grew because of the
decline of opium consumption or whether it was just a change in the
pattern of tobacco consumption: evidence points in both directions
(Cochran 1980:27–8; Newman 1991). While the reasons for it remain
unclear, the fact of the rapid growth of cigarette consumption in China is
strikingly evident. In 1902 China is estimated to have consumed 1.25
billion cigarettes; in 1928 the figure stood at 87 billion and in 1988 China
consumed nearly 1,500 billion cigarettes (Cochran 1980:219, 234; Grise
1990:22).
Japan and China stand out in Asia as the countries most thoroughly
committed to cigarette consumption. In other parts of Asia the progress of
the replacement of other forms of tobacco consumption by the cigarette
has been far less complete. Traditional patterns have proved to be much
more resistant to change than they were in Japan and China, though the
resistance is showing distinct signs of crumbling.
In India, for example, manufactured cigarettes accounted for only 12
per cent of total consumption in 1950 despite the early intervention by
British American Tobacco (Basu 1988). Chewing tobacco, smoking
tobacco for hookahs, cheroots and bidis each accounted for about onequarter of the market (Rogoziński 1990:156). In 1979 India and Pakistan
had amongst the lowest figures for per capita consumption of
manufactured cigarettes, equivalent to 5 per cent of the annual per capita
level in Japan (Tucker 1982:186). Even so, the penetration of the Indian
market by the manufactured western-style cigarette has progressed
considerably. Between 1935 and 1965 the consumption of all tobacco
products per adult fell marginally but cigarette consumption per adult
more than doubled (Beese 1968:4).
Indonesia, too, was targeted by British American Tobacco as a
potential market. Its first factory manufacturing cigarettes was
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 93
established in 1924, and output increased steadily until the 1970s (Reid
1985:539–41). But the real success story in the Indonesian tobacco
industry has been production of the kretek, a cigarette composed of locally
grown, primarily dark, air-cured tobacco mixed with cloves, in a ratio of
3 to 2 (Akehurst 1981:320; Reid 1985:539–40). Kretek production has
increased substantially since it was first introduced in the 1880s: in 1939
output was at a level of between 5 and 16 billion units—there are varying
estimates of the output level—but by 1980 the figure had surpassed 50
billion units, almost twice the level of output of what are called ‘white’
cigarettes (Reid 1982:539–41).
Other parts of Asia have experienced patterns of tobacco consumption
somewhere between these extremes. The patterns are not static, however,
and the tobacco marketplace continues to be transformed by the actions of
tobacco multinationals and the responses to them (Chen and Winder
1990). Oceania, for example, has only recently become a battlefield
between traditional and western forms of tobacco consumption. The
Pacific Islands, at least those formed of coral, have never grown much of
their own tobacco and have, therefore, been dependent on imported
sources since contact with Europeans in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century (Marshall 1981:887). Most Micronesians, since the end
of the Second World War, have been avid cigarette smokers, purchasing
their supplies primarily from the United States and Japan (Marshall 1981:
889). The larger islands, such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea, now
produce their own cigarettes from local tobacco as well as imported
supplies: Fiji began its industry in the early 1960s, whereas in New
Guinea, though plans were laid down for a cigarette manufacturing
operation from as early as 1948, little happened before 1960 (Marshall
1987:35). The impact of the establishment of a modern cigarette industry
has been dramatic. Not only has tobacco consumption increased but,
perhaps more importantly, the consumption of cigarettes has outstripped
that of brus, a traditional tobacco product made from air-cured, as
opposed to flue-cured, tobacco. Papuan New Guinea smokers first
consumed more cigarettes than brus in 1969 but by 1979 sales of cigarettes
accounted for 71 per cent of total tobacco consumption (Scrimgeour
1985).
A similar pattern of the increasing consumption of manufactured
cigarettes, and the decreasing use of both local tobacco and traditional
methods of consumption, is evident in Africa. The diffusion of tobacco
growing and consumption in Africa was, in many ways, similar to its
spread in Asia. In particular tobacco was incorporated into local specific
cultures in such a way that there emerged great variation in how tobacco
was used. Snuffing, chewing and smoking, primarily in pipes, was
practised throughout the continent (Hambly 1930). Increasingly though,
as the demand for manufactured cigarettes has risen, traditional methods
94 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
of smoking as well as growing and curing methods have become less
prevalent (Muller 1978). In Kenya, for example, cigarette consumption
during the 1970s grew at an annual rate of 8 per cent—this compares with
a global rate of only 1 per cent (Stebbins 1990:229; Currie and Ray 1984:1,
132). Urbanization has been held partly responsible for shifting patterns
of consumption, from traditional to western, in Africa, as it has in other
parts of the world (Kaplan et al. 1990; Waldron et al. 1988; Finau et al.
1982).
The process by which the cigarette has come to dominate global
tobacco consumption in this century has progressed at an extraordinary
rate. If one compares the relative position of the cigarette in tobacco
consumption in ten representative countries in 1900 and 1950, then the
figures speak for themselves—in 1900, on average, cigarettes were
consumed by 8 per cent of the population; fifty years later the figure was
57 per cent. Since the Second World War the figure has continued to
climb. Towards the end of the 1980s, at least 80 per cent of the world’s
tobacco crop ended up in cigarettes (Grise 1990:9–13). Despite the widely
differing methods of consumption used throughout the world up to the
end of the nineteenth century, the entire world has been converging in
the twentieth towards one type of tobacco consumption, the cigarette.
And, as the cigarette has come to dominate consumption, there has also
been a convergence in its form, away from unfiltered to filtered varieties
and from dark to light tobacco, from air- and fire-cured to flue-cured
(Grise 1990:10, 20–1; Tucker 1982:38, 195).
How do we explain the emergence and dominance of the cigarette?
The early history of the cigarette is obscure; there are several accounts, all
at variance with each other. The story that the cigarette originated in the
Near East, and was introduced into Europe by soldiers returning from
the Crimean War where they were taught to smoke by Russians and
Turks, is the least credible though most popular account. It may be that
British soldiers were introduced to the cigarette by Russians and Turks,
but it seems that the Russians and Turks learned of the cigarette from the
French who in turn learned of it from the Spanish (Rogoziński 1990:51).
This is not to suggest that the cigarette is a nineteenth-century
European invention; like other forms of tobacco consumption, it
originated in South and Central America. There the cigarette was
commonly smoking tobacco crushed and wrapped in vegetable matter
such as banana skin, bark, maize leaves, and reeds (Rogoziński 1990:50;
Wilbert 1987). Spanish cigarettes used maize wrapping at first, and in the
seventeenth century fine paper was introduced (Perez Vidal 1959:100–1).
This latter method of enclosing tobacco for smoking the Spaniards called
papelate: Goya portrayed in several paintings Spanish soldiers smoking
papelates in the eighteenth century.
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 95
According to most accounts the papelate as well as the maize cigarette
crossed into France around 1830, but it could easily have happened
before that date. At any rate, what is important is that the French state
tobacco monopoly began manufacturing cigarettes, the nomenclature
that the French had given to the papelate, in 1845, during which year sales
amounted to 7,000 pounds, or the equivalent of 3 million cigarettes
(Rogoziński 1990:96). And what is perhaps of even greater importance,
especially for the subsequent history of the cigarette, is that at about the
same time as the monopoly began manufacturing cigarettes French
consumers were found to prefer American rather than French domestic
tobacco in their cigarettes: the verdict was that French domestic tobacco
was too acrid (Tilley 1948: 505). Whether, as one authority suggests, the
American tobacco was Bright tobacco is not clear, but certainly the early
adoption of American leaf into the cigarette was of great significance
(Tilley 1948:505).
From France the cigarette, using American leaf, passed into Germany
and Russia, where Turkish or Balkan tobacco was mixed with American
leaf for the first time around 1850 (Tilley 1948:505). The cigarette may
have been introduced into England as early as the 1840s, therefore,
antedating the supposed connection with the Crimean War, but there is
little doubt that manufacturing did not begin in England until after that
date (Alford 1973:123). The problem with cigarettes at that time is best
summed up in the words of the historian of W.D. and H.O.Wills and
Company:
These early cigarettes were wrapped in tissue paper with a cane
mouthpiece attached. But they were very crudely made and it was
necessary to pinch together each end to prevent the tobacco from
falling out. Accordingly, at that time cigarettes had only novelty
appeal. Moreover, dark air-cured and fire-cured tobaccos, most
commonly in use, were generally too strong for use in cigarettes.
During the 1860s cigarettes made from best quality Turkish tobacco
and specially made fine texture paper came on the market, but even
these, with their distinctive aromatic flavour, did not commend
themselves widely to British tastes.
(Alford 1973:123–4)
Americans appear to have adopted the cigarette from England, it being
relatively rare before the Civil War (Tilley 1948:506–7). In 1869
production of cigarettes in the United States stood at the level of 2 million
individual units, though it may have been much higher than that by the
end of the Civil War (Tilley 1948:507). It comes as no surprise to learn
that the first manufactories of cigarettes were located in New York City
and run and owned by Greek and Turkish immigrants (Heimann 1960:
96 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
206). One of the most important manufacturers of the time, the
Bedrossian brothers, made an important contribution to the evolution of
the cigarette for it was they who were the first to blend Turkish (or
Balkan) tobacco with the recent innovation in American leaf production,
Bright flue-cured tobacco (Tilley 1948:507). A more detailed description
of the evolution of Bright tobacco and flue-curing can be found in
Chapter 8, but suffice it to say that Bright flue-cured tobacco produced
much milder smoke than did the traditional dark air- and fire-cured
varieties.
The adoption of flue-cured tobacco was of such great importance for the
history of the cigarette and its cultural and pharmacological dynamics
that it would be difficult to exaggerate its significance. Without getting
into too much technical detail, flue-cured tobacco smoke is acidic while
air- and fire-cured tobacco smoke is alkaline (Akehurst 1981:647).
Ciga rettes are acidic and it is this chemical property which makes the
smoke relatively easy to inhale. It is interesting to note that Turkish
(Oriental) tobacco, which is sun-dried and highly valued for its aromatic
properties, is more acidic than flue-cured tobacco; this might help explain
why Turkish tobacco was adopted for use in cigarettes (Akehurst 1981:
579). Cigar and pipe tobacco smoke is more difficult to inhale. In addition
nicotine is released gradually in acidic smoke whereas in alkaline smoke
the initial release of nicotine is very fast but so is the decline (Akehurst
1981:647). It seems that the relative ease of inhalation of flue-cured
tobacco was critical in influencing new consumers who might have been
put off by the adverse initial effects of consuming air- and fire-cured
tobacco (Brecher et al. 1972:229). This may be one reason why legislation
against children purchasing and smoking tobacco was not required
before the twentieth century. Recent studies of smokers who have access
both to commercial flue-cured and traditional air-cured tobaccos certainly
confirm that inhalation is much easier with the former (Vallance et al.
1987:277; Mougne et al. 1982:106).
The cigarette, even as it appeared in its relatively crude form at the end
of the 1860s, nevertheless already had the hallmarks of a new form of
tobacco consumption, one that could be exploited by tobacco
manufacturers using new methods of production, employing
technologies of manufacture from other industrial activities (see
Chapter 9); and, more significantly, new methods of marketing,
particularly packaging and advertising.
The origins of tobacco advertising are obscured but certainly the
practice did not begin with cigarettes. One of the earliest forms of
advertising was through branding. The idea behind branding was simple
enough: it allowed consumers to identify with the name of the product
rather than the name of the maker. Its historical trajectory is unclear but
there is little doubt that branding evolved from trade cards used in
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 97
tobacco distribution from as early as the first two decades of the
seventeenth century (Brongers 1964: 125). Trade cards and wrappers from
the late eighteenth century show clearly the images that manufacturers
wished to convey. The ubiquitous American Indian together with
hogsheads, tobacco leaves, snuff boxes and other accessories of tobacco
culture were frequently portrayed (Scott 1966; Brongers 1964:132–5). By
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a brand name began to
take prominence over the maker’s name, as evidenced by extant trade
cards and wrappings of the period. Not surprisingly, manufacturers of
snuff were the first to exploit this early form of marketing because
manufacturers prided themselves on providing snuff of different scents
and colours (Alford 1973:27–8).
Branding was important in presenting an image for the consumer as
well as providing manufacturers with a movable asset. There is
considerable evidence, for the United States at least, that both of these
had already occurred by the middle of the nineteenth century. There
were already brands of chewing and, to a much lesser extent, smoking
tobacco that were famous in many parts of the county though they were
manufactured predominantly in Virginia and North Carolina (Robert
1938:218–19). Before the Civil War there seems to have been a preference
for choosing the names of sweet fruits or famous people as the brand
label. In the case of the former this was probably done in order to convey
an image of the chewing tobacco as being delicious: in the latter case
there was undoubtedly an effort to make the product seem prestigious.
Some of the names used by Virginia and North Carolina manufacturers
at the time included Cherry Ripe, Wedding Cake and Golden
Pomegranate in addition to Lafayette and Pocahontas (Robert 1938:219).
The value of brand names as assets to the firm was shown in Richmond
in 1852 after the death of Poitiaux Robinson, one of the city’s most
powerful tobacco manufacturers, when the issue of to whom the brand
names should be ceded became the central concern of the administration
of Robinson’s estate (Robert 1938:193).
In the United States branding tobacco was widespread since
manufacturers were typically distant from their customers and
distribution was handled not by the manufacturers but by agents and
jobbers located for the most part in New York City (Robert 1938:222–6).
British manufacturers also turned to branding. Ricketts, Wills and
Company began the practice in 1847 with brand names such as Best
Bird’s Eye, Bishop Blaze and Stansfields (Alford 1973:97–8). The
distribution of tobacco products by Wills in Britain, though operating on
a different system from that in the United States, nevertheless allowed
the firm to gain a national as opposed to a local reputation (Alford 1973:
100–7).
98 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
Branding preceded advertising and it involved the consumer and the
manufacturer in an association through images (Mitchell 1992). Names
were one kind of image but a more effective method was for the brand to
be recognized by a symbol or sign. One of the first manufacturers to do
this, and to do it very successfully too, was the smoking tobacco
manufacturer W.T.Blackwell and Company of Durham, North Carolina
who in 1866 launched the brand Bull Durham on a demanding public
(Tilley 1948: 548). Not only did the firm place its product on the market
with a trademark but, more importantly, they decided to adopt the bull
as their motif on all wrappings and advertisements. One of the partners of
the firm, Julian Carr, instigated a national advertising campaign in which
the Durham Bull itself, rather than the tobacco, was portrayed in
anthropomorphic situations, alternating between scenes in which the bull
was jovial and boisterous and those where he was serious and
determined. The campaign was in swing by 1877 but Carr, one of the first
and principal exponents of advertising, had more tricks up his sleeve,
two of which strike a particularly modern chord. One of these was to
sponsor commencement exercises at the University of North Carolina by
conveying guests from hotel to campus with a livery of horses, each of
which had attached to it a flag bearing the sign of the bull; the wagons
dealt with the matter more directly —they had painted on them the sign
‘Smoke Blackwell’s Durham Smoking Mixture’. Each member of the band
greeting the guests smoked a pipe containing Bull brand tobacco (Tilley
1948:549). The other move was to sponsor the barbecue following
commencement, to which all guests were invited: once having eaten,
drunk and, one may safely suppose, smoked, the guests were returned to
their hotel in Durham in the same fashion in which they arrived (Tilley
1948:550).
That was in 1879, and just the beginning of W.T.Blackwell’s experience
of the power of advertising. The 1880s signalled Julian Carr’s
determination to announce the Bull to the whole country by contracting
an advertising agency to take out space in both country newspapers and
large dailies: at the same time he introduced the practice of offering
premiums to customers: clocks, razors and soap were particularly
favoured, as well as gifts to dealers handling the Bull brand (Tilley 1948:
550).
W.T.Blackwell and Company, and especially Julian Carr, set a new
trend in the American tobacco industry not only in its use of advertising
but also in understanding that this was a key to success in the
marketplace. Other manufacturers of the time attempted to follow the
Bull’s lead but none seems to have had the imaginative approach of Carr,
except that is for one manufacturer, James B.Duke. Duke not only was
Carr’s rightful heir in the field of advertising but also understood that
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 99
advertising for mass consumption required techniques of mass
production.
Like Blackwell’s, Duke’s business, inherited from his father, was
founded on the manufacture of smoking tobacco, under the brand name
Pro Bono Publico. Unlike the Bull, however, Pro Bono Publico had a
limited market and, in frustration at the firm’s inability to crack the
market, James Duke made the fateful decision to withdraw from direct
competition in the smoking tobacco business and launched into what was
then a relatively little known field, the cigarette industry.
Virginia and North Carolina manufacturers concentrated for the most
part on producing chewing and smoking tobacco: New York City and
other large towns in the northern United States concentrated on cigar
manufacturing and, later, on the cigarette (Cooper 1987). When Duke
decided to produce cigarettes, therefore, he entered into a sector of the
tobacco industry that not only was located in a distant part of the country
but in which there were already some well established firms (Tilley 1948:
557). Duke launched his first brand of cigarettes, Duke of Durham, in
1881 and then went about creating a mass market, employing techniques
reminiscent of those first used by Carr, as well as some of his own. He
advertised nationally, offered premiums to consumers and special deals
to jobbers, sponsored games at which free cigarettes were presented (to
men only) and he introduced the cigarette card, using at first the picture
of a popular singer of the period and in time extending to actresses,
presidents of the United States, royalty and other important figures; at
the same time he considerably cut the price of his brands of cigarettes
(Tilley 1948:558). The firm also had its own polo team, named after Cross
Cut, one of the company’s leading brands (Tilley 1948:558).
It is clear from the extant information about the firm’s operations that
Duke’s techniques of mass advertising were extremely successful in that
until 1885 orders for cigarettes consistently exceeded the technical
capacity of production (Tilley 1948:558). Even his decision to open a
factory in New York City in the previous year did not solve the supply
problem. As the discussion in Chapter 9 will show, the solution came in
the shape of the cigarette-making machine invented by James Bonsack but
most fully exploited, in several meanings of the word, by Duke himself.
Duke was not alone in using advertising to push his products: other
cigarette manufacturers also pursued markets in this way and provided
innovative ideas (Tilley 1948:559–60).
However, Duke alone, in the first few years of using the Bonsack
machine, suffered the reverse of the problem he had before 1885: the
Bonsack machines raised the output of cigarettes from a level of 9 million
in July 1885 to 60 million two years later (Tilley 1948:559). Duke’s solution
was not only to advertise more aggressively, which he did, but to get
closer to the consumer by circumventing the commission merchant and
100 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
searching for global, as opposed to national markets. But before this
could happen a technical hitch stood in the way and that was that
cigarettes were poorly packaged, typically in flimsy wrappers, although
by the 1880s there were some machines on the market that could package
cigarettes in a sturdy container. Once more it was Duke who took the
lead by presenting his version of the sliding box in the launch of a new
brand, Cameo, in 1886 (Tilley 1948:575). It was now possible for Duke to
use the package itself as a form of advertising and to include in it a small
memento, in the shape of a cigarette card. Cigarette cards, in particular,
became a critical component of Duke’s advertising as they quickly
became desirable in themselves, the consumer being enticed to collect
sets of cards which were issued in series. According to an authority on
Duke’s advertising techniques at this time, the most common theme was
sex. In his words:
The cigarette was used almost exclusively by a masculine clientele
in the nineteenth century, and the cards…reflect the advertisers’
keen awareness of the fact. Many sets of cards featured either
photographs or lithographs of buxom young ladies in what must
have seemed very daring, if not shocking, costumes. Usually these
sets were labelled simply ‘Actresses’ or bore descriptive phrases
such as ‘Stars of the Stage’, ‘American Stars’, or ‘Gems of Beauty’.
Since there was surely little personal identification by the purchaser
with the stars, who were usually unnamed, and since actresses were
then accorded a low place in the social scale of polite America, it
seems clear that such cards were designed for prurient attraction.
(Porter 1971:35)
Advertising did not come cheap and Duke probably spent more on it, as
a proportion of turnover, than did other manufacturers (Porter 1971: 43).
According to Duke himself, the costs of advertising in 1889 accounted for
20 per cent of sales (Porter 1971:41). In the same year it was estimated by
a trade magazine that manufacturers could easily incur a cost of $250,000
by introducing a new brand on to the market (Porter 1971:41).
Duke structured his business around the twin concerns of mass
consumption and mass production, and in this lay his particular genius
(Chandler 1977:382). His advertising techniques targeted the market
carefully, in the United States and abroad. In China, the most important
foreign market for British American Tobacco, the successor to Duke’s
firm, advertisements followed a different pattern to those in use in the
United States. In particular far greater use was made of outdoor
advertising, handbills, wall hangings, posters and window displays,
rather than newspaper advertising and cigarette cards (Cochran 1980:35–
8).
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 101
In Britain advertising also proved to be crucial to the performance of
individual firms and to the industry at large. Firms like Cope’s and Wills,
while not spending as much on advertising as their American
counterparts, nevertheless found themselves pursuing similar objectives
and also innovating in their own right. Cope’s, for example, not only
advertised their products in familiar ways but also took the
unprecedented step of publishing a magazine, Cope’s Tobacco Plant, from
1870 to 1879, in which not only was the firm and its products advertised
but also the delights of smoking (Seaton 1986:16–22).
One of the major characteristics of the cigarette industry in both the
United States and Britain before the First World War was the large
number of brands available to the consumer. Shortly after the creation of
the American Tobacco Company in 1890 James Duke stated that the
company manufactured a hundred different brands of cigarettes
(Tennant 1950:42). Brands had particular followings, and advertising
policy at the time reinforced this pattern, definitely in the United States
and most likely in Britain too (Tennant 1950:42; Alford 1973). But all this
changed very dramatically in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution
by legislation in 1910 of American Tobacco, over which Duke was the
supreme head (for more detail see Chapter 9).
One of the effects of the dissolution was to divide up the trust’s
business and, particularly, its brands among the successor companies.
The cigarette sector was split largely into three companies, the newly
reorganized American Tobacco Company, Liggett and Myers, and
P.Lorillard who between them accounted for just over 80 per cent of
national output (Tennant 1950:80). One manufacturer who did not
produce cigarettes before the dissolution of the trust and consequently
got none of the cigarette sector at the time was a chewing tobacco firm
called R.J.Reynolds. In 1913 this firm, which had no experience of
cigarette manufacture, launched on the market a brand called Camel, the
output of which stood at just over 1 million cigarettes: the following year
production surpassed 400 million cigarettes and in 1919 it surpassed the
figure of 20 billion (Tilley 1985: 219). By that date, Camel accounted for
just under 40 per cent of all the cigarettes sold in the United States.
The success of Camel cigarettes rested on three main factors, all of
which revolutionized the cigarette industry and placed it on a trajectory
which would continue until very recently. In the first place, Camel was a
new product in that it was composed primarily of American leaf, a
mixture of blended Bright tobacco with Burley tobacco (an air-cured mild
tobacco grown mostly in Kentucky); Turkish tobacco was added for taste
and aroma (Tilley 1985:211). Reynolds redefined the cigarette in terms of
its constituent composition. Before the introduction of the Camel brand
American-made cigarettes were either pure flue-cured (termed Virginia)
or pure Turkish, or blended flue-cured and Turkish (Tilley 1985:210).
102 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
Second, Camel cigarettes were sold only in packages of twenty, again
breaking with a tradition of selling in units of ten or five. Finally,
Reynolds decided to advertise their new product publicly, that is in
newspapers and the like, and totally refrained from the use of premiums
or prizes, so frequently used to promote the cigarette in Duke’s day.
Slogans proved to be especially important in this kind of advertising. In
1921, for example, the famous slogan ‘I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel’ was
first used on billboards throughout the United States (Tilley 1985:223). The
cost of advertising soared in the first decade of Camel’s existence, as did
the expenses entailed in giving away samples for free, a widespread
practice in the cigarette industry: in 1913, for example, the total
expenditure on both these amounted to under $800,000; in 1924 the figure
was over $8,000,000 (Tilley 1985: 224). But of equal importance was the
advertising on the package itself. The refusal to offer premiums was
turned to advantage by printing on the package the message: ‘Don’t look
for Premiums or Coupons, as the cost of the Tobaccos blended in CAMEL
cigarettes prohibits the use of them’ (Tilley 1985:214–15).
The other tobacco companies, naturally, responded directly and
aggressively to Reynolds’s challenge and, of course, its extraordinary
success. Each of the major companies either pushed one brand already in
existence or introduced an entirely new brand to compete directly with
Camel. Liggett and Myers turned to the Chesterfield brand as their
flagship, and, not surprisingly, modified the blending formula and
packaged the cigarettes in units of twenty: the American Tobacco
Company staked its future on a new brand, Lucky Strike, which it
brought out in 1916: and Lorillard chose Tiger as its brand but, after
failing to secure a reasonable market share, dropped it in favour of Old
Gold, launched in 1926 (Tennant 1950: 78).
The impact of these responses to Camel’s challenge was dramatic, as the
cigarette market split into three main brands. Table 5.2 shows these
market shares for Lucky Strike, Camel and Chesterfield from 1925 to
1949.
Needless to say, the amount of money expended by the companies to
pursue what had come to be known as a cigarette war in advertising grew
considerably. To hold on to its market share, for example, R.J.Reynolds
continued to pour money into advertising. By 1925 advertising
expenditure topped the $10 million level and until the outbreak of the
Second World War the figure hardly slipped below $15 million:
moreover, as a proportion of net earnings, the expenditure on advertising
was enormous, averaging 70 per cent during the 1930s in the aftermath of
the depression (Tilley 1985:330). The American Tobacco Company with
Lucky Strike also saw its advertising budget mushroom, tripling to just
over $24 million in the period from 1925 to 1932, and similar changes
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 103
were experienced by Liggett and Myers (Tilley 1985:331; Tennant 1950:
165–6).
It was precisely in the period after the First World War that the
consumption per capita of tobacco products other than cigarettes began
to decline for the first time since the turn of the nineteenth century: by
contrast, the consumption of cigarettes continued to increase, and by
1923, in these terms, cigarettes had become the single most popular form
of tobacco consumption in the United States (Tennant 1950:127). In the
1920s alone, cigarette consumption per adult more than doubled from 610
in 1920 to 1,370 in 1930; or, to put it another way, from less than two to
just under four per person per day (Beese 1968:62). The powerful
attraction of the cigarette was a remarkable feature of this period
considering that in per capita terms consumption of all tobacco products
was virtually the same in 1940 as it had been in 1920 (Beese 1968:62–3).
Men were abandoning the old tobacco comforts—pipe, cigar and chaw
—and confirming themselves as cigarette consumers, and this certainly
accounted for the greater part of the increase in per capita cigarette
consumption. But a not insignificant component of this increase in the
popularity of the cigarette was a change in the gender basis of tobacco
consumption. As the previous chapter pointed out, the notion that
women have started to consume tobacco only in the twentieth century is
incorrect; on the contrary there is ample evidence that in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries tobacco consumption was not gendered. The
picture for the nineteenth century is blurred, but there is enough indirect
evidence to suggest that some such process was under way: certainly in
the nineteenth century the pipe, the cigar and chewing tobacco had an
increasingly masculine image (Dunhill 1924; Seaton 1986:22). Other than
these general observations there is little hard information on the degree
or extent of tobacco consumption by gender in the nineteenth century.
Table 5.2 Market share of leading cigarette brands, United States 1925–49
Source: Tennant 1950:88, 94
104 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
However, there is scattered evidence in the early part of the twentieth
century that might confirm the low incidence of smoking among women.
In 1924 the editor of one of America’s most important tobacco trade
journals estimated that women accounted for only 5 per cent of national
consumption (Tennant 1950:136): in Britain there are no contemporary
estimates for this period but a recent work estimates that women’s
consumption of tobacco for the same year was no more than 1.9 per cent
of the national total (Alford 1973:340).
During the 1920s, however, there is ample evidence that women became
increasingly attracted to smoking and particularly to the cigarette. By
1929 women were estimated to consume 14 billion cigarettes in the
United States, equivalent to about 12 per cent of total consumption; in
1931 the estimate had increased to 14 per cent and in 1935, in a survey
carried out by Fortune magazine, the researchers were able to report that
26.2 per cent of women aged 40 years or more smoked cigarettes while
for those under 40 the corresponding number was 9.3 per cent (Gottsegen
1940: 150–1). In urban areas the proportion regardless of age was much
higher, between 31 per cent and 40 per cent, depending on the size of the
city (Gottsegen 1940:151). A similar pattern occurred in Britain where the
proportion of total tobacco consumption accounted for by women
doubled from 5 per cent to 10 per cent between 1930 and 1939 (Alford
1973:362).
Tobacco companies were not slow to realize that changes were
occurring, and through the 1920s their advertising became clearly
targeted to this new and growing group of consumers. Whether the
advertising was itself responsible, to some degree, for the increasing
number of women smokers or whether it was capitalizing upon a
discernible trend is a moot point. It is also unresolvable since the complex
culture of tobacco consumption precludes any analysis in simple terms of
cause and effect (Schudson 1985: 178–208; Waldron 1991). There is little
doubt, however, that even if the rise in women’s consumption of tobacco
rested on other social and economic changes, the tobacco companies, in
their cigarette advertising, provided new images to which women might
aspire or be confirmed by smoking.
The targeting of women as cigarette smokers in the United States
happened slowly and uncertainly. One of the first advertisements was for
Helmar’s cigarettes, a brand manufactured by Lorillard. The
advertisement featured a woman with oriental features holding a
cigarette between her lips (Tilley 1948:614). This appeared in 1919 but it
was not until 1926 that the first advertisement appeared in which women
were portrayed in the role of accepting the challenge of smoking a
cigarette. The advertisement for Chesterfield showed a couple in a
romantic setting: the man is shown smoking while the woman, in a
sensuous pose, pleads with the caption ‘Blow some my way’ (Marchand
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 105
1985:97). In 1927 Philip Morris, one of the smaller cigarette manufacturers
of the time, advertised one of its brands, Marlboro, showing a woman
holding a cigarette with the caption ‘Women, when they smoke at all,
quickly develop discriminating taste’ (Tennant 1950:139). Lucky Strike
entered the fray on two fronts: it solicited and printed testimonials from
European artistes who informed the reader that they had discovered their
favourite cigarette in Lucky Strike, a cigarette that was mild and mellow
and because of a special process that treated the tobacco—‘It’s Toasted’—
Luckies protected your throat (Marchand 1985:96). The makers of Lucky
Strike, American Tobacco, pursued the advantages of smoking their
brand with new hard-hitting messages in advertisements in 1928 and
1929 in which women were urged to smoke with the caption ‘Reach for a
Lucky Instead of a Sweet’ (Tilley 1948:614). This was backed up by
testimonials from well-known personalities on the desirable effects on
body weight and figure by substituting cigarettes for sweets (Marchand
1985:99). And, if the point hadn’t been driven home enough, in the next
few years Lucky Strike adverts championed the svelte over the fat body
with headlines such as ‘Pretty Curves Win!’ and captions such as: ‘Be
moderate—be moderate in all things, even in smoking. Avoid that future
shadow by avoiding overindulgence, if you would maintain that
modern, ever youthful figure “Reach for a Lucky Instead”.’ (Marchand
1985:101). Or the advertisement entitled ‘The Grim Sceptre’, in which a
woman haunted by a double chin is urged, again, to reach for a Lucky
instead (Tilley 1948:614). Reynolds came back hitting hard in 1928 with
their own version of the advertisement targeted directly at women,
showing scenes of women alone as well as couples, the woman in each case
getting closer and closer to smoking the cigarette (Tilley 1985:340–1). In
the following year Reynolds turned the first Chesterfield advertisement
on its head when they showed a woman offering a Camel to a man who
responds with a turn of phrase that must have warmed the hearts of the
copy writers: ‘I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel —but a “Miss” is as Good as a
Mile’ (Tilley 1985:331). You’ve come a long way, baby, as the later
advertisements put it.
What were the messages of cigarette advertising during the 1920s and
1930s and what was their connection with the culture of consumption?
As Michael Schudson points out in his study of advertising and American
society, the chief theme that advertising emphasized was mildness, a
theme that integrated the ingredients of the cigarette (mild, mellow
tobaccos wrapped in pure white paper) with the action of smoking the
cigarette portrayed in refined terms and circumstances (Schudson 1985:
202). Presumably this message was designed as much to reinforce their
confidence in the product as it was to wean pipe and cigar smokers and,
presumably, tobacco chewers from their habit; after all, men were the
smokers. The advertising of cigarettes to women, judging from the text of
106 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
these advertisements, stayed on the edge of the social conflict which
marked the rise of the woman cigarette smoker during the 1920s. It
legitimized the results, and cultivated an image of the woman smoker
that was complementary to the image of women over which the conflict
arose in the first place (Schudson 1985:187–91). The gender politics of the
1920s rested on the question of the access to power by women, in relation
to men, as well as by women in the past. The cigarette was adopted as a
symbol of the emergence of the new woman of the 1920s (Filene 1975:148–
9; Fass 1977:9; Ernster 1985:336; Waldron 1991:994). The tobacco
companies responded to this social change not by entering the debate but
by adding their own fine tuning to the new woman image: slender, chic
and mildly seductive (Ernster 1985:338). As for men, as Schudson argues,
the cigarette represented, both symbolically and actually, a convenience
and refinement, in terms of pleasure, as opposed to the cigar and pipe, both
of which came to be viewed as cumbersome and were therefore relegated
to special occasions such as the after-dinner treat: cigarettes were more
suitable to the work and leisure culture of the postwar era than were
other forms of tobacco use (Schudson 1985:198–202).
The cigarette was adopted by women as a badge of emancipation in the
period following the post-First World War (Jacobson 1981). Since then the
proportion of women smoking has increased continuously until just
recently. In the United States there was a steady rise in the relative
number of women smoking until the mid-1960s, after which it levelled
off or decreased slightly (Waldron 1991:989–90). A similar pattern can be
observed in Britain (Jacobson 1988:5). In Italy smoking among women
was uncommon before the Second World War but increased very rapidly
after, and continued to increase until the mid-1980s (La Vecchia 1986:
276). This is only part of the story, for while men have been decreasing
their consumption of cigarettes, in the sense that the proportion of
men smoking has been declining for a long time, women have only
recently decreased theirs. If the cigarette is a symbol of equality, then men
and women have only recently become equal, with some evidence that
cigarettes have become appropriated by women more than men as a
commodity in some parts of the world (Jacobson 1988:5–12; USDHHS
1980).
Until the Second World War, the major tobacco companies in both the
United States and Britain continued to be characterized by leading
brands. Lucky Strike, Chesterfield and Camel accounted for the majority
of the market share of the cigarette business, though in the 1940s the
Philip Morris brand made significant inroads into the market share of the
big three (Tennant 1950:88). In Britain the picture was very similar:
Woodbine, the flagship brand of Wills, accounted for as much as 70 per
cent of all cigarettes sold by the company in the country and for as much
as 30 per cent of all the cigarettes sold in total (Alford 1973:478–9).
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 107
Though advertising continued to target men and women in different
ways, no specific brand was associated with any particular gender or
class (Schudson 1985: 178–208).
Since the Second World War the cigarette market has undergone
another major change involving three main developments:
multibranding; filter-tipped and low nicotine brands; and gendered
brands. These were not entirely separate developments though their
chronology differed. Multi-branding, for example, grew as a response to
market conditions in the United States after the war. One of these
conditions was the inability of the three leading brands to maintain, let
alone increase, their share of the market: the sales of Camel, Chesterfield
and Lucky Strike were virtually identical in 1949 to what they had been
in 1946 despite an increase of just under 10 per cent in the size of the
market (Tennant 1950:88; Beese 1968: 63). Related to this was the other
observation that unusual brands were finding a place in the market that
was not only secure but actually growing. In particular there were
mentholated brands, the most important being Kool, first marketed in
1933; there was a filter-tipped cigarette, under the brand name of Viceroy
launched in 1936; and king-size brands such as Pall Mall (Axton 1975:
118). Viceroy and Kool were manufactured by Brown and Williamson,
one of the smaller tobacco companies at the time, while the latter
belonged to American. Between 1945 and 1952 Reynolds, Liggett and
Myers, American and Lorillard brought out new brands to meet the
competition (Tennant 1971:228).
Multibranding was, therefore, well under way when cigarette smokers,
in particular, were told by the prospective studies on cancer, carried out
first in 1951, and published under the auspices of the American Cancer
Society in 1954, that there was a causal relationship between cigarette
smoking and lung cancer (Patterson 1987:209). The consumption of
cigarettes in the United States fell immediately by 24 billion units, or 6.4
per cent of the total manufactured, as the public reacted to the health
scare (Tennant 1971:229), It was the first time in the twentieth century that
cigarette consumption had fallen and shock waves rang through the
tobacco industry.
Tobacco chiefs responded in a number of ways, including, not
insignificantly, the creation of a powerful industry lobby and publicity
organization called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, and then
in 1958 the more influential Tobacco Institute Inc., both of which, in their
own way, sought to undermine the smoking-cancer equation (Patterson
1987: 211–12). Another much more important response was to
manufacture a cigarette in which consumers would have more
confidence and which, indirectly, would show that the industry was
responsible and responsive to public opinion. The solution came in the
form of the filter-tipped cigarette which had already been on the market
108 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
but enjoyed only a small following. Viceroy sales doubled immediately;
the sales of Kent, introduced only two years earlier, with an allegedly
revolutionary filter system, accelerated and all the tobacco companies
without a filter cigarette launched their own version (Tennant 1971:229).
Liggett and Myers’s brand, L & M, came out in 1953 and in the following
year R.J.Reynolds brought out its enormously successful Winston brand;
in 1956 the company launched Salem, the first filter-tipped mentholated
cigarette (Tennant 1971:229; Tilley 1985:496–503).
The speed with which the manufacturers and the public switched to
filter cigarettes can be seen clearly from Table 5.3. While the data in
Table 5.3 relate only to the United States, the trend towards the filter
cigarette has been global, though the rates of transformation have varied
considerably. Britain, for example, followed the American lead very
closely though with a lag of some five years; in Japan, New Zealand and
Venezuela over 90 per cent of cigarette sales were filter-tipped by 1970
while in India in the same year filter-tipped cigarettes accounted for less
than 10 per cent of total sales (Alford 1973:431; Tucker 1982:195).
The filter-tipped cigarette was, in form, a refinement on the nonfiltered type. It satisfied the consumer’s need for a ‘safer’ cigarette, one
which filtered out ‘irritating’ elements in the smoke, and also drew the
public’s attention to the scientific research that had produced the filter:
manufacturers were at pains to point out that their particular filter
embodied the most advanced technology and materials. But there was
also a large economic benefit in switching to filter-tipped cigarettes, as
less tobacco was used in production.
This was not, however, the only cost-reducing manufacturing
innovation of the postwar era. Since the early part of the century tobacco
manufacturers had been attempting to reduce their costs of operations by
reclaiming as much as possible of the waste products of manufacturing.
Since tobacco leaf is the most expensive component of manufacturing
costs, manufacturers looked for ways of using more of the tobacco plant
other than the leaves. For technical reasons a successful method of
Table 5.3 Filter-tipped share of the United States cigarette market (average %)
Source: Warner 1986:23
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 109
reconstituting the waste products—the stems, scrap tobacco and tobacco
dust—into a sheet, akin to paper, was not developed until after the
Second World War (Tilley 1985:488–94; Akehurst 1981:656). But one
cannot help feeling that there were other factors in the slow development
of reconstituted sheet as a cigarette filling: the stem has a significantly
lower nicotine content than the leaves and, while public tastes were
formed around the high level of nicotine in cigarettes manufactured
before 1945, any shift away from that position would undoubtedly hurt a
manufacturer as consumers sought other brands for their taste (Davis
1987:19). Once the cancer scare hit, manufacturers could confidently
launch new tastes on the market largely because the filter-tipped cigarette
was itself a novelty (Mann 1975:100). The immediate impact of increasing
reconstituted sheet, and the use of a filter, was to increase markedly the
number of cigarettes manufactured from a given weight of tobacco. In the
United States between 1939 and 1953 the number of cigarettes produced
per pound of leaf was stable at a level of 324: in 1958 the corresponding
level was 380 and in 1970 it was 467—a 50 per cent increase over the
figure in 1953, before the cancer scare (Johnson 1984:65).
Besides the shift to filter cigarettes, another important change,
especially since the publications of the Surgeon General in the United
States and the Royal College of Physicians in Britain, has been the
increasing importance of low-tar, low-nicotine brands. The United States
was a big leader in the manufacture of these brands: between 1967 and
1970 cigarette brands containing 15 mg or less of tar captured hardly 1
per cent of the market but by 1981 the share had risen so quickly that six
out of every ten cigarettes smoked were of this type (Warner 1986:13). In
1980 the United States cigarette market was swamped with no fewer than
one hundred new brands of the low-tar, low-nicotine cigarette (Taylor
1984:185). Unlike filter cigarettes that have global markets, the low-tar,
low-nicotine brands are mostly confined to the western industrialized
countries, but even in these the market is not as large as in the United
States: in 1982, for example, only 20 per cent of the British cigarette
market was accounted for by low-tar cigarettes (Wilkinson 1986:55;
McMorrow and Foxx 1983: 302; Davis 1987:17; Muller 1978:53). The
increasing consumption of low-tar, low-nicotine cigarettes has had an
impact on manufacturing as well. Reconstituted sheet has been
increasingly used as have other techniques designed to decrease the
amount of tobacco leaf used per cigarette. One of the most important
techniques of this kind is called puffing, in which dried tobacco leaf is
processed in such a way that its size is increased to that of its green
condition: by this method the filling capacity of the cigarette is increased
by 40–50 per cent—the technique was first introduced in 1969 (Mann
1975:100–1). Between 1970 and 1980 the number of cigarettes
manufactured from one pound of tobacco leaf rose from 467 to 523
110 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
(Johnson 1984:65). Both reconstituted sheet and puffing lend themselves
to cigarettes of low-tar and low-nicotine delivery.
The filter cigarette and the newer low-tar, low-nicotine brands have
pushed multibranding far beyond the levels envisaged when the practice
first began after the Second World War. The process was further
accelerated by the introduction and rapidly growing popularity of the
female cigarette. The idea of a female cigarette was not new to the
postwar period. The idea had been floated before and several attempts
had been made by tobacco companies to get such a product established in
the market: one such failure was a cigarette called Fems whose chief
characteristic was its red mouthpiece designed, of course, not to show
lipstick (Ernster 1985: 337); in Britain Wills had a proposal for launching a
brand especially for women—its name was to be Rainbow—but this was
declined in favour of targeted advertising (Alford 1973:340). Marlboro,
marketed by Philip Morris, was probably the only prewar cigarette that
advertised itself as a luxury cigarette with a feminine touch (Ernster 1985:
336). Even in the 1960s the going was rough for the launch of a female
cigarette as evidenced by the failure of Liggett and Myers’s Eve brand
(Jacobson 1988:55). All the previous difficulties were swept away,
however, in 1968 when Philip Morris launched Virginia Slims; in 1983 it
was America’s eleventh best selling cigarette in what was a very
competitive market (Jacobson 1988: 56). The amount of advertising and
promotional expenditures that went into sponsoring Virginia Slims and
other female cigarettes is unknown but that this grew enormously during
the 1970s is beyond doubt (Ernster 1985: 339; Jacobson 1988:55–60). In
1984 cigarette advertising in the major women’s magazines in the United
States cost manufacturers many millions of dollars: Family Circle, to take
one example, earned over $16 million from cigarette manufacturers,
equivalent to 12.5 per cent of the magazine’s total revenue for that year
(Ernster 1985:339).
Since 1950, therefore, cigarette brands have been placed on the market
in bewildering numbers. These brands, at the time of their launch and
subsequently, have been aimed at particular classes of consumers, each
of which has an identity in the product, in terms of its packaging, design,
colours and, of course, image. While the market is a mass one and the
techniques of marketing reflect this, they also rest on the belief that while
the market is segmented, within each segment the market is global.
One of the first brands to confirm this was Marlboro. From its launch in
the 1920s until the 1950s, as stated above, Marlboro was first a luxury
then a women’s cigarette. In the wake of the cancer scare in the early
1950s, Marlboro underwent a total transformation: a filter was added, it
was packaged in a flip-top, crush-proof box with distinct red and white
colours, and it was unceremoniously taken away from women and given
to men with the help of the masculine cowboy image (Lohof 1969:443).
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 111
The Marlboro advertising campaign has been one of the most successful
of all time. Reflecting on the meaning inherent in the rugged images that
the advertisements convey, one commentator has written as follows:
The Marlboro image represents escape, not from the responsibilities
of civilization, but from its frustrations. Modern man wallows
through encumbrances so tangled and sinuous, so entwined in the
machinery of bureaucracies and institutions, that his usual reward
is impotent desperation. He is ultimately responsible for nothing,
unfulfilled in everything. Meanwhile, he jealously watches the
Marlboro Man facing down challenging but intelligible tasks…
Innocence and individual efficacy are the touchstones of the
metaphor employed on behalf of Marlboro cigarettes.
(Lohof 1969:448)
‘Power, status, success and confidence’ as Bobbie Jacobson puts it; the
appeal of Marlboro seems to cut across class and income (even gender)
divisions by presenting an image which reinforces the self-awareness of
the privileged, and satisfies the fantasy aspirations of the less privileged.
In 1976 Marlboro became the best-selling brand in the United States
(Tucker 1982:80). Marlboro sales undoubtedly accounted in large
measure for the rise of Philip Morris as a tobacco company: its share of the
American cigarette market which from 1940 to 1960 hovered at around 10
per cent, reached 29 per cent in 1979, by which time it was firmly
established as the second largest tobacco company in the United States.
Globally, Marlboro is the world’s most popular cigarette. In 1987 293
billion Marlboro cigarettes were sold worldwide (USDHHS 1992:40). It is
the market leader in many countries, especially, but by no means
exclusively, in the Third World (Tucker 1982:85–6; USDHHS 1992:46).
Advertising has, as we have seen, always been of critical importance to
the tobacco companies, even before James Duke raised the profile and use
to which it was put. What the effects of advertising have been on
consumption—especially on the extent of it—has been and still continues
to be a hotly debated issue. Whatever its impact on total consumption,
certain elements of advertising are clear enough. One of these is that
advertising has probably been the most important expenditure by
tobacco manufacturers. The twentieth century, especially the period since
1945, has witnessed an excessively large and increasing advertising
budget despite the bans on certain kinds of advertising taken by various
different countries throughout the world. Scattered data on advertising
expenditure, in Table 5.4, reveal the extent of this trend. Though the data
for 1970 to 1983 are represented in current terms, even allowing for
inflation advertising still doubled in the period (Warner 1986:45). Second,
though there are hundreds of brands available in many countries—in
112 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
1985, for example, there were around 140 different brands of cigarette
available in Britain—there is a large degree of concentration in sales as
there appears to have been throughout the twentieth century (Jacobson
1988:203–7). This confirms the remark about the segmented but mass
aspects of the cigarette market. In 1988–9 the top ten brands in Australia,
Brazil, Canada, Italy, France, Mexico, Germany, Britain and the United
States accounted for at least 70 per cent of total sales (USDHHS 1992:40).
The meaning of the cigarette has become intimately related to the
image and metaphor of its advertising. Smokers are reinforced in their
choice by the images presented and there is sufficient evidence available
that brand loyalty is extremely important—surveys in the United States
in the 1970s concluded that about half of cigarette smokers interviewed
had never changed their brand (USDHHS 1992:41).
The culture of cigarette consumption, however, is not simply that of
the advertisement: rather it is a blend of the advertised images and
metaphors together with prevailing social customs. While there has been
a powerful transformation of tobacco habits globally towards the
consumption of light filter-tipped cigarettes manufactured by
multinational tobacco companies, the anthropology of tobacco use, as
recent studies make patently clear, remains complex (USDHHS 1992:37–
40, 46–7; Waldron et al. 1988; Waldron 1991; Carucci 1987; Knauft 1987;
Black 1984). In the western industrialized world, however, there is a
further element affecting the culture of tobacco consumption, namely the
increasing view of the cigarette as a dangerous commodity, especially by
the medical profession. In the words of the historian Allan Brandt:
The new research agenda facilitated the ongoing process of
delegitimizing cigarette smoking in American culture. The cigarette
—the icon of consumer culture, the symbol of pleasure and power,
sexuality and individuality—had become suspect. The smoker
would subsequently be redefined, in a process which we continue to
see played out—from the independent Marlboro man or liberated
Virginia Slim to a new vision of a weak, irrational, and now,
addicted, individual. The stigmatization of the cigarette became a
Table 5.4 Cigarette advertising expenditure, United States, selected years 1939–83
($ million)
Sources: Tilley 1985:331; Patterson 1987:212; Warner 1986:45
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 113
critical aspect of a revolution in American values about personal
health and behavior.
(Brandt 1990:168–9)
The medical significance of tobacco has been debated continuously since
its first introduction into Europe in the sixteenth century. On the whole
the judgements made about tobacco were favourable despite stern
opposition to consumption both by experts and by civil and ecclesiastical
authorities. While the debates were most frequent and expressive in the
seventeenth century, they did not disappear in the eighteenth century.
The issues raised in the medical literature became more subtle, as
exemplified in the debates concerning the comparative effects of tobacco
in the form of snuff and smoke.
What is important to understand is that the discourse in the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took place without anyone really
understanding what constituted tobacco. Botanists were quick to
establish the nature of the plant but other insights were lacking. There
was some suggestion that tobacco was dangerous in that it contained
dangerous substances. Francesco Redi, the Florentine scientist and
physician, for example, published the results of his experiments in one of
which he injected ‘oil of tobacco’ into a number of animals, all of whom
died (Redi 1671). But the lack of knowledge about the constituents of
tobacco ensured that many of the arguments pursued in the eighteenth
century simply replicated those of the previous century without offering
anything new. It is, of course, impossible to say precisely what impact the
medical controversies had on the consumption of tobacco. However, with
so much praise for the efficacy of tobacco from so many eminent
physicians, it seems likely that favourable medical opinion did stimulate
consumption. Certainly the survival of tobacco in folk remedies into the
twentieth century suggests that conclusion (Kell 1965).
The tobacco discourse changed abruptly in the nineteenth century. The
change came not from the medical profession but from the enormous
growth in chemical investigations and insights. Of the many paths that
chemists followed in the early nineteenth century to classify and
understand the nature of matter, one with very special significance was
to isolate the active, physiological principles of plant medicines. The
interest in the pharmacology of plant medicines predated the nineteenth
century but the techniques that would allow for an isolation of the active
principle as well as the clinical trials necessary to confirm the connection
were not generally developed until the end of the eighteenth century
(Lesch 1981:305–10; Smith 1979). In both Germany and France this
problem seems to have captured the imagination of several eminent
chemists and pharmacists. Initial interest focused on opium and cinchona
but early work made little progress (Lesch 1981:311). A real breakthrough
114 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
came, however, in 1803 when Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner, a pharmacist,
discovered morphine, the active principle of opium (Schmitz 1985:62;
Lesch 1981:312–13). Sertürner’s work on opium was critical and it also
raised hopes among chemists and pharmacists that there were other
plant substances of an alkaline nature waiting to be isolated.
These alkali plant substances required classification as well as
nomenclature. Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac proposed that substances in this
class be nominated by attaching the suffix -ine to their name, and in 1818
the German pharmacist Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Meissner proposed the
generic term ‘alkaloids’. Both nomenclatures have remained ever since.
Whether codifying the discoveries in this way had anything to do with
further breakthroughs is unknown, but in the aftermath of Sertürner’s
paper and Gay-Lussac’s pronouncements, a host of new active plant
principles were revealed. The French took the lead. Joseph Pelletier and
Joseph-Bienaimé Caventou, both pharmacists working in Paris, declared
in 1817 that they had discovered emetine, the active alkaloid of
ipecacuanha root, a plant used in European and Amerindian medicine
for its emetic properties; within the next few years they isolated
strychnine, quinine, brucine and veratrine (Lesch 1981:322–3).
Coffee was subjected to laboratory treatment in 1820, and caffeine was
isolated; eight years later it was the turn of tobacco. Though the German
physician Wilhelm Heinrich Posselt and his partner, the chemist Karl
Ludwig Reimann, are credited with isolating nicotine in 1828, the
attempt to find the active alkaloid of tobacco can be traced back to the
experiments of Gaspare Cerioli in Italy and Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin,
professor of chemistry in Paris, who produced an oil of tobacco in 1807
and 1809 respectively (Eiden 1976:8). Experiments by Posselt and
Reimann on dogs and rabbits confirmed what Francesco Redi had noticed
more than 150 years earlier: that nicotine was extremely poisonous (Eiden
1976:6).
There followed a spate of publications and experiments on nicotine
from a chemical as well as a pharmacological viewpoint that filled the
pages of scientific journals throughout Europe and the United States.
Some of the work investigated the molecular structure of nicotine in the
hope of synthesizing its constituent structure (Eiden 1976:8–18). Other
work investigated the physiological characteristics of nicotine from
animal trials as well as from reported incidents in human consumption. A
significant number of publications, however, fastened on the potential
therapeutic uses for nicotine. A well publicized use for nicotine was as an
antidote to strychnine, as well as other kinds of poisoning, including
snake bites. The scientific journals reported on successful outcomes of
nicotine for a wide variety of ailments including disorders of the nervous
system, muscle contracture, genito-urinary diseases, haemorrhoidal
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 115
bleeding (via a tobacco enema), strangulated hernia, infectious diseases
(especially malaria) and tetanus (Silvette et al. 1958; Stewart 1967:264–7).
The nineteenth century, like the seventeenth century, witnessed a
controversy over whether tobacco was harmful or not but, for the time
being at least, nicotine did not figure in it. As in the seventeenth century
there was debate but no decisions, and, in fact, there had been little
progress in the terms of the debate. Professor John Lizars of Edinburgh
University in the sixth edition of his textbook on tobacco echoed the
imprecise language of many critics of tobacco at the time. He not only
listed an expansive catalogue of diseases and ailments caused by
consuming tobacco—from vomiting and diarrhoea to ulceration,
emasculation and congestion of the brain—that would have delighted
any seventeenth-century nicotian critic, but spoke about tobacco
consumption as a disease in itself. It was implicated, according to him, in
the spread of syphilis, through the sharing of the tobacco pipe, and to
national degradation, both physical, psychological and, of course, moral
(Walker 1980:393). Lizars was, perhaps, the most vehement critic of
tobacco, but there were others in Britain, especially in the medical
profession who made their views known in the Lancet and the British
Medical Journal during the second half of the nineteenth century. In
France, at the same time, a similar controversy raged (Perrot 1982;
Nourrisson 1988).
While the terms of the debate remained unaltered from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth century, there was an important change in how the
debate was conducted. In the second half of the century anti-tobacco
societies sprang up principally in Britain, France, the United States and,
to a lesser extent, in other European countries. They all had similar
objectives—to inform the public about the dangers of tobacco and to
lobby for legislation against tobacco abuse—and similar memberships
(Nourrisson 1988; Walker 1980; Troyer 1984). They also, at various times,
associated themselves with the temperance movement, in a general
crusade against intemperance, broadly defined. Furthermore, they were
headed by charismatic individuals who imposed their own personalities
on the societies. Despite having some outstandingly influential members
—Pasteur, for example, joined the Société Française Contre l’Abus du
Tabac in 1878—most of the societies either fell into liquidation or ended
their existence once the founders or the influential members lost interest
or died. The two main French anti-tobacco societies were defunct by
1905, as were the chief British societies (Nourrisson 1988:542; Walker
1980:398–9). What they accomplished is hard to judge, but there is some
evidence that the Children Bill of 1908, passed in Britain to prohibit the
sale of tobacco to children and to ban juvenile smoking in public places,
had enshrined at least some of the arguments of the anti-tobacco
movement (Walker 1980: 401).
116 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
In the United States, however, the anti-tobacco movement had a much
more direct and widespread impact, at least in terms of legislation. To
speak of any early movement in the United States would be an
exaggeration since the movement was perhaps no more than the
publication, at irregular times, of the Anti-Tobacco Journal between 1857
and 1872. The main object of the attack was chewing tobacco and the
main thrust was its uncleanliness but, in general, little seems to have
come of the agitation which the editor of the journal, George Trask,
hoped to inspire in his readers.
Once the cigarette became popular, however, an anti-tobacco
movement coalesced around the problem of the cigarette. Publications of
the period attacked the cigarette as a contaminating influence for both
adolescents and women (Tennant 1950:133). In the United States the
argument connecting national decadence with cigarette consumption
surfaced as it did in Europe. The favourite European bugbear was the illdefined ‘Turk’, but in the United States, according to a writer in the New
York Times in 1883, the finger was pointed directly at the Spaniard:
The decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted
cigarettes and if this pernicious practice obtains among adult
Americans the ruin of the Republic is close at hand.
(Tennant 1950:133)
The anti-cigarette campaign found supporters throughout the country
and included some very influential people. Those in the front line, such
as Lucy Page Gaston, who in 1920 declared she was running for
President on a no-tobacco issue, were joined by such influential people as
Henry Ford and Thomas Edison (Heimann 1960:252). Ford, who carried
out his own crusade against what he termed ‘the little white slaver’,
solicited evidence from American notables about the inherent danger of
the cigarette. One of them, Thomas Edison, in a letter to Ford,
pronounced his verdict on the cigarette thus:
The injurious agent in Cigarettes comes principally from the
burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called
‘acrolein’. It has a violent action in the nerve centres, producing
degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among
boys. Unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and
uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes.
(Tennant 1950:135)
Edison’s remarks are particularly interesting for two reasons. First,
though he was wrong about what constituted the danger in cigarettes, he
did attempt to provide a pharmacological and physiological basis for
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 117
sustaining the argument that cigarette smoking in adolescence was
particularly injurious. It should be pointed out that Edison was a
committed cigar smoker. Second, his remark about narcotics should be
seen in the context of what was perceived in the United States at the time
as a virulent epidemic of drug taking, especially cocaine, opium and
marijuana (Courtwright 1982; Courtwright 1991). (It is interesting that
Edison should add cigarettes to the discourse on narcotics in light of our
understanding of the powerfully addictive properties of nicotine.)
The tobacco reform movements culminated in a wave of legislation,
beginning with the states of North Dakota, Iowa and Tennessee by 1897,
and grew until 1921, when some form of legislation against smokers and
the tobacco industry was on the statute books in twenty-eight different
states (Gottsegen 1940:155). The range of proscription was very wide but
only two states—Idaho and Utah—passed specifically anti-cigarette
legislation. In many cases, however, the repeal of the laws came as swiftly
as their enactment: fiscal needs were often the reason. By 1930 little of the
original legislation existed: the only prohibition that did remain in force
was that on the sale of tobacco to minors (Gottsegen 1940:154–5).
Most writers surveying tobacco consumption have treated those
involved in the anti-tobacco crusades of the second half of the nineteenth
and first two decades of the twentieth century in an anecdotal and largely
unsympathetic manner. Certainly some of the pronouncements of those
who carried the anti-tobacco banner border on the ludicrous. Dr H.A.
Depierris, a guiding light of the Association Française Contre l’Abus du
Tabac, claimed, for example, that the French suffered a humiliating defeat
against German troops in the Franco-Prussian War ‘because of the
wreckage wrought by the narcotic plant…[they were] devoid of intellect,
breathless, [with] emaciated legs and weak arms, they were incapable of
taking up their rifles and marching towards the enemy on the day of the
invasion’ (Nourrisson 1988:541). Dr Pidduck, in an article published in
the Lancet at the height of the tobacco controversy in Britain, maintained
that at an important London hospital the blood of smokers instantly
killed leeches, and that fleas never attacked smokers (Walker 1980:393).
American commentators were equally colourful in their portrayal of the
vile effects of tobacco in general, and the cigarette in particular.
However, fanatics aside, there is a real sense of an underlying unease
being expressed during this period. The difficulty, however, was to find a
vocabulary to express it. Take for example the statement made in 1898 by
the Supreme Court of Tennessee in support of upholding the state’s anticigarette legislation:
Are cigarettes legitimate articles of commerce? We think they are not
because they are wholly noxious and deleterious to health. Their
use is always harmful; never beneficial. They possess no virtue, but
118 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
are inherently bad, and bad only. They find no true commendation
for merit or usefulness in any sphere. On the contrary, they are
widely condemned as pernicious altogether. Beyond any question,
their every tendency is toward the impairment of physical health
and mental vigor.
(Tennant 1950:134)
The quotation above, typical of many pronouncements against tobacco
and cigarettes, demonstrates the problem. Moral condemnation alone is
not enough; evidence is required and its source must be respected. An
appeal to the medical profession was inevitable, given their remarkable
rise as a professional group, but this was not without its difficulties. For
one thing, most members of the profession did not consider tobacco as
particularly dangerous. They were far more involved in other public
health issues, especially the campaign against infectious diseases. The
articulation and general acceptance of the germ theory of disease, helped
by the enormous publicity given to scientists such as Robert Koch and
Louis Pasteur in the 1880s, created an important shift in the public
perception of health. In the United States, for example, but also in Europe
and elsewhere, the medical profession focused on diseases such as
tuberculosis which was, at the turn of the century, the greatest single
killer in the West (Patterson 1987:33). Though they were at the time
unable to cure tuberculosis, the message from physicians (which was
echoed in the popular press) was that the contagion could be arrested by
attacking the germ through strict regimens of cleanliness (Burnham 1984;
McClary 1980). It was difficult, if not impossible, to locate tobaccoinduced disease within this paradigm. Interestingly, the practice of
chewing was condemned by some doctors principally because it was
believed that the spittle helped the spread of germs: this condemnation
may also have helped the consumption of cigarettes.
Another problem was that many doctors themselves were smokers and
thought positively about the substance. The Surgeon General of the
United States Public Health Service, Hugh S.Cumming, while
condemning cigarettes especially for women in a statement made in 1929,
was accused of being half-hearted about it since he was a cigarette
smoker himself (Burnham 1989:3). Even as late as 1948 the Journal of the
American Medical Association was arguing that the benefits of smoking—to
reduce tension—outweighed any evidence of its harmfulness (Patterson
1987: 208). This attribute of tobacco was, of course, already part of the
popular image of the cigarette, seized upon by tobacco companies and
repeated in the popular press. Even as early as 1889 the New York Times
carried the following articulation of the opposition of tobacco and tension:
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 119
Whatever be its merits or demerits, one thing is certain—namely,
that there is an ever-increasing subjection to the influence of this
narcotic, whose soothing powers are requisitioned to counteract the
evil effects of the worry, overpressure and exhaustion which
characterize the age in which we live.
(Tennant 1950:141)
The third reason why the medical profession remained relatively silent
on tobacco is that before the 1930s and 1940s there was no place for
tobacco in the disease paradigm. Physicians who did speak out against
tobacco did not adopt a scientific position and eventually resorted to
rather shaky moral arguments. Ironically, in their attempt to distance
themselves from the moralizers, many doctors found themselves tacitly
arguing that tobacco was not harmful (Burnham 1989:12–13).
Moreover, as the consumption of the cigarette increased in the United
States and Europe, both relatively and absolutely, the cigarette became
increasingly a cultural artefact that was resistant to carrying health
associations. The parallel with the car is instructive. The rising mortality
from traffic accidents was never attributed to the car itself, to its design,
either internally or externally; this was above criticism. Traffic deaths
were caused by reckless individuals not by cars. The car as a symbol of
freedom from the tyranny of distance could therefore continue to develop
without being confronted by traffic deaths (Flink 1988). Tobacco
discourse had a similar structure. Victor Heiser, an influential American
surgeon writing at the end of the 1930s, stated what many others
thought: that ‘tobacco has different effects on different people’ (Burnham
1989:12). The speed with which the cigarette was adopted as a means of
personal expression (an expression of choice, loyalty and control) no
doubt helped to prevent it being recognized as an agent of disease (Brandt
1990).
There is also little doubt that the powerful industrial and political forces
that were building up around tobacco companies, the state and farmers
were already having an impact on the medical discourse and deflecting
interest. This is, of course, a very important factor and one which is dealt
with in far greater detail in the next two parts of this book.
Finally, one should not overlook the fact that though we now associate
smoking with cancer this link has been recognized only because of
changes in the nature of the perception of cancer, and the understanding
by medical researchers of what might possibly be dangerous in tobacco.
Let us deal with the latter first: as we have already seen, the first real
breakthrough in providing for a pharmacological definition of tobacco
lay in the isolation and synthesis of nicotine by the end of the nineteenth
century. The extreme toxicity of nicotine was also confirmed at the time.
This led to two developments, one being the preparation of an effective
120 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
insecticide—in general use until the production of DDT in the early 1940s
—and the other a spate of work investigating the physiological action of
nicotine in humans (Busbey 1936). While this research increased the
understanding of nicotine, there was no evidence that in the doses taken
by consuming tobacco nicotine caused any problem.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century medical
researchers produced an enormous literature on the toxicology of tobacco.
It is difficult to summarize this work because of its diverse character but,
in examining the titles of these studies, certain patterns of enquiry
emerge. First of all, there was a great deal of research on the effect of
tobacco on intellect, efficiency and growth. This had more to do with the
moral arguments about tobacco that were then current than any new
departure in the scientific study of tobacco use. Second, there were many
studies purporting to deal with tobacco consumption as a form of
addiction, called variously tobaccomania and tobaccoism. Neither the
physiological and psychological studies nor those on addiction called into
question tobacco as a cause of disease. In fact the only area in which there
was concern about tobacco in this respect was in relation to tobaccospecific disorders, in particular tobacco amblyopia and tobacco heart
(Burnham 1989:15–16, 21–3; Larson et al. 1961:653–86; Dunphy 1969).
The rising consumption of tobacco, specifically cigarettes, and the
public nature of the moral debate about tobacco, particularly in the
United States, undoubtedly stimulated the increasing flow of research on
tobacco until the 1920s. But in disease aetiology tobacco was generally
not incriminated, until, that is, the western world began to understand
that a new disease was in its midst—cancer.
Not just any cancer, but lung cancer in particular. While it is commonly
thought that this is a twentieth-century disease, in fact not only was it a
recognized disease of the nineteenth century but there was a considerable
amount of research into the nature of the malignancy (Rosenblatt 1964).
Already by the latter part of the century lung cancer was recognized as a
significant type of respiratory disease. While studies describing the
cancer abounded, there was little in the way of understanding what
caused it. This was for several reasons: first, cancer was typically
recognized only at the post-mortem, and so a search for causes was
severely hampered; the diagnostic tools, especially the X-ray and the
bronchoscope, did not exist until the twentieth century. Second, cancers,
and particularly pulmonary malignancies, were understood to be
occupational diseases (in those instances, at any rate, where there was an
interest in such conditions). Actually, during the second half of the
nineteenth century, interest in industrial or occupational diseases was
increasing in Europe, especially in France, Germany and Britain. However,
one of the effects of this interest was that pulmonary diseases became
associated with specific occupations, rather than specific causes (Lecuyer
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 121
1983). In a study of mineworkers in Saxony published in 1879, the
researchers, both of whom had considerable understanding of lung cancer,
concluded that the reason why these workers suffered from fatal
pulmonary malignancies was because of their long exposure to arsenic
and other metals: ironically, in their search for the causative agent, both
Hesse and Härting dismissed food and tobacco as possibilities
(Rosenblatt 1964:405). Finally, there was a significant body of opinion
that held that the supposed rise in the incidence of lung cancer during the
nineteenth century was apparent rather than real (Rosenblatt 1964:413).
In spite of the diagnostic difficulties and sceptical voices, there was a
growing body of evidence that the incidence of lung cancer, at least in
relation to other cancers, was on the increase, especially during the
second half of the nineteenth century; and, though aetiological factors
were still kept in the background, references to possible respiratory
irritants and previous infections such as influenza and tuberculosis were
appearing in the literature (Rosenblatt 1964:412). Yet, for all the medical
work, the absolute level of deaths attributed to lung cancer was not only
very small in absolute terms but paled into insignificance when
compared to other known diseases. In the United States in 1900, for
example, 48,000 people were reported to have died of cancer of which
fewer than 400 cases were of lung cancer—while tuberculosis, the
country’s main killer, was responsible for 266,000 deaths (Patterson 1987:
32–3; Brandt 1990:161).
While lung cancer contributed only marginally to overall mortality,
cancer in general was rising in the United States during the second half of
the nineteenth century from a mortality rate of less than 20 per 100,000
before 1850 to 64 per 100,000 in 1900 (Patterson 1987:32). Some threefifths of cancer deaths were of women (tumours of the breast, uterus and
oral tissues were the most common form of malignancy) (Patterson 1987:
26–7). The increase in cancer deaths was attributed to many causes—
stress and urban civilization, and greater longevity (since cancer was
normally found in old, rather than young people) were the most popular
explanations —but one proximate cause which found wide acceptance
was that cancer could be caused by an irritant.
The idea of an irritant causing cancer logically followed from the
observation that tumours were normal body cells that behaved in an
anarchic and vividly fatal manner (Patterson 1987:14–15). What made
previously normal cells carcinogenic was unknown but the possibility
that irritating a particular part of the body could cause tumours in that
area was taken seriously. The definition of an irritant was, however, very
broad and included, for example, bruises and cuts. In the case of tumours
of oral tissue, mouth, lip and throat cancer, for example, doctors had little
difficulty in ascribing blame to tobacco smoke because of its irritant
qualities, normally perceived of as heat: at the same time the pipe was
122 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
suspected of causing irritation by rubbing against the sides of the mouth
and tongue, as were jagged teeth (Patterson 1987:26–7). Snuff was also
implicated in tumour development from at least the end of the eighteenth
century when Antoine Fourcroy, the French chemist, linked nasal polyps
to tobacco in powdered form (Körbler 1968:1181).
Until the twentieth century lung cancer was not considered a serious
problem, and the carcinogenic effects of tobacco were neither widely
acknowledged nor understood. Over the next few decades several
changes occurred which gradually led to the recognition that lung cancer
was a twentieth-century disease of alarming proportions, and that
tobacco smoke, delivered to the lungs directly by the cigarette, was
increasingly suspected of contributing to the phenomenon. Yet in spite of
all the growing evidence it was not until well after the Second World
War, and in particular during the last two decades, that the connection
between cigarettes and lung cancer, as well as other diseases, entered
public discourse.
Of particular importance was the stark fact that deaths from cancer
were rising while those from other diseases were falling. The figures
speak for themselves. In the United States, for example, cancer deaths
between 1900 and 1940 increased in the manner shown in Table 5.5.
Within this pattern lung cancer began its inexorable rise: between 1930
and 1940, for example, the number of deaths from lung cancer increased
much faster than deaths from other forms of cancer, rising from 2.3 per
cent to 4.5 per cent of deaths from cancer (Patterson 1987:88, 203). But of
even greater importance was the growing suspicion that this
phenomenon was being caused by tobacco smoke. In the United States
and Britain a series of studies appeared in the 1920s, and 1930s, in which
tobacco became implicated in the aetiology of lung cancer (Brandt 1990:
158; Patterson 1987:205; Burnham 1989:17; Cuthbertson 1968). Some of
these studies, such as the ones conducted separately by Frederick
Hoffman in 1931 and Dr Raymond Pearl in 1938 in the United States,
were primarily statistical: that is, they demonstrated a link between
smoking and mortality on the basis of a statistical analysis of the
appropriate data. Pearl, for example, compared mortality characteristics
of smokers and non-smokers and came to the conclusion that those who
smoked shortened their lives without, however, explaining the reason
(Brandt 1990:159). Hoffman was more precise in drawing a link between
cancer and smoking, but the strongest advice he could give—as much a
reflection of the problems of analysis as of the climate of the time—was to
moderate the consumption of cigarettes (Brandt 1990:159). Other studies
reported observations by highly respected surgeons such as Alton
Ochsner and Michael DeBakey which linked smoking and lung cancer
even more closely (Burnham 1989:18–19; Patterson 1987:205). Then there
were the experimental studies, conducted on laboratory animals, that
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 123
attempted to induce cancers by painting likely carcinogens on skin—
interestingly, but not surprisingly, nicotine, rather than other tobacco
ingredients was suspected as being carcinogenic (Burnham 1989:17).
Many, if not most, of the conclusions of these various studies were
challenged on a variety of different grounds and, as far as it is possible to
say, made little impact on public discourse and certainly none at all on
consumption habits: in the United States annual consumption of
cigarettes per adult rose from 1,485 in 1930 to 1,976 in 1940 and 3,552 in
1950 (Patterson 1987:201, 207); in Britain over the same period
consumption rose from 1,380 to 2,180 cigarettes per adult (Beese 1968:60–
1). Clarence Little, president of the American Society for the Control of
Cancer, the forerunner of the American Cancer Society, reflected the lack
of a clear commitment to the conclusions of the many studies on smoking
and cancer when he stated that ‘the more common use of tobacco is
blamed by some for the frequency of lung cancer… It is impossible to say
how accurate these opinions are’ (Patterson 1987:206). One of the first and
most comprehensive studies of tobacco consumption in the United
States, published in 1940, did not mention the word cancer even though
the author covered the physiological effects of tobacco: again it is notable
that the centrepiece of the discussion was nicotine (Gottsegen 1940:81–
105). While the work on cancer and smoking before the 1940s made little
impact, it did, nevertheless, bring new researchers into the field using
different techniques to prove or disprove a connection.
By 1950 lung cancer was accounting for 15 per cent of cancer deaths in
the United States (Patterson 1987:207). That year was the turning point
for implicating tobacco smoke as a cause of cancer. The new studies,
epidemiological in character, used new approaches: the one, termed
retrospective, proceeded by interviewing patients positively diagnosed as
having lung cancer about their lifestyle leading up to their diagnosis; the
other, termed prospective, interviewed people about their lifestyles and
then correlated this information later with the cause of their deaths. The
Table 5.5 Cancer deaths, United States 1900–40
Source: Patterson 1987:32, 80, 88, 95, 159, 235, 301
124 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
major studies of this kind were those by Ernst Wynder and Evarts
Graham, and E.Cuyler Hammond and Daniel Horn in the United States,
and Richard Doll and Austen Bradford Hill in Britain (Wynder and
Graham 1950; Hammond and Horn 1954; 1958; Doll and Hill 1952; 1954;
1956).
Their conclusions were direct and clear. Prospective and retrospective
studies were consistent with each other in the identification of tobacco
smoke and the cigarette as a significant contributor to lung cancer
(Steinfeld 1985). In the wake of these profound conclusions, medical
researchers preoccupied with other big killers reviewed their
understanding of the aetiology of these diseases. In particular, attention
became focused on the role of tobacco in heart disease and emphysema.
By 1960, in the United States, cigarette smoking had become officially
implicated in coronary disease, in emphysema, in certain cardiovascular
diseases and a host of other ailments (Burnham 1989:20–3; Davis 1987:19–
22). But in both the United States and Britain there was a considerable lag
between the publication of the major research findings and their general
acceptance by the major institutions of the medical profession, who had
considerable public power. It was not until 1962, in Britain, and 1964, in
the United States, that the Royal College of Physicians and the Surgeon
General, respectively, weighed up the evidence before them and declared
that cigarette smokers exposed themselves to a very high risk of serious
disease, and that this risk could be substantially reduced if they gave up
smoking (RCP 1962; USDHEW 1964). But, as a later discussion will show,
it took even longer for the public to react and to curtail consumption.
Seen over the long history of tobacco since the beginning of the
sixteenth century, what happened in the 1960s was momentous. For the
first time there was solid evidence that tobacco was a dangerous
substance and that cigarette smoke caused fatal diseases. This had
considerable impact in many different areas. First, tobacco was put on the
political agenda as it became increasingly clear that there were powerful
vested interests involved. Almost immediately an intense war broke out
between the pro-tobacco forces, including tobacco companies, some
government agencies, tobacco producers and some consumers, and the
anti-tobacco forces, including consumer pressure groups and some other
government agencies. The lines dividing the forces have never been
entirely clear and shifted over time (Brandt 1990:165–7; Patterson 1987:
211–30; Taylor 1984). The role of government came under close scrutiny
especially since, on the one hand, it had a duty to protect consumers from
potentially dangerous substances, while, on the other hand, it acted to
protect its own interests, financial and electoral. In the United States,
where tobacco growing is big business, the scale of the problem is
enormous but even a few statistics from Britain, where there is no tobacco
farming lobby, make the point clear enough. In 1980 the UK Treasury
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 125
received around £3,000 million in taxes and duty from tobacco; tobacco
sales from 350,000 retail outlets amounted to £4,300 million; cigarettes
valued at £464 million were exported to 150 countries; overseas aid to
Zambia, Malawi and Belize to develop and support tobacco growing
amounted to £3,500,000 since 1974; and 36,000 people were employed in
tobacco manufacture (Calnan 1984:288).
Second, and as part of the tobacco war of the period, manufacturers
responded to the medical threat by denying the conclusions and by
launching a particularly aggressive counter-attack through advertising.
To understand this phase of its history it is important to analyse tobacco
in cultural terms. The medical history is only one aspect of the cultural
significance of tobacco but one to which manufacturers did respond.
When at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the
objection to tobacco was based on moral arguments, manufacturers and
advertisers tried to project an image of respectability: when after the
Second World War medical evidence condemned tobacco as dangerous
and its consumption as risky, manufacturers and advertisers switched to
projecting an image of individual choice and independence of authority.
The attacks and counterattacks amounted, in cultural terms, to a struggle
over the image of tobacco’s most refined form, the cigarette.
126 ‘THE LITTLE WHITE SLAVER’
Part III
It is a culture of infinite wretchedness. Those employed in it
are in a continual state of exertion beyond the power of nature
to support. Little food of any kind is raised by them: so men
and animals on these farms are ill fed, and the earth is readily
impoverished.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
Marse ain’ raise nothin but terbaccy, ceptin’ a little wheat an’
corn for eatin’, an’ us black people had to look after dat ’baccy
lak it was gold. Us women had to pin our dresses up roundst
our neck fo’ we stepped in dat ole ’baccy field, else we’d git a
lashin’. Git a lashin’ effen you cut a leaf fo’ its ripe. Marse ain’
cared what we do in de wheat an’ corn field cause dat warn’t
nothin’ but food for us niggers, but you better not do nothin’
to ‘baccy leaves.
Quoted in Siegel (1987):98
6
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’
The impact of colonialism before 1800
Despite the attention it received from European physicians, botanists and
herbalists, tobacco retained the character of an expensive herbal medicine
until the end of the sixteenth century. Exactly where it fitted into
European perceptions of the New World economy is unclear. Despite the
scattered references to tobacco cultivation in Brazil and in the SpanishAmerican possessions during the sixteenth century, there is very little
hard evidence on quantities produced and amounts consumed. Historical
sources pertaining to the imports of colonial commodities into Seville, the
principal port for Spanish-American trade, are silent on tobacco before
the first decade of the seventeenth century, despite a thriving commerce
in other New World medicines and spices, such as sarsaparilla,
canafistula and ginger (Lorenzo Sanz 1979:605–13). It could of course be
that tobacco entered Seville illicitly, that is without paying customs, but
in the absence of any direct evidence its quantity remains wholly
unknown. No other European country, with the possible exception of
Portugal, had direct access to the New World’s tobacco supply before the
end of the century. Unless or until other evidence emerges we can
conclude only that no regular commerce existed in tobacco before the last
decade of the sixteenth century at the earliest. Tobacco was being
cultivated in Europe before then but, as in the case of colonial
production, nothing is known of its quantity (von Gernet 1988:32–3, 61).
Searching through the documentary evidence one is struck above all by
a general lack of interest in tobacco as a commercial commodity as
opposed to its value as a miracle cure. Why this should be is not entirely
clear. It may have to do with the fact that the sixteenth century resonated
with the lure of gold and silver. Spanish conquistadors and colonists
accumulated a vast treasure store of gold in the wake of their military
conquests between 1520 and 1540 (Bakewell 1987:203). The belief that
more gold could be discovered, despite the fact that few considerable
deposits were uncovered, continued to draw Europeans across the
Atlantic. Following on from the discovery of silver deposits near Mexico
City around 1530, and culminating in the most important strike of them all
in Potosí in 1545, Spanish attention shifted to the problems of extracting,
processing and transporting an increasing amount of silver across the
Atlantic (Bakewell 1987:206). Once other European powers, especially
those hostile to Spain and Spanish influence, recognized that Spanish
power rested on New World bullion, their interest became either to find
their own deposits or to cut the Spanish supply lines (Elliott 1987:98–9).
During most of the second half of the sixteenth century European
commercial interests in the New World revolved around silver and gold.
Another reason for the lack of commercial interest in tobacco may have
been that as long as the Amerindians controlled the supply there was
little scope for its incorporation within European commercial capitalism.
The problem here was not so much that Amerindians would not, and could
not, respond to market forces—they managed it for other medicines such
as sarsaparilla and guaiacum, and, of course, in North America, for
beaver pelts—but that tobacco was sacred in the sense described in
Chapter 2 (Amerindians, it turned out, were very happy to receive
tobacco from Europeans, as they did increasingly in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; but giving it away on European terms was quite
another matter) (Trigger 1991b). To transform tobacco from an
Amerindian into a European commodity required Europeans to
appropriate the means of production. This, in turn, required settlers who
would be willing to migrate for a cash crop, a magnet with little appeal in
an age of glitter (Boyd-Bowman 1976; Elliott 1985; MacLeod 1973).
Before the end of the sixteenth century Spanish colonists had managed
to launch fledgling sugar plantations on Hispaniola, but these were in
steep decline by the mid-1570s (Ratekin 1954:12). By contrast the
Portuguese were successful in their exploitation of the sugar cane on
their Brazilian settlements; by the end of the sixteenth century Brazil was
the world’s largest producer of cane sugar (Schwartz 1987:67–98). By 1600
at least 200,000 emigrants had left Spain for the New World (Slicher van
Bath 1986:25); in 1585 the European population in Brazil stood at around
30,000 (Johnson 1987:31). The French, English and Dutch were hardly yet
in evidence. The French had ventured into New World enterprises in
several different ways, but before the end of the sixteenth century none
was successful. Cartier’s voyages in the St Lawrence River early in the
1530s did not lead to colonization partly because of the disappointment
at not finding gold and partly because of the difficult climate and health
hazards faced by the few colonists who attempted settlements in the St
Lawrence Valley (Meinig 1986:25–6). Huguenot initiatives in Brazil and
Florida failed (von Gernet 1988:26–9). Jean Ribault’s 1562 settlement on
Port Royal Island, South Carolina, also foundered, partly because of
internal conflict and partly because it was successfully attacked by the
Spanish (Meinig 1986:27). Ribault’s purpose was similar to that of Cartier
—the search for gold, particularly the legendary Cibola, the Seven Cities
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 129
of Gold—but none was to be found (Buker 1970). He also considered
the settlement as a base for attacking Spanish treasure fleets on their
return to Seville (Shammas 1978:154). The account of Ribault’s voyage
circulated in the English court, and this clearly influenced English
enterprises in the New World which, for most of the second half of the
sixteenth century, were concerned to find gold and silver, to attack the
Spanish treasure fleets and even to conquer all of Spanish America
(Shammas 1978). Even the first but disastrous English settlement in North
America, on Roanoke Island in 1585, was established with the express
purpose of providing a convenient base for piracy and privateering,
targeting the Spanish treasure fleets (Kupperman 1984). As the French
were drawn by the legend of Cibola, so too were the English inspired by
the legend of El Dorado, which was believed to be sited at the southern
end of the Orinoco, and first investigated by the Spanish from New
Granada (Hemming 1978; Lorimer 1989). As for the Dutch, their primary
interests in the New World were very similar to those of the English,
though settlements were not, at the time, on the agenda (Goslinga 1971;
Israel 1989).
Through the next century the French, now under the inspiration of
Samuel de Champlain, succeeded in establishing permanent settlements
on the banks of the St Lawrence and Acadia, though both areas struggled
to increase their numbers. By the end of the century the French
population of North America was probably 15,000, almost 95 per cent of
whom lived in New France (Davies 1974:77). The Dutch, too, failed to
make a significant impact on the settlement of the New World, though
they managed to establish colonies in the Hudson River Valley, the
Caribbean and on the north-eastern coast of South America. The largest
Dutch colony in the New World, that of New Amsterdam, was lost to the
English in 1664 after which 10,000 Europeans became the first residents
of New York (Meinig 1986:119).
While the French struggled, and the Dutch experienced varying levels
of success, the seventeenth-century settlement of North America
belonged almost entirely to England. The change in English attitudes
towards the New World is one of the most important changes to occur in
the history of colonialism and one of the most difficult to explain
completely. Certainly there is clear evidence of a highly significant shift
from privateering to legitimate trade. During the latter part of the
sixteenth century, as the Spanish bullion fleets became larger and better
defended, privateering became less remunerative, and the ‘gentlemen
adventurers’ (usually funded by courtiers) became increasingly interested
in other commodities, of which tobacco was perhaps the most important
(Lorimer 1978; Shammas 1978). By the time the Anglo-Spanish truce of
1604 outlawed the preying on Spanish bullion ships, even the otherwise
conservative London merchants were aware of the profits to be made
130 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
from relatively risky, long-distance trading in ‘exotic’ commodities, an
alteration from their preoccupation with Europe and the steady cloth
trade (Shammas 1978:164–6; Brenner 1972; Fisher 1976; Quinn 1974). The
year 1600 saw the incorporation of the English East India Company, an
event that reflected the change in mercantile ideology and outlook.
It was in this transformed political and economic climate that the
settlement of Englishmen became a strategy in the competition for the
New World. Yet, as the history of the first permanent colonies makes
amply clear, settlement did not necessarily mean the construction of a
society abroad. On 10 April 1606 a charter was granted in London to the
newly-founded Virginia Company. In May 1607, just over a year later,
105 colonists from an expedition led by Captain Christopher Newport
chose to establish themselves on a site on the James River that they
named Jamestown, and the settlement of Virginia had begun (Quinn
1974; Morgan 1975). The primary aim of settling these colonists was to
turn a profit for the shareholders. Only men were sent on the first voyage
and many, if not most, of them were company employees. Women and
children did not arrive in the fledgling colony until 1609 (Meinig 1986:38–
9). It is clear from the occupations of the first arrivals, as well as from the
fact that women were not included, that the Virginia Company intended
the colony to process the riches of Virginia, through extractive industries
such as mining and glass making (Morgan 1975:87).
Life in the new colony was very difficult, to say the least. Though the
population of Virginia had grown to around 500 at the beginning of 1610,
most of the colony’s population starved in the winter, and in spring of
the same year there were only 60 Virginians left (Morgan 1975:63). One
year later, in May, the new governor of the colony, Sir Thomas Dale,
upon his arrival in Jamestown was appalled to find that the colonists had
abrogated their responsibilities to subsistence and, instead of working in
the fields, they were at ‘their daily and usuall workes, bowling in the
streetes’ (Morgan 1975:73). The population hardly recovered. In 1616 the
colony was reported to have 351 European inhabitants (McCusker and
Menard 1985:118). Between 1607 and 1624 (when the Virginia Company
was wound up) at least 6,000 people emigrated to Virginia: by 1625 only
1,200 Europeans were left (Kupperman 1979:24).
Tragic as this was, there was a slight glimmer of hope for English
society abroad in 1612. In that year John Rolfe, who is perhaps better
remembered as the husband of Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, chief
of the Pamankey Indians of Virginia, successfully grew the colony’s first
crop of tobacco. According to William Strachey in his account of Virginia
in 1612, the type of tobacco grown there ‘which the Saluages call Apooke…
is not of the best kynd, yt is but poore and weake, and of a byting tast, yt
growes not fully a yard aboue grownd…the leaves are short and thick…’
(Strachey 1953:122–3). Though he experimented with cultivating this
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 131
variety of tobacco, known to have been Nicotiana rustica, Rolfe’s success
came with seed imported from Trinidad which, again according
to Strachey, was the best tobacco to have and was already growing to
some extent in the colony (von Gernet 1988:137; Strachey 1953:38). Ralph
Hamor, the secretary of the colony, was the first to credit Rolfe with
establishing the cultivation of what we now know was the variety
Nicotiana tabacum (Hamor 1957:24). From whom Rolfe acquired his seeds
is unknown though there was contact between Virginia and Trinidad
through English merchants and seamen. One possible source was Sir
Thomas Roe who was in Trinidad in February 1611 and had joined the
Council of the Virginia Company in 1607, but there is no definite proof
(Lorimer 1978: 141; Lorimer 1989:37). Any of the considerable number of
English and Dutch traders plying around Trinidad and the Orinoco delta
and landing in Virginia could have conveyed the seeds to Rolfe, or
someone else in the colony (Lorimer 1978; Kupp 1973). Rolfe’s crop
apparently arrived in England in July 1613 aboard the Elizabeth (Brown
1964:639; Hillier 1971: 115, 410, 435). Rolfe was not alone in
experimenting with tobacco. Others were clearly involved in the attempt
to produce a marketable product by finding, in particular, new ways of
curing and preparing it (Kingsbury 1933:92–3).
Ralph Hamor saw the possibilities for the colony and in his account of
Virginia in 1614 he emphasized to prospective emigrants the profitability
of the tobacco plant. ‘The valuable commoditie of Tobacco’, he wrote, ‘of
such esteeme in England (if there were nothing else) which every man
may plant, and with the least part of his labour, tend and care will
returne him both cloathes and other necessaries. For the goodnesse
whereof, answerable to west-Indie Trinidado…let no man doubt’ (Hamor
1957:24). In the same year the Elizabeth once again brought tobacco back
from Virginia, perhaps as much as 170 pounds (Thornton 1921–2:496).
Two years later Virginia exported 1,250 pounds and in 1628, fifteen years
after the Elizabeth’s first deposit of Virginia tobacco in England, exports
reached 370,000 pounds. As one historian has argued, Virginia’s economy
exploded into a boom, and wherever tobacco could be planted, it was
(Morgan: 1971).
In more than one sense Rolfe’s success with tobacco came at just the
right time. Since 1592, in which year the island of Trinidad was settled by
Spaniards, English ships had been calling either at the island or on the
nearby mainland to trade for tobacco with the local Amerindians
(Lorimer 1978:125). Spanish settlers were cultivating tobacco on the
Venezuela coast and New Andalucia. The high price of tobacco attracted
the attention of many northern European ships, including English ones,
who engaged in what must have been a lucrative smuggling trade. Even
though tobacco cultivation on these Spanish settlements was increasing
considerably, so much of the tobacco crop was traded illicitly that the
132 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
King of Spain, in a royal cédula of 25 August 1606, forbade the planting of
tobacco for a period of ten years (Arcila Farias 1946:82). This effectively
ended tobacco cultivation in Venezuela for more than a decade and it
was not until 1620 that the trade in Venezuelan tobacco recovered to the
level it had reached before 1606. Meanwhile, and in direct response to the
destruction of the Venezuela plantations, the northern Europeans turned
their attention to the small Spanish settlements in Trinidad and the
Orinoco (Lorimer 1978: 129–31). The number of European ships calling at
Port of Spain for contraband tobacco increased considerably over the
following years: in the season 1608–9 there were twenty ships, thirty the
following year, and in February 1611 alone fifteen ships were reported
trading (Lorimer 1978:132, 133–4). The trade, however, came to a climax
in 1612. Spanish authorities sought to bring to an end the Trinidad
operations, as they had previously ended those in Venezuela. In 1612 the
resident investigator forbade cultivation and so there was no tobacco
available for the next season (Lorimer 1978: 147). Though the illicit trade
was not completely cut off, it appears that after 1612 only the Dutch
continued to ply the waters for contraband tobacco (Lorimer 1978:147).
There is no direct evidence connecting the events in Trinidad with John
Rolfe. It may just be a coincidence that Rolfe harvested his first crop in
the same year that the Spanish authorities brought tobacco cultivation in
their possessions to a complete halt, but if so it is an amazing one. There
was a fair degree of overlap between those merchants with an interest in
the contraband tobacco trade and those with an interest in the Virginia
Company (Lorimer 1978). The Virginia Company did not envisage
tobacco as a possible crop for the colony; it was never mentioned in the
list of potential commodities. The question as to why the Company did
not seize upon tobacco as a crop in the early years, despite its proven
profitability, may be answered partly by the existence of the contraband
trade.
However, there is something even more significant for the history of
tobacco in the experiences of Spanish-American tobacco cultivation. First,
by the end of the sixteenth century, at the latest, Europeans had already
learned from Amerindians how to cultivate tobacco. According to one
estimate, the Trinidad and Orinoco plantations supplied as much as 200,
000 pounds of tobacco annually in the early years of the seventeenth
century (Lorimer 1978:136). Bartering with Amerindians for the sacred
herb was clearly a thing of the past. Second, Spanish cultivators were
curing their tobacco in a more complex way than their Amerindian
counterparts, a practice that resulted in a product with both a different
appearance and a different taste. (Whether the Spanish developed this
method on their own or, as is more likely, were imitating practices
followed in Brazil, is unclear.) An English writer on tobacco, known to us
only as C.T., contrasted the different curing practices of Spanish and
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 133
Amerindian producers in a pamphlet published in 1615. From the
description that follows it can be seen clearly that Spanish methods were
not only more involved but were linked to other colonial enterprises in
the New World:
The naturall colour of Tobacco is a deepe yellow or a light tawnie:
and when the Indians themselves sold it us for Knives, Hatchets,
Beads, Belles, and like merchandise, it had no other complexion, as
all the Tobacco this day hath, which is brought from the coast of
Guiana, from Saint Vincents, from Saint Lucia, from Dominica, and
other places, where we buy it but from the naturall people; and all
these sorts are cleane, and so is that of St. Domingo, where the
Spaniards have not yet learned the Art of Sophistication…[their]
Tobacco is noynted and slubbered over with a kind of iuyce, or
syrope made of Saltwater, of the dregges or filth of Sugar, called
Malasses, of blacke honey, Guiana pepper, and leeze of Wine… This
they doe to giue it colour and glosse, to make it the more
merchantable…
(C.T. 1615)
Both André Thevet’s account of tobacco curing methods by Brazilian
Indians and Girolamo Benzoni’s account of the Taino of Hispaniola
support what C.T. describes, namely that Amerindians simply dried their
tobacco before consuming it (Dickson 1954:119; Benzoni 1857:80–1).
Finally, the methods employed by the Spanish authorities to stamp out
contraband and smuggling indicate that tobacco was a commodity to
which governments had to give special attention.
The success of the Spanish plantations in Venezuela, together with the
high prices that tobacco fetched in Europe, gave the plant commercial
viability (Lorimer 1973:270). The same factors were instrumental in
linking tobacco with colonization in the minds of those Englishmen who
established small settlements in South America in the years before and
after the founding of Jamestown. Robert Harcourt, who maintained a
small settlement on the Wiapoco River in Guiana from 1609, argued in
his history of the colony that tobacco was a linchpin of successful
colonization. The allusion to Spanish techniques of curing is important to
note:
There is yet another profitable commoditie to bee reaped in Guiana,
and that is by Tabacco, which albeit some dislike, yet the generalitie
of men in this Kingdome doth with great affection entertaine it. It is
not only in request in this our Countrey of England, but also in
Ireland, the Neatherlands, in all the Easterly Countreyes and
Germany; and most of all amongst the Turkes, and in Barbary. The
134 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
price it holdeth is great, the benefit our Merchants gaine thereby is
infinite, and the Kings rent for the Custome thereof is not a little. The
Tabacco that was brought into this Kingdome in the yeare of our
Lord 1610. was at least worth 60. thousand pounds: And since that
time the store that has yeerly come in, was little lesse. It is planted,
gathered, seasoned, and made up fit for the Merchant in short time,
and with easie labour. But when we first arrived in those parts,
wee altogether wanted the true skill and knowledge how to order
it, which now of late we happily have learned of the Spaniards
themselves, whereby I dare presume to say, and hope to prove,
within few moneths, (as others also of sound judgement, and great
experience doe hold opinion) that onely this commoditie Tabacco;
(so much sought after, and desired) will bring as great a benefite
and profit to the undertakers, as ever the Spaniards gained by the
best and richest Silver Myne in all their Indies, considering the
charge of both.
(Purchas 1906:385–6)
In 1612 the settlers, together with others from Holland, were
concentrating entirely on tobacco. Indeed tobacco was crucial to the
survival of all the English, and Irish, settlements that appeared on the
Wiapoco, as well as the Amazon. Philip Purcell’s group of Irish settlers
were sending tobacco to England and Holland by 1617 and, according to
a Portuguese account, the English, Irish, and Dutch settlements in the
Amazon were prospering with tobacco and, apparently, by 1623 shipping
as much as 800,000 pounds to Europe (Lorimer 1989:46, 57, 76). Thomas
Roe inspired many of the settlements in the Amazon, together with
merchants from Zeeland, in the Dutch Republic, as well as the Dutch
West India Company after 1621 (Lorimer 1989:75–6).
The speed with which European settlements were established and took
to tobacco cultivation was remarkable. The choice of tobacco was
deliberate, and the case of the colonization of Bermuda provides a clear
case of this connection. Bermuda was discovered uninhabited in 1609
when a ship carrying Sir Thomas Gates, Virginia’s new deputy governor,
and Sir George Somers, together with a company of 150, ran aground just
off the coast (Bernhard 1985:57–8). Tobacco was listed as one of the
possible crops to be grown in the islands, in accounts written at the time
of the first venture. Experimental cultivation of tobacco was undertaken
at about the same time as Rolfe was trying it in Virginia (Craven 1937:
353). It was already growing, to some extent, by 1613 (Ives 1984:4). As the
population of the islands increased, so too did the output of tobacco:
exports to England totalled 30,000 pounds in 1617/18, 80,000 pounds in
1623 and 184,000 in 1628 (Craven 1937:355–6; Williams 1957:414). The
case of Maryland, first settled in 1634, while different in important
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 135
respects to Bermuda, nevertheless underlines the pivotal role of tobacco
in settlement. George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, clearly perceived
the importance of tobacco to a successful settlement in 1629, when he
decided to abandon his settlement in Newfoundland and set sail for
Virginia (Wroth 1954). For various reasons he was not allowed to settle
his group of colonists in Virginia, and returned to England to press for
the rights of settlement in the New World (Menard and Carr 1982:175).
He died before seeing his vision materialize, and his son, the second Lord
Baltimore, inherited not only his father’s estate but also his project.
According to historians of early Maryland, the colonists were at first
encouraged not to grow tobacco and, indeed, during the first year of
settlement no crop was sown (Menard and Carr 1982:187, 199). However,
it was not too long before the tobacco infection hit the early Marylanders.
By 1637 tobacco was already the colony’s currency, and in 1639 the
colony, with a population of less than 300, exported 100,000 pounds of
tobacco to London (Menard and Carr 1982:189, 198).
The English settlement of the Caribbean islands did not get under way
until the 1620s, though one or two earlier but unsuccessful attempts had
been made. Once again the crucial role of tobacco is clear, as is the
connection with the earlier English settlements in the Amazon. The first of
the Caribbean islands to be settled was St Kitts, founded by Sir Thomas
Warner in 1624. In Warner’s own words, the island offered great hope
because it was ‘a very convenient place for the planting of tobaccoes,
which ever was a rich commoditie’ (Harlow 1925:18). Warner had first
encountered tobacco cultivation on the English settlements in the
Amazon, and was undoubtedly strongly influenced by this experience in
assessing the potentialities of his newly founded island (Lorimer 1989:
70). Arriving back in London, he managed to persuade a group of
London merchants to invest in the enterprise and in January 1624 about
twenty men arrived in St Kitts and began cultivating tobacco (Andrews
1984:301). The following year Warner returned to England with the
colony’s first crop of 9,500 pounds, the impressive sale of which
confirmed that he had been right about tobacco. He returned to St Kitts in
1626 with a party of some 400 settlers (Batie 1976:6–7). The island was
divided between English and French settlers in 1627. Ten years later, in
1637, the English population of St Kitts stood at 12,000; in the following
year nearly 500,000 pounds of St Kitts tobacco arrived in London
(Gemery 1980:223; Watts 1987: 158).
The settlement of Barbados was also planned with tobacco as the
pivotal cash crop. The driving force behind this enterprise was Sir
William Courteen, the leading figure of a wealthy Anglo-Dutch trading
firm with interests in the New World. One of Courteen’s associates, a
Dutch Catholic named Aert Groenwegen, successfully founded a small
Dutch settlement on the Essequibo River and began to grow tobacco
136 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
(Goslinga 1971: 79, 81). It was from this Dutch settlement that the seeds
and knowledge of tobacco culture were transplanted to Barbados (Innes
1970:14). As in St Kitts, the population increased as tobacco production
expanded. In 1638, with a population of some 10,000, Barbados exported
205,000 pounds of tobacco to London (Gemery 1980:219; Watts 1987:158).
In the founding and settlement of St Kitts and Barbados, as well as in
the cultivation of tobacco in both Virginia and Bermuda, there is
clear evidence of a link to Spanish experiences with tobacco in
Venezuela. Once the English settlements were thriving on tobacco,
further settlements appeared with tobacco as the cash crop. One such
settlement was begun on Providence Island, off the coast of Nicaragua,
first assessed by English vessels in 1628/9 (Appleby 1987:233). The
enterprise was headed by a consortium, formed in 1630 as the Providence
Island Company, and included among its Puritan leaders those with a
controlling interest in Bermuda (Kupperman 1988:73). The governor of
Bermuda, Philip Bell, was so convinced of tobacco’s promise in a more
tropical climate that, influenced by Sir Thomas Warner’s success on St
Kitts, he proposed to lead the first settlement on Providence Island and
he became the colony’s first governor (Batie 1976:7). The settlements of
Nevis in 1628, Antigua and Montserrat in 1632, all of which were initiated
by Warner, were based initially on tobacco (Watts 1987:169–70). Thus, as
far as English colonialism was concerned, by 1640 the English population
of the West Indies, Bermuda and Virginia, estimated at 40,000, was
producing just over 1,250,000 pounds of tobacco (Gemery 1980:212; Pagan
1979:253).
English successes with colonization and tobacco cultivation did not go
unnoticed in other parts of Europe, least of all by the French. Martinique
was settled in 1635 by colonists from St Christophe, the French part of the
island adjoining St Kitts, led by Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, who had also
founded the French settlement on St Christophe in 1627. Not surprisingly,
the Martinique settlers, who were experienced tobacco growers, began
tobacco cultivation on the island (May 1930:87). On the other hand,
Guadeloupe was settled directly from France in the same year, 1635, yet
tobacco was again chosen as the cash crop. For both islands tobacco
continued to underwrite their wealth until the 1660s (Schnakenbourg
1980: 54). Roughly one-third of the acreage of the two islands devoted to
cash crops was accounted for by tobacco in 1671 (Schnakenbourg 1980:49;
Kimber 1988:128). St Domingue, which became settled by the French
during the second half of the seventeenth century, also established
tobacco as the primary cash crop (Davies 1974:147; Price 1973:83).
The other major player in the tobacco enterprise in the seventeenth
century was Portugal. Tobacco began to be grown commercially in the
Bahian region in the north-east of Brazil by the end of the sixteenth
century, though some historians give a later date (Nardi 1986:15; Hanson
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 137
1982:150–1; BM Add. Mss 20,846 fol. 167; von Gernet 1988:149). Unlike
the English and French for whom tobacco was the sine qua non of
settlement, the Portuguese had already settled the region with sugar
plantations (Schwartz 1985:82–5). Even so, a considerable part of the
increase in the population of the region can be attributed directly to
tobacco cultivation (Flory 1978:191).
Elsewhere in the Americas tobacco was also cultivated by the early
colonists, though, compared with the Chesapeake colonies and
Brazil, output was meagre, The Dutch were growing tobacco in New
Netherland as early as 1629; Swedish colonists in New Sweden (in the
present state of Delaware) were harvesting a crop early in the 1640s; and
even the habitants in inhospitable New France were producing a small
yield (von Gernet 1988:149–86).
The seventeenth century was a formative but complicated period in the
history of tobacco. Most historians have not fully appreciated the role of
tobacco in the settlement of the New World, and the powerful attraction
it held as a settler’s crop. They have also not acknowledged the fact that
the settlers were also heavy consumers of tobacco and treated it much in
the same way as their counterparts in Europe. The addiction of the
colonists to tobacco should not be dismissed as a possible factor in
choosing tobacco as a staple crop (von Gernet 1988:149–86, 188–9).
Considering all the evidence, there is little doubt that initial settlement of
the English, French, and Dutch in the Caribbean and Bermuda would not
have been possible without tobacco, and without the knowledge that
Spanish settlers had gained about harvesting and curing the product.
There are several reasons why tobacco was the preferred crop on which
to found colonies in the New World. The next chapter will explore the
social and cultural factors but at this point the economic reasons for the
choice of tobacco need some attention.
It should be stressed that both English and French seventeenth-century
colonialism were primarily commercial in nature. The Chesapeake,
Bermuda and Caribbean colonies were all funded by private investment.
Tobacco had two major advantages over other crops: first, its growing
cycle was short, on average nine months from planting to being ready for
market; and second, it could grow in various soils and climates, with the
result that no two consignments of tobacco were alike. Ships’ captains,
according to one account, on reaching the French Lesser Antilles were
reported to have remained on the islands long enough to harvest a crop
before returning to their home ports (Kimber 1988:107). According to
John Pory, writing from Jamestown in 1619, a man working by himself
had made a clear profit of £200 while another, working with six servants,
managed £1,000 (Kingsbury 1933:221). Even by the 1640s, after a fall in
prices, tobacco profits in Virginia could range from £225 to £300 per man
(Morgan 1975:110). In Barbados in 1628 even a planter producing a poor
138 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
quality leaf could expect a profit on his annual output of between £35 and
£56 (Batie 1976:7–8).
While such windfall profits were sufficient inducement to plant
tobacco in the New World, those who did not emigrate across the
Atlantic were no less attracted by the economics of this cash crop. It is
important to remember that Europeans first grew tobacco in Europe
itself, though until the end of the sixteenth century it was, as previously
argued, confined very much to physic gardens and not yet a commercial
crop. The origins and early history of European tobacco cultivation are
not very clear but some things are known. In France, for example,
cultivation appears to have begun in the 1620s in the south-east of the
country, in the Rhone and Garonne valleys, and in Alsace. By the 1640s
the area of cultivation had extended throughout the Garonne valley and
also westwards into the upper Dordogne (Price 1973:4–5). Tobacco
cultivation seems to have begun in Germany at about the same time as it
did in France. The main area of tobacco culture was in Brandenburg and
the Palatinate, but as the century advanced other areas were incorporated
(Tiedemann 1854:175). In Italy tobacco cultivation concentrated primarily
in the north, in the Veneto and generally in the northern plain (Comes
1893:93–105). During the eighteenth century cultivation spread to
northern Europe: in 1724, for example, the Swedish government
encouraged domestic cultivation (Roessingh 1978:29).
In England tobacco cultivation began in 1619 when two London
merchants entered into a partnership for growing tobacco around the
town of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire (Thirsk 1974:79). Precisely how
one of the partners, Henry Somerscales, acquired the knowledge of how
to cultivate tobacco is not known, but connections with both Virginia and
Dutch merchants existed (Thirsk 1974:78–80; Roessingh 1978:26). Within
ten years tobacco was growing more widely throughout Gloucestershire,
Worcestershire and fitfully in Wiltshire. Until 1640 the Avon Valley and
the Vale of Evesham were the principal centres of cultivation. Thereafter
tobacco growing spread generally throughout England and Wales. In
1655 tobacco was growing in fourteen English and Welsh counties and in
the next ten years a few more Welsh counties as well as Yorkshire and
East Anglia were added to the list (Thirsk 1974:94–5). Proof of tobacco’s
appeal to the small farmer is available in the shape of expected profits: in
1619 one acre of tobacco could have been expected to clear anywhere
from £29 to £100, at a time when the average annual earnings of a farm
labourer stood at £9 (Thirsk 1974:86–7).
How much tobacco was produced in England is unknown, but
whatever the level of output, it would have been no match for Dutch
tobacco cultivation, probably the largest in early modern Europe. The
beginnings of Dutch cultivation can be traced back to 1610 or 1615 in the
provinces of Zeeland and Utrecht (Roessingh 1978:23). Amersfoort, in
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 139
Utrecht Province, became the principal centre of tobacco cultivation,
retaining this position until the end of the eighteenth century. Even so,
tobacco cultivation diffused to other parts of the Dutch Republic, into the
provinces of Gelderland and Overijssel and the Duchy of Cleves
(Roessingh 1978: 27–8). As cultivation spread and intensified, output rose
substantially. Around 1675, the first year for which reliable figures exist,
total Dutch tobacco output stood at between 5 and 6 million pounds.
Peak production was reached in the first decade of the eighteenth century
at a level varying from 17 million to 28 million pounds (Roessingh 1978:
42; Price 1961: 88).
Taking the New World settlements together with those parts of Europe
where tobacco was cultivated, the seventeenth century was remarkable
for its rapid incorporation of the plant into its agrarian structure. Yet as
the century advanced the pattern of production changed considerably as
many areas either stopped cultivation altogether or experienced a sharp
decline in output. In the first category, the main casualties were the
English Caribbean settlements, England, parts of France and Portugal. The
timing and pattern of the abandonment of tobacco culture in the
Caribbean colonies is unclear. In terms of tobacco shipments to London it
is certainly the case that a maximum level was reached in 1638, when 675,
000 pounds of Barbadian and St Kitts tobacco reached England; two years
later the comparable figure was just over 200,000 pounds (Watts 1987:
158). By 1640 tobacco cultivation on Barbados was in severe depression, as
economic resources were shifted into cotton and indigo production
(Innes 1970: 16–19). But even as late as 1654, by which time we are told
that the sugar revolution had swept all before it, there is some evidence
that tobacco cultivation had not been abandoned, though compared to
the acreage then under sugar the amount was small (Innes 1970:16).
According to an account of Barbadian exports between August 1664 and
August 1665, 82 per cent of the islands’ exports by value were accounted
for by sugar and less than 1 per cent by tobacco (Puckrein 1984:60).
Whether and to what extent Barbadian tobacco entered intra-regional
American, rather than transatlantic, trade is unknown, though for other
commodities there was a brisk traffic (Morgan 1975:139–40). On St Kitts
tobacco cultivation certainly continued until the 1660s (Dunn 1973:121–
2). With the exception of Nevis, which had earlier converted to sugar, the
other Leeward Islands continued to produce tobacco well into the 1660s,
and probably later (Dunn 1973:123). By the turn of the eighteenth century,
England was still receiving almost 200,000 pounds of tobacco from the
West Indies, but after 1706 the amounts were insignificant (Gray and
Wyckoff 1940:24–6). Why Barbados, in particular, shifted so
wholeheartedly into sugar in such a short space of time is a question that
is still strongly debated. It appears that there are several reasons,
including the collapse of tobacco prices and the buoyancy of other,
140 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
especially sugar, prices; the discouragement of tobacco growing on the
island by order of the Privy Council to avoid over-production
throughout British America, and the interest shown by the ever-present
Dutch merchants in sugar, as well as in slaves (Batie 1976; Beckles 1985;
Green 1988). Whatever the reasons, it is clear that the tobacco era in
Barbados was crucial to the sugar revolution that so changed the island in
the 1640s. Of the 175 largest sugar planters in Barbados in 1680 no fewer
than 40 per cent had become established during the tobacco era (Puckrein
1984:65). Meanwhile in England domestic tobacco cultivation became a
problem for the Virginia Company who, in 1619, successfully persuaded
the Privy Council to ban domestic cultivation (Thirsk 1974:94).
Enforcement over the next two decades was ineffective, and during the
political turmoil of the 1640s tobacco growers were left alone. In 1652 the
Council of State resumed the government’s intent to ban domestic
cultivation, but enforcement once again proved difficult. Finally, in 1688–
9, the Privy Council succeeded where it had previously failed. With the
help of the Royal Army, who had harassed tobacco growers over the
previous two decades but now attacked them and burnt their fields,
cultivation finally came to an end (Thirsk 1974:95). The French
government also sought to ban domestic cultivation, but this was not
extended to the politically sensitive areas in the southwest, or to Alsace
and Artois. The arrêt of 1676 and another in 1719 were successful in
containing domestic cultivation (Price 1973:143, 294). It was left to the
Revolution to restore the rights of Frenchmen to cultivate tobacco
wherever they wished. As for Portugal, it is clear that domestic
cultivation was suppressed as early as 1647, though how successfully is not
known (Lugar 1977:35). There is little doubt, however, that once the state
monopoly was reorganized in 1674 domestic production would have
been extinguished (Lucio d’Azevedo 1947:287; Nardi 1986).
In the French Caribbean recent research maintains that the growth of
tobacco cultivation paralleled that of sugar until the 1670s
(Schnakenbourg 1980: Petitjean Roget 1980). The pattern of output on the
islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe is not known but evidence from
Martinique certainly suggests that production grew until at least 1671
(Petitjean Roget 1980:1144, 1396). On Guadeloupe the incursion by sugar
seems to have begun earlier and to have been more revolutionary than in
Martinique—that is, not very different from what happened on Barbados
(Schnakenbourg 1968). In 1671, probably at the peak level of production,
output on the two islands surpassed 1 million pounds, but as major
producers of colonial tobacco neither island was of much significance
after the 1680s. On St Domingue output probably peaked at about the
same time as on Martinique and Guadeloupe but the decline was more
protracted (Price 1973:90–115). Still, by 1700, there were a few planters
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 141
growing tobacco on St Domingue, as the island’s economy was much
more diversified than the other French possessions (Trouillot 1981; 1982).
Between 1600 and 1700 the tobacco market was severely shaken. Small,
especially island, producers had abandoned the dream crop and almost
all of them, with the notable exception of Bermuda, turned effectively to
sugar. The eighteenth century was dominated mostly by large mainland
producers: the Chesapeake colonies, and Brazil in the New World;
Holland and Germany in Europe.
The graph below (see Figure 6.1) shows the eighteenth-century history
of tobacco production according to the best figures available. The
principal features of the period are clear enough. Dutch and Brazilian
output remained fairly stable throughout the century, averaging around
8 million pounds of tobacco in each case. Spanish-American production,
using imports into Cadiz as a proxy, was distinctly smaller, averaging
around 2 million pounds annually. All of this was overwhelmed by
production in the English colonies on Chesapeake Bay, from where
tobacco exports to Britain soared from 37,166,000 pounds in 1700 to a
maximum of over 100 million pounds in 1771 (USBC 1975:1190).
At this point no further comment is needed on the Dutch and Brazilian
figures, but the Spanish-American data require some discussion. It is
important to note that by the end of the seventeenth century Cuba had
become the principal source of tobacco imports into Spain. During the last
decade of the century, for example, Cuba accounted for 83 per cent of
total tobacco imports into Cadiz, in contrast to the situation around midcentury when the island’s share of tobacco imports stood at only 2 per
cent (Garcia Fuentes 1980:369; Rivero Muñiz: 1964). Cuba’s rise to
dominance was at the expense, primarily, of Venezuela, whose export
economy in the eighteenth century turned increasingly to cacao, indigo
and hides (Ferry 1981; Fisher 1985:60). In addition to Cuba’s expansion,
tobacco cultivation also grew in Mexico and Costa Rica, though in the
latter case almost all of the tobacco entered into intra-American, rather
than Atlantic, trade (Deans 1984; Acuña Ortega 1978).
Tobacco played a key role in the European colonial enterprise. Once
the methods of cultivation, and curing, were both appropriated by
Europeans, tobacco became rapidly transformed into an essential
commodity of the transatlantic economy, and provided the economic
foundations of successful settlement. Although tobacco was being widely
cultivated in New World settlements, by the end of the seventeenth
century most of the island planters ceased production, and turned their
attention to other commodities, notably sugar. By 1700, and continuing
for the next hundred years, Brazil and the Chesapeake colonies accounted
for almost the entire output of New World tobacco, Cuba’s output being
relatively small. This pattern was, however, challenged in the following
two centuries as tobacco cultivation spread rapidly throughout the world,
142 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Figure 6.1 Tobacco quantities: Chesapeake, Brazil, Spanish America and Dutch Republic 1620–1800 (official figures). (Broken
lines: incomplete data.)
Source: as in text
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 143
partly because of its value for the new colonialism of the nineteenth
century and partly because of its value to many countries in the world
searching for a place in the international economic system, a theme
explored in Chapter 8.
Settlements based on tobacco culture were the beginnings of an
international circuit of tobacco that spanned the globe satisfying a
complex pattern of demand. Europe controlled this circuit as it also
accounted for most of the demand. The role of the merchant or trader
was therefore critical to the success of tobacco in Europe at the same time
as it was fundamental to the success of settlement and colonialism in the
New World. The merchant and grower were natural partners in the
exchange, but tobacco attracted other vested interests who at times were
in conflict with one another. For reasons that will be explained later in
this chapter the state quickly became involved in the exchange of
tobacco. It also opened up a significant opportunity for smuggling, a
trade that caused perennial concerns throughout the colonial period.
Even without the interference of the state, the peculiarities of the colonial
system as it operated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
brought merchants into conflict with growers. An uneasy, rather than a
mutually beneficial, relationship characterized tobacco commerce.
Before the regular imports into England of Chesapeake tobacco in the
latter years of the second decade of the seventeenth century, England
received its consignments of tobacco from Spanish America either
indirectly and officially, from Seville and Cadiz, or directly and
unofficially, from the Venezuelan and Trinidadian plantations. Precisely
how much tobacco reached the English consumer before the second
decade of the seventeenth century is not known. Official figures refer
only to the value, not to the volume, of imports, and those records that
survive show that the imports of Spanish tobacco rose from around £8,
000 in 1603 to over £44,000 in 1616 (Pagan 1979:248). Other sources,
however, give an indication of volume, showing a rise from an annual
import of 25,000 pounds at the beginning of the century to between 50,
000 and 75,000 at the start of the second decade (Gray and Wyckoff 1940:
18). Even though these figures cannot themselves be taken as indicative
of the true level of tobacco imports, the trends they suggest are supported
by the available figures on the export of tobacco from Spanish America.
These show a considerable increase, from a level of 25,000 pounds at the
end of the sixteenth century to a level approaching 60,000 pounds in 1610
(Arcila Farias 1946:81; Chaunu 1956:1032–3).
These are only the official figures, however. How much came through
contraband is not known with any certainty, but there is little doubt that
it was considerable, perhaps as much as 60 per cent of the English
consumption in 1610 (Lorimer 1978:136–7; Gray and Wyckoff 1940:18).
The temptation to contraband trade must have been considerable at the
144 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
time. It has been estimated that English traders would have expected to
pay about 3s. per pound at source directly from planters and, of course,
clandestinely in Trinidad and the Orinoco plantations (Lorimer 1973:
271). This figure was not very different from the duty payable in England,
which, itself, was not very different from the freight rate across the
Atlantic (Lorimer 1973:271–2). Once it hit the market, Spanish tobacco
could fetch as much as 40s. per pound (Lorimer 1978:137).
Those who chose the risky, but highly lucrative, path of contraband
trade in the New World were not necessarily, as one might suspect,
traders of dubious reputation. Though the background of most of them
remains obscure, at least 10 per cent of them were merchants of
considerable means, with commercial and financial interests, and a
further 10 per cent were London grocers (Lorimer 1978:137–8).
English contraband trade around the Orinoco virtually collapsed in
1612, as Spanish authorities clamped down on the illicit trade through
various means, including the rather drastic action of forbidding the
planting of tobacco, as happened in that same year (Lorimer 1978:147).
Once tobacco was cultivated for export in Virginia and Bermuda,
however, important changes began to take place in tobacco’s commercial
system which, in turn, had important implications for all vested interests.
The commercial history of tobacco in the period until the 1630s is a
complicated affair because it touches upon so many aspects of the English
fiscal and colonial system that was in the process of being created (Beer
1959:101–75). At the same time tobacco was also a focus for much of the
political infighting that characterized this period of English history. To
enter into this viper’s nest would detract from the main point of this
chapter and its details have been well documented elsewhere (Beer 1959;
Craven 1932). For our purposes, however, some of the rough outlines of
the controversies surrounding tobacco in these early years need to be
covered, if only to provide a background to later developments. Possibly
the best way to do this is to bring on the two principal actors. First of all
there was the Crown, whose interests were fiscal and political. James I
was granted the right to levy customs duties on both imports and exports
by Parliament in 1604, and, as English trade grew in the early decades of
the seventeenth century, the value of this revenue grew; between 1604
and 1625, for example, customs revenue increased by 50 per cent (Beer
1959: 103). At the same time, however, the prevailing ideology of trade
considered imports as a drain on the country’s wealth, in the sense of
reducing its stock of precious metals. Tobacco was one of these imports
since, before 1612, the bulk of the tobacco consumed in England was
Spanish-American. Judging from his attack on tobacco in the famous
Counterblaste, James I’s solution to the problem was to prohibit the
importation of Spanish tobacco by economic means through an
excessively high duty—to have done it otherwise would have brought
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 145
him into conflict with merchants, consumers and the Spanish Crown,
with whom a peace treaty had been concluded in 1604. The total duty
payable on tobacco shot up from 2d. to 82d. per pound though it fell back
sharply in 1608 to steady at 24d. per pound by 1615 (Beer 1959:108–9).
Imports did not shrink: on the contrary, the total import of tobacco,
primarily Spanish-American in origin, more than tripled. This was, of
course, entirely unexpected, but so was the inflated size of the
Exchequer’s purse. Fortunately for the Crown, tobacco imports were
relatively small when compared to the imports of manufactured goods,
especially textiles, food and drink, particularly wine and brandy, and
industrial raw materials, such as raw silk (Davis 1973:55). These were the
problem goods in the mercantilist’s conception of the commercial system.
The economic potential of colonies lay principally in reducing the size of
the import bill by producing the same commodities or substitutes for
them (Shammas 1978). Both James I and Charles I pressed the Virginia
Company, and then the Governor and Council of Virginia, to produce a
commodity other than tobacco, and this pressure continued until well
into the century (Beer 1959:90–1; Morgan 1975:133–57, 180–95; Leonard
1967). Yet the Virginia (and Maryland) colonists, as we have seen, could
not be weaned from tobacco, and while its production soared the dream
of a diversified Chesapeake economy faded, and finally disappeared.
Precisely when the Crown began to accept the fact that, as Charles I put
it, the colony was ‘wholly built upon smoke’ is unclear, but there was no
avoiding the obvious: the revenue potential of tobacco was
overwhelming (Beer 1959:149). One can easily recognize the primacy of
the Exchequer in the actions of the Crown, especially in its relations with
the Virginia interests in England whether in the first instance in the shape
of the Virginia Company or, after 1624, with individual merchants.
The second principal actor or actors were the Virginia interests. In the
guise of the Virginia Company, these interests were exempt from import
duties above the customary ad valorem tax that all goods had to bear
(Beer 1959:110). As Virginia and Bermuda tobacco imports soared after
1615, the gap between the volume of imports and revenue began to
widen and, in response, the Crown entered into a long set of negotiations
with the Virginia Company, the results of which were extremely
significant for the subsequent history of tobacco. What emerged was an
agreement that the Virginia Company would pay twice as much in duties
as they customarily did: in return, the Crown would prohibit the
cultivation of tobacco in England (Beer 1959:112). This happened in 1620,
and signalled a victory for the colonial interests in England over domestic
interest groups. The problem of what to do about Spanish-American
tobacco was raised in the following year when, once again, the Virginia
interests put pressure on the Crown to grant them a monopoly of the
English market (Beer 1959:114). By 1623 the Virginia Company had
146 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
convinced the Crown of its case, and while the Crown did not wholly
forbid the importation of Spanish tobacco it did restrict it very severely
(Beer 1959:132). But the issue did not end there, for the problem of
Spanish tobacco continued for several more years at the same time as the
Crown accepted responsibility for governing Virginia in 1624 with the
dissolution of the Virginia Company. In the end the needs of the Exchequer
for revenue clashed with the Virginia interests’ claim for a monopoly and
the result was a compromise by which a certain, but limited, amount of
Spanish tobacco could be imported on which was levied an import duty
that was several times that on English colonial tobacco. (It should be
pointed out that Spanish-American tobacco enjoyed a considerable
following: to outlaw the importation altogether would have antagonized
these well-to-do consumers, at the same time as opening the trade to
smugglers.) But the Virginia interests scored victories in other areas,
particularly in getting the import duties on their tobacco reduced from a
high level of 9d. in 1623 to 2d. for the period 1640 to 1660; in getting all
tobacco shipped from the colonies to be landed first in England,
regardless of its final destination; in establishing a drawback system
whereby an importer would be reimbursed for a considerable proportion
of the duties paid if the tobacco were re-exported; and finally in turning
the attention of the Crown towards the retailers of tobacco as a source of
revenue through a licensing system (Gray and Wyckoff 1940:16; Beer
1959:161–5; Menard 1980:149).
The collusion between the Crown and the Virginia merchants resulted
in a considerable flow of revenue into the Exchequer. In the 1660s, for
example, tobacco duties from the Chesapeake colonies accounted for
roughly one-quarter of total English customs revenues, and as much as 5
per cent of total government income (Morgan 1975:193). In the last
quarter of the seventeenth century, despite an enormous increase in reexports, and a concomitant increase in drawbacks, tobacco income for the
Crown is estimated to have quadrupled (Morgan 1975:197). The Crown
seems to have been content at the levy of around 2d. per pound of
tobacco until 1685, when the duty was raised considerably to 5d. (Gray
and Wyckoff 1940:16). For the next seventy years the nominal duties on
Chesapeake tobacco were raised at various times, reaching a level of just
over 8d. per pound in 1758 (Menard 1980:151). The legal imports of
Chesapeake tobacco into England between 1685 and 1758 remained fairly
stable, suggesting that Crown revenue grew in line with the rising level
of duty. But the raising of duties also provided an incentive for
smuggling, a problem of the tobacco trade that became of enormous
concern to the state.
The first few decades of the commercial history of tobacco were
dominated by London and by London merchants. There were many
reasons why London should have taken this position but most important
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 147
among them, as far as tobacco is concerned, is that London was the seat
of the Virginia Company—as it was of all the chartered companies, such
as the East India Company—and that the Crown, in 1624, had proclaimed
that London should be the sole port for the importation of tobacco. This
was done primarily in order to facilitate the agreements drawn up with
the Virginia merchants over the import of Spanish tobacco and the
collection of duties (Beer 1959:197–9). The Crown’s order was not entirely
obeyed, however, and outports continued to trade in tobacco.
Nevertheless, London did account for the greatest bulk of the import
trade: available figures show that during the 1620s London handled, on
average, 78 per cent of the tobacco import trade (Williams 1957:418–20).
Contributing to this concentration was the decline in the number of
foreign merchants who imported Spanish tobacco and the relative fall in
the volume of Spanish tobacco landed in England (Pagan 1979:257–8).
Yet, while London monopolized the trade, the trade itself invited the
participation of many merchants, far more than in any other branch of
the colonial trade. In part this must have been because of the absence of a
monopoly, following on from the dissolution of the Virginia Company
and also because the trade itself did not require massive investment nor
did it incur high transaction costs. The trade had a certain, predictable
monotony about it in contrast to the other trades of the period to the
Levant and the Orient where transaction costs were appreciably higher
(Steensgaard 1974). A further incentive to wide participation came from
the progressive decline in the costs of shipping; in the late 1620s and 1630s,
transatlantic freight rates fell by more than half (Menard 1980:147–8).
This fall was primarily the result of improvements in packaging tobacco
for export.
The evidence bears out the attraction of the tobacco trade to small
operators, at least in the first few decades after the dissolution of the
Virginia Company (Price and Clemens 1987:4,10). Soon enough,
however, the trade became concentrated as a small group of large
merchants increasingly dominated the commercial relations between the
Chesapeake and the English and Scottish ports, notably London, Bristol,
Liverpool and Glasgow (Pagan 1979:259; Price and Clemens 1987). This
‘revolution in scale’, especially after 1680, was caused by a combination
of a rise in duties, more burdensome administrative regulations and the
easier access to credit and insurance by big firms (Price and Clemens
1987).
This increase in the scale of operations coincided with a profound shift
in the spatial pattern of imports in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. There were two stages to this change. First, London began to lose
its monopoly over importing tobacco especially after the 1660s (Gray and
Wyckoff 1940:18–20; Pagan 1979; Williams 1957:419–20). Ports along the
southern coast of England were the first to share in the tobacco import
148 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
trade, but the most important newcomers to the trade were Bristol,
Whitehaven, Liverpool, Hull and Newcastle (Gray and Wyckoff 1940: 21–
2). By the mid-eighteenth century English ports other than London were
handling half of the tobacco import trade (Nash 1982:370; USBC 1975:
1190). The second change was even more striking. This was the rise of
Glasgow as the second, and for the greater part of the second half of the
eighteenth century the first, port of entry of Chesapeake tobacco into
Britain (Price 1954a:180–1). During the first half of the century Scotland
imported no more than 13 million pounds of tobacco, but after midcentury the level reached as much as 47 million pounds in the few years
before the outbreak of the American Revolution (USBC 1975:1190). It was
only after the American Revolution that London resumed its central role
in tobacco imports, reflecting, in part, the decline of Glasgow (Price and
Clemens 1987:40–1).
Re-exports were crucial to the tobacco trade, and though reliable data
do not exist before the mid-seventeenth century, figures for the second
half of the century convey the scale of the operations: between 1677 and
1680 re-exports were, on average, 33 per cent of imports, and around 1695
53 per cent of legal imports were re-exported (Gray and Wyckoff 1940: 21–
2; Nash 1982:356). During the eighteenth century, however, the figure
rose considerably, often exceeding 80 per cent of imports (USBC 1975:
1190). The main destination for re-exported Chesapeake tobacco was
northern Europe, that is Holland, France and the Baltic countries; in the
eighteenth century France, Flanders and Holland commonly consumed
two-thirds of British tobacco exports (Gray and Wyckoff 1940; 21–2; Price
1973:849). In terms of value the re-export trade in tobacco rose from £421,
000 per annum at the beginning of the eighteenth century to £904,000 per
annum at the outbreak of the American Revolution; at the same time
tobacco re-exports accounted for as much as one-quarter of total reexport earnings (Davis 1969:120).
The changes in the nature of the tobacco importing trade into Britain in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries need to be understood in several
important contexts. In the first place, there was a veritable explosion in the
quantity of tobacco landed in Britain in this period. In 1620, for example,
less than 60,000 pounds of tobacco was imported from the Chesapeake
and, though the level of imports rose sharply over this decade and the
following one, total imports around mid-century probably stood at
around 1 million pounds (Menard 1980:157–8). During the second half of
the century the rate of expansion of tobacco imports accelerated very
rapidly. By 1669 15 million pounds of Chesapeake tobacco were imported,
reaching 30 million pounds by the turn of the eighteenth century (Menard
1980:159–60). The trade continued to be characterized by enormous
volumes after 1700 but the rate of growth in imports slowed considerably.
During the first half of the eighteenth century an annual average of 45
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 149
million pounds of Chesapeake tobacco was imported into Britain, rising
to an average of 76 million pounds during the second half of the century
(USBC 1975:1190).
Second, the huge increase in tobacco imports was part of a wider
transformation in the nature of Britain’s imports in which groceries,
especially exotic commodities—tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate and sugar—
played a critical role. As a proportion of the total value of imports into
England and Wales, groceries grew in importance from 8.9 per cent in
1559 to 34.9 per cent in 1800 (Shammas 1990:77). Most of the growth
occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half
of the eighteenth century, reflecting, in good part, the growing
importance of tobacco, as previously discussed, but also of tea and sugar.
Unlike the other main exotic substances which were imported primarily
for home consumption, tobacco was largely re-exported, especially in the
eighteenth century, and entered into international circuits of trade
(Shammas 1990:81–6; Austen and Smith 1990:99; Mui 1984:12–14;
Schumpeter 1960:60–1).
Re-exported Chesapeake tobacco found its way principally to the
Dutch Republic and France, though other markets were not trivial. The
Dutch market was particularly important both because it took so much of
the Chesapeake output and because Amsterdam was Europe’s chief
tobacco market. In the seventeenth century Holland accounted for about
half of Chesapeake tobacco re-exports, and for most of the eighteenth
century it remained the single most important re-export market,
accounting for a proportion fluctuating between one-third and one-half
(Price 1964:500–1; Price 1973:845–8): Holland had been the most important
foreign market for Chesapeake tobacco from the beginning of its
successful exploitation in the colonies. Dutch merchants effectively
competed against English merchants in Virginia by offering relatively
higher prices for the leaf than their English counterparts, but for various
reasons, most notably that the main London merchants importing
tobacco had extensive land holdings in Virginia, the bulk of the
Chesapeake output flowed not to Amsterdam but to London (Pagan 1982:
485–6; Pagan 1979:260–1; Kupp 1973). Their control of the tobacco trade
was not guaranteed and had to be fought for. The Dutch were unable to
make any headway in the early 1630s, but the tide began to turn towards
them in the latter years of the decade. Two big changes occurred. First, in
the matter of just a few years, Chesapeake output at least doubled:
English imports of Chesapeake tobacco rose from 500,000 to just over 1
million pounds between 1634 and 1640, and prices collapsed by the same
proportion; second, the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 disrupted
regular maritime communications between England and the colonies
(Menard 1980:157; Pagan 1982:486). London was swamped with colonial
tobacco, and everything was done in the city to shift the excess supply.
150 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Re-exports, which stood at just under 50,000 pounds—or 12 per cent of
imports—in 1634, rose to just over 400,000 pounds—42 per cent of
imports—in 1640 (Pagan 1979:255). Though we have no information on
the size of the annual tobacco harvest in the Chesapeake from which to
calculate the amount which was bought by English merchants, it is
nevertheless clear that a proportion was left behind, and that it was the
Dutch merchants who moved in to dispose of it. One Amsterdam
merchant family put down roots in Virginia, and in 1640 they exported at
least 60,000 pounds to Amsterdam, more than any London merchant
handled (Pagan 1982:487–8). Dutch merchants continued to profit from
direct contact with Virginia planters until the 1650s, when a combination
of parliamentary legislation (which made it statutory to send colonial
products on to England, on English or colonial ships) and the First AngloDutch War made it extremely difficult for the Dutch to trade directly
with the Virginians (Pagan 1982:489–97). For the next few years some
Dutch traders undoubtedly circumvented English maritime law, but as
the price of forfeiture increased, especially after the passage of the
Navigation Act of 1660 and the Staple Act of 1663, the Dutch (and other
nations, for that matter) were excluded from direct commerce with the
colonies. After this date Virginia tobacco was, to all intents and purposes,
English tobacco.
Even though Dutch merchants relinquished their place in Virginia’s
commerce, there were several compensations. Not least of these was the
fact that Amsterdam was, and had been for a while, Europe’s chief
(possibly only) tobacco mart. There is nothing surprising in this, since
Amsterdam was Europe’s premier mart for an enormous range of goods,
as well as the focal point of European trade and financial information
(Smith 1984). Into Amsterdam flowed tobacco from the Chesapeake,
Spanish America, Brazil, and from other parts of Europe, from the Dutch
country-side, as well as from Germany (Roessingh 1978:42–3; Price 1961:
6–7). How much tobacco flowed in and out of Amsterdam is unknown
with any certainty but a reasonable estimate would be in the order of 25
million pounds at the turn of the eighteenth century (Roessingh 1978:42).
The amount of commercial income that this flow generated must have
been substantial. The compensation for the loss of Virginia tobacco did
not end there. Besides growing in importance in importing and disposing
of tobacco, Amsterdam also became important in the processing side of
the tobacco trade. Processing consisted of two stages, blending and
spinning, both of which were established in Amsterdam at an early date,
possibly 1631 (Barbour 1963:63). Helped by the import of Chesapeake
tobacco, either directly or indirectly through London, by the import of
Brazilian and Spanish-American tobacco and by the prodigious
expansion of Dutch cultivation, the Amsterdam tobacco industry
increased enormously; in 1700 the city could boast more than twenty
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 151
tobacco workshops where the blending of Dutch tobacco with colonial
imports was carried out with typical Dutch ingenuity: at one point in
1670 they were accused by the English of falsifying tobacco products by,
for example, selling their own tobacco blended with Virginia as Spanish
(Price 1961:7). Processing doubled the value of tobacco (Barbour 1963:63).
London and Amsterdam were the twin pillars of the international
circulation of tobacco, both colonial and European. Merchants in both
cities were locked into a permanent search for markets, spreading tobacco
consumption to the periphery of the European heartlands. The heartland
was mostly represented by France, to which we will return later in the
chapter. For the moment, however, it is revealing to examine how vital it
was for both English and Dutch merchants to find outlets for their everincreasing supplies, and no part of Europe provides a better example of a
potential market than the north, both Scandinavia and Russia.
The northern European market was important for both Holland
and England. Both countries bought considerable quantities of raw
materials in the region, including timber and iron and naval stores, but
the problem was that there was little that either Holland or England
could sell in the northern markets. So trade balances were adverse for
Holland and England and could be balanced only by the export of bullion
(Johansen 1986). Russia, in particular, was seen as an extremely
promising market by London mercantile circles and the Crown itself,
even though the consumption of tobacco was forbidden by law until 1697
(Price 1961:17–20). For various reasons the dream of a vast market was
never realized, for the English at least. Official figures for the export of
tobacco leaf from England to Russia show a peak export of just under 1.5
million pounds in 1700, but for the rest of the century the figure barely
reached 2,000 pounds annually (Price 1961:101–2). By contrast the Dutch
were extremely successful in the northern market, particularly in Sweden.
One estimate places Dutch exports of tobacco, both leaf and processed, to
the north at 15 million pounds (Price 1961:89). Even though the Dutch
had managed to gain more than a foothold, they were not able to retain it
for the whole of the eighteenth century. The Russian market, for
example, became increasingly difficult to furnish because, in true
mercantilist fashion, tobacco cultivation was itself increasing in the
Ukraine; in the late 1760s, for example, Russia was exporting Ukrainian
leaf at a level of around 1.7 million pounds per annum (Price 1961:95). It
was only in its manufactured state, increasingly in the form of snuff, that
Russia continued to import tobacco from the West (Price 1961:95). The
Swedish market also collapsed, and, though in absolute terms the import
of tobacco from Britain remained stable over several decades, it never
amounted to more than a minor element in British tobacco commerce
(Price 1961:101–2). The Dutch were the ones who suffered most from the
collapse of the Swedish market because not only did Sweden begin to
152 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
cultivate its own tobacco, once again under mercantilist pressure, but it
also began to manufacture its own products (Price 1961:89, 103;
Roessingh 1978:46; Israel 1989:385, 388).
While both the Dutch, and particularly the English, struggled in the
northern market for a foothold, much closer to home there was a market
that not only was considerable—compared to both England and Holland
—but that required far less expenditure in energy. The French market,
from 1674 to 1791, had one buyer only, the state monopoly, and it
preferred to purchase its supplies from Britain. This was, of course, a
most fortunate state of affairs since the balance, if not the conduct, of trade
with France was a source of constant worry to the English Crown,
especially since French exports to England consisted of luxuries rather
than essentials.
While the course of the commercial history of tobacco in England may
correctly be interpreted as a victory by the Crown and the Virginia
interests over the consumer, France, by contrast, presents a very different
picture. The French tobacco market was already from its first beginnings
much more varied than the English market. Before cultivation began in
the French Caribbean colonies France was not only importing
considerable quantities from Brazil and Venezuela but also producing
substantial quantities in the south-west and the east of the country (Price
1973:4–5). Once cultivation began in St Christophe, Guadeloupe and
Martinique, and then later in St Domingue, French consumers were
possibly the best supplied in Europe with a range of tobacco types and
tastes—only the Dutch could match the range of the French tobacco
market. The tobacco trade did not come directly under the French
Crown’s jurisdiction until 1621, when an import and export duty was
first placed on the movement of tobacco (Price 1973:11). Over the
succeeding half-century the rate as well as the administration of these
duties changed as new interests groups, such as the French West India
Company, attempted to get special treatment for their participation in
French tobacco commerce. Notwithstanding changes in the details of
French duties on tobacco, until 1674 these were, by comparison with
those of England, small. The French Crown did not earn as much from
tobacco as it might have done had the duties been higher, or had there
been a different method of collecting them (Price 1973:11–16).
In 1674 the entire method of collecting duties, and the entire structure
of French tobacco commerce, changed beyond recognition when the state
established a tobacco monopoly that was to last, with a few
interruptions, until its downfall in 1791, along with other ancien régime
institutions. The monopoly was responsible not only for the commerce in
tobacco but also for its cultivation, manufacture and sale. Monopolies
over the control of tobacco were not uncommon in Europe, and by the
time the French went in this direction there were already in existence in
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 153
Spain, Portugal and the Italian peninsula institutions of this sort, though
no two monopolies were identical (Price 1973:17; Comes 1900; Gray and
Wyckoff 1940:4–13). The French monopoly operated under a system
which was common in many parts of continental Europe, namely that the
state did not directly administer the monopoly but rather farmed it or
leased it out to whatever private company offered the state the highest
price for the farm. In the event the French tobacco farm had few lessees
over its history, allowing for a remarkable continuity in the monopoly’s
policies regarding purchasing and manufacture (Price 1964:503).
The tobacco monopoly was a business that had to cover the price of the
lease granted to it by the Crown. At the same time it sought to be the sole
provider of tobacco to the French consumer. One of its first decisions was
to control the sources of supply to prevent leakage through smuggling.
Tobacco cultivation in France itself was severely restricted, though not
abolished altogether as was the case in England; supplies overland from
Holland and Germany were discouraged, and, as cultivation in the
French colonies began to decrease, the monopoly turned increasingly
towards England, then Britain, for its supplies. Even so, while the
mono poly would have been happy to buy all of its supplies from across
the Channel, it could not forget the French consumer who still hankered
after the particular tastes of both Brazilian and Spanish-American leaf.
We can follow the purchases of the French monopoly with some
degree of precision. During the first few years of the monopoly’s
existence French domestic and French colonial tobacco predominated,
though just under 20 per cent of the tobacco supply was Brazilian;
Chesapeake tobacco accounted for less than 5 per cent of the total, and
purchases from both Holland and Germany were very small, in line with
the monopoly’s overall policy (Price 1973:174–5). The main change in the
structure of purchasing occurred around the turn of the eighteenth
century when, because of the decline of tobacco cultivation in St
Domingue, difficulties in getting increased supplies from Brazil and a
growing demand among French consumers for Virginia leaf, English
tobacco imports into France started to move ahead rapidly (Price 1973:
177–81). By 1708, for example, French domestic tobacco purchases by the
monopoly had fallen, in relative terms, to around a third of total
purchases, compared to a figure of 80 per cent at the time of the
monopoly’s founding; Virginia tobacco represented the single largest
purchase, accounting for nearly one-quarter of the entire year’s supply
(Price 1973:174, 187). Seven years later the proportion of Virginia tobacco
in the purchases by the monopoly rose to 60 per cent of all imports, and
by the same time France had become England’s second market, surpassed
only by Holland (Price 1973:189). Once established to this extent, the
place of Britain in the tobacco purchases of the monopoly remained
paramount; at times in the eighteenth century, until its dissolution, the
154 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
monopoly received virtually all its tobacco from Britain (Price 1973:390–
1). This trend towards British tobacco supplies was also reflected in
British re-exports, where France, for most of the eighteenth century, vied
with Holland as the major market (Price 1973:849).
The relationship between the rising purchases of Chesapeake tobacco
by the French monopoly, and the changing French preference for tobacco
as snuff rather than in smoking or chewing form, has been discussed in
Chapter 4. While French consumers and the purchasing strategy of the
French monopoly clearly benefited the British tobacco trade, the market
power of the monopoly directly affected the nature of the tobacco
mercantile system in Britain as well as the Virginia planter.
The French monopoly bought in bulk through agents they placed in
the main tobacco markets; in the seventeenth century these agents
concentrated in Amsterdam and Lisbon, and in the eighteenth century
they were in London, Bristol and especially Glasgow. By the time that the
French monopoly was turning its attention across the Channel for tobacco
supplies, the tobacco import trade in England had been transformed from
a trade characterized by easy entry and numerous participants to one
with high entry costs and concentrated business power. This situation
was, of course, perfectly suited to the French monopoly whose aim was
to buy as cheaply as possible in the British market, and without any
appreciable difference in price across the market the monopoly could
settle on doing business where transaction costs were at a minimum. The
bigger the importing merchant in London, for example, the more likely
he was to make a deal with the monopoly. That this was more than
possible is borne out clearly by comparing the size structure of the
London tobacco importing business and the purchases of Chesapeake
tobacco made by the French monopoly in one year, 1719. In that year
France imported just over 6 million pounds of tobacco from England.
This quantity could easily have been supplied by only five of the leading
London tobacco importers (Price 1973:380; Price and Clemens 1987:11).
For the French buyer it was not, however, simply a matter of the size of
the business offered by the English merchant that was the decisive factor.
The kind of tobacco business also mattered. In the tobacco trade at the
turn of the eighteenth century there were two main kinds of importing
merchants, those who purchased Chesapeake tobacco on consignment
from the planter, and those who purchased Chesapeake tobacco on their
own account. The French monopoly preferred to do business with the
latter. This preference had a considerable effect on the entire British
tobacco trade, as well as on life in the Chesapeake. To understand why this
was so we have to explore the nature of both consignment and direct
purchasing systems in greater detail.
It is not clear when the consignment system first took root in the
Chesapeake. It was established in the trade to the Caribbean in the early
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 155
seventeenth century, and there is some evidence to suggest that in the
Chesapeake it began as early as the 1630s (Davies 1952; Price and Clemens
1987:4). The foundations of the consignment system in the Chesapeake
trade lay in the practice of having factors resident in Virginia, who
consigned tobacco to a number of merchants in London, superseding a
system in which tobacco was entrusted to ships’ captains on their way to
England (Price and Clemens 1987:4–6). Most of the growth in the
consignment trade seems to have occurred after the 1690s, and lasted
right through the eighteenth century, though its significance, in terms of
its relative share of the import trade, declined. At the height of the
consignment system perhaps as much as 50 per cent of the tobacco trade
was handled in this manner, but on the eve of the American Revolution
the figure had slumped to 25 per cent (Price and Clemens 1987:6; Breen
1985:84; Bergstrom 1985:198–9). The essential features of the consignment
system were that the Virginia planter entrusted his tobacco to a London
merchant who arranged to have it sold in the British and European
market and returned to Virginia with British and European goods
purchased with the revenue from tobacco sales. The system also involved
the London merchant providing credit for the Virginia planters
(Rosenblatt 1962; Price 1980; Breen 1985:84–175). In its operation the
consignment system integrated the Virginia planters and London
commission merchants with the tobacco trade and the consumer goods
market (Breen 1985:118–22; Bergstrom 1985:163–79).
Virginia planters, as the following chapter will explain, prided
themselves on the individual quality of their tobacco, and no two
hogsheads were considered to be the same, even if the tobacco they
carried came from the same planter. This aspect of tobacco culture was
carried forth into the consignment system, and manifested itself in
minutely differential pricing, by type of tobacco, to reflect supposed or
actual quality differences. To make the system work, therefore,
consignment merchants were under an obligation to treat the sale of each
hogshead as a separate event (Price 1964: 507). The Virginia planter and
the consignment merchant were required to be loyal to each other, and,
as a result, the relationships between the two ran far deeper than
business alone (Rosenblatt 1968:xvi; Breen 1985).
When the French monopoly started purchasing Chesapeake tobacco in
increasing amounts, it had no choice but to trade with the consignment
merchants, principally in London, because it was only they who handled
sufficiently large quantities of tobacco, even though the problem of
individuality remained (Price 1973:592). Dealing with the French
monopoly was considered as a crucial adjunct to the British-Chesapeake
trade because of the cash facilities which the French buyers extended. As
the authoritative historian of the trade has aptly described it, ‘the French
were thus the liquidity grease which kept in motion the entire sluggish
156 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
mechanism of the British-Chesapeake trade’ (Price 1973:660). Anyone
who entered the tobacco trade after 1700 must have been aware of this
role of the French monopoly and none capitalized on it more than the
Scottish merchants.
Scottish merchants had been trading in Virginia from as early as the
mid-seventeenth century but it was not until after the Act of Union, in
1707, that Scottish merchants had free access to Virginia, the British
domestic and the re-export market (Price 1954a:182–3). Records of the
import of Chesapeake tobacco into Glasgow, the Scottish port of entry for
tobacco, show an increasing share of the British tobacco import trade from
1707 and, though growth was slow in the first few decades after Union,
by the 1740s Scottish imports were already 20 per cent of the total and
rising; by the 1750s, the proportion had risen to 30 per cent and by the
1760s to 40 per cent (USBC 1975:1,190). Even more striking, by the late
1750s Glasgow had become the chief tobacco port in Britain and for most
of the years leading up to the American Revolution tobacco imports into
Glasgow exceeded those into London (USBC 1975:1,190; Price 1954a:
180). These figures refer only to legal imports, and, though there is no
certainty about the degree of smuggling, recent work suggests that, once
illegal imports are taken into account, the import of Chesapeake tobacco
into Scotland was much higher in the years immediately following
Union than originally thought (Nash 1982:364). Yet, even when the
revised figures are taken into account, the chronology of the rise of
Glasgow as described above remains in force.
The rise of Glasgow in the tobacco trade obviously opened another
sector in this branch of commerce and offered the potential of an
alternative first to the outports Whitehaven, Liverpool and Bristol, and
eventually to London itself. What made Glasgow a real alternative were
two distinguishing but interrelated features. First, Glasgow possessed
advantages in terms of the costs of transport from the Chesapeake, since
the route to Glasgow was considerably shorter than to London; second, it
had a well-developed financial and commercial system in which the
‘tobacco lords’ held special prominence; and finally, Glasgow merchants
could offer exceptionally low freight rates (Price 1954a:187–90; Devine
1975). It was the latter feature of Glasgow’s tobacco trade that most
influenced the price of tobacco at the port. The price of tobacco in
Glasgow was generally below the London price (Price 1964:508).
The French monopoly became increasingly attracted to buying tobacco
from Glasgow. The Scottish share of the French market increased
substantially after 1740; on the eve of the Revolution the share of Scottish
tobacco in the monopoly’s purchase of British tobacco stood at 72 per
cent (Price 1973:592). Price differentials were obviously one of the reasons
why the French agents found themselves increasingly in Glasgow rather
than London, but they were not the only reason. Mention has already
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 157
been made of the needs of the French monopoly for bulk purchases and of
the constraints imposed upon this by the special relationship that existed
between the London commission houses and the large Virginia planters.
Scottish merchants totally bypassed this because they operated on a
completely different system in purchasing Chesapeake tobacco.
The consignment system placed the Virginia planter in a web of
financial relations across the Atlantic that were continuous and based on
close, familiar, interpersonal commitments. Consignment was as much a
social as a commercial system and typically it was the large Virginia
planters that constituted the colonial side of it. Small planters, on the
other hand, did not have the social stature to place them in personal
contact with the impressive London commission houses and, therefore, it
was fairly useful for these planters to sell their tobacco to the large
planters before the lot was sold on commission (Breen 1985:36). Into this
system came Scottish traders who offered an alternative to the
consignment system that was particularly attractive to the small planter.
There is little doubt that Scottish traders were operating in Virginia in
the latter part of the seventeenth century but it was not until the openingup of the Virginia piedmont to settlement and tobacco culture that these
traders came into their own. The following chapter will outline the
dynamic aspects of tobacco culture in the Chesapeake as the frontier of
cultivation moved westward, pushing further from the inlets where the
large planters had their holdings. This migration, initially of small
planters, was of little interest to the London commission houses partly
because they produced small crops and their credit-worthiness was
generally unknown and partly because of the difficulty in transporting
tobacco from the interior (Devine 1975:56–7; Kulikoff 1986:92–9).
In contrast to the consignment system, Scottish merchants bought
tobacco directly from the planters, and sold them European and West
Indian goods from country stores that they established in the Chesapeake
hinterland. Many of the country stores were actually part of a chain of
stores owned by the three main Glasgow tobacco firms, the Glassford, the
Cunninghame and the Speirs groups (Devine 1975; Devine 1976; Devine
1984). These stores were very sophisticated businesses that, in addition to
their buying and selling activities, offered a substantial provision of
credit to medium and small planters (Soltow 1959). The social and
economic development of the Virginia piedmont, and especially
southside Virginia, was intimately linked to the presence of these stores,
and to the credit that they disbursed (Kulikoff 1986:122–31; Farmer 1988;
Price 1973:666–71). The Scottish merchants offered a service that was
highly attractive to small planters, but the cutting edge of the Scottish
presence was that they offered relatively high prices (Devine 1975:58).
They could do this because direct marketing, especially purchasing
tobacco in advance, substantially reduced operating costs; and, because
158 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
the Scottish merchants could bring tobacco into Britain in hogsheads that
were undifferentiated and could be sold in bulk, they distinguished
themselves to the French buyers. As the tobacco was landed in Glasgow,
the title was passed immediately to the French monopoly and money
changed hands (Price 1964:508). And so it went on to the next planting
season in the Chesapeake.
Alongside the London consignment and the Glasgow direct purchase
system operating roughly from London and Glasgow respectively, there
were other means of purchasing tobacco, as well as other players in the
field, including merchants from Liverpool, Bristol and Whitehaven (Price
and Clemens 1987:24–31; Tyler 1978: Price 1986). Until the American
Revolution, however, London and Glasgow and their purchasing
methods dominated the British tobacco trade. London reclaimed the
ground it had lost to Glasgow in the years after the Revolution (Price and
Clemens 1987: 39–40).
Though the British colonial system and the place of tobacco in it
evolved over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, certain features
stand out as relatively permanent. For one thing, the tobacco trade seems
to have been sustained and promoted by a combination of state and
mercantile interests; when, for instance, planters complained of extremely
low prices because of overproduction and suggested a moratorium on
planting, it was the Virginia merchants in London who successfully
rejected the idea (Hemphill 1985:93–7; Olson 1983). Second, trade was
severely constrained by the legislation of the period excluding nonBritish merchants from purchasing Chesapeake tobacco directly, forcing
all Chesapeake tobacco, regardless of its final destination, to be landed
first in Britain and to be shipped in British (or colonial) vessels. This may
seem to have been drastic, but it made perfect sense given the
contemporary economic discourse. Forcing colonial exports to Europe, on
their first leg of a possible international circuit, was the policy of most
European states, but in the history of tobacco there was one very
important exception, that of Portugal.
The amount of tobacco that was exported from the New World was far
in excess of the demands of the home country. For example, British
consumers would have had to consume more than 10 pounds per head of
the population in order to clear the Chesapeake output—at no time in
British history has per capita consumption exceeded 5 pounds. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the vast majority of New World tobacco was reexported from the home country.
By comparison with the Chesapeake tobacco trade, commerce in
Brazilian tobacco was complex. Part of this complexity was established in
the seventeenth century, precisely in 1644, when King João IV authorized
direct trade between Bahia and the Mina Coast, on the Bight of Benin to
the east of the River Volta in West Africa (Hanson 1982:153; Van Dantzig
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 159
1980:118). This was not only a bold but a highly controversial step since it
acted entirely in opposition to the prevailing political economic ideology
of the time: namely that colonies were there to serve the home country,
and all trade between colonies was to be conducted through the home
country, and not directly. What inspired the royal decree was the capture
of Angola by the Dutch in 1642, thereby forcing the Portuguese into other
parts of Africa for their source of slaves, and the unease that Brazilian
tobacco planters felt at the re-establishment of the tobacco monopoly only
several weeks earlier (Hanson 1982:153).
The direct trade between Bahia and the Mina Coast was essentially the
Brazilian slave trade. Though in existence in the sixteenth century, it was
not until the seventeenth century, and especially during the second half,
that the slave trade to Brazil began to grow; according to one estimate
almost four times as many slaves were imported into Brazil during the
second half than during the first half of the seventeenth century (Curtin
1969:119). During the eighteenth century the growth in the slave trade
accelerated dramatically; nearly two million Africans were imported into
Brazil between 1700 and 1800 as opposed to 560,000 between 1600 and
1700 (Curtin 1969:216). Brazil was participating in a trade which was
generally on the increase during the eighteenth century, but in the case of
Brazil the main reason was the discovery and opening of gold mines in
the interior (Lovejoy 1982:497; Russell-Wood 1987). In this considerable
trade Bahian tobacco played a critical role.
Thanks to its rich soil and climate the Bahian Recôncavo could produce
three successive tobacco harvests, the first in September of each year
(Antonil 1965:313–15). The first growth was destined for the European
market; it was considered strong and suitable for smoking, chewing and
snuffing (Antonil 1965:315). The second and third grades, however, did
not find a market in Europe and their import into Lisbon was illegal
(Verger 1964:354). Their main market was the Mina Coast. Bahian
planters prepared tobacco for Africa in a distinct manner, especially
drenching it in molasses to give it a particular taste and aroma (Verger
1964:354). Why West Africans were so dedicated to Brazilian inferiorgrade tobacco is unclear, but their passion for it was remarked by many
writers. It was this passion for it that created a barter economy of large
proportions.
No one knows when tobacco ships began their regular voyages from
Bahia to the Mina Coast. In 1678, the first year for which the record of
such voyages exists, only one ship made the journey (Verger 1976:578).
Twenty years later twenty-one ships made the same trip. Over the
following century the number of tobacco ships to the Mina Coast
fluctuated around an average of maybe ten per year and by the end of the
century over 1,300 ships are known to have been involved in this trade
(Verger 1976:578–9).
160 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
As the number of ships plying the South Atlantic increased so too did
the export of tobacco. At the turn of the eighteenth century tobacco
exports to the Mina Coast stood at no more than 160,000 pounds (Flory
1978: 162). By 1704 the amount exported had risen to 425,000 pounds; by
the 1720s it had reached 2 million pounds and by mid-century perhaps as
much as 4 million pounds (Flory 1978: 162; Hanson 1982:160; AHU, Baia,
doc. 3305). In the ten years from 1743 to 1753 just under 330,000 rolls of
tobacco, yielding a total weight of 29 million pounds, were shipped
(AHU, Baia, doc. 748). Tobacco shipments to the Mina Coast throughout
the eighteenth century far exceeded those to any other parts of Atlantic
Africa and, in many years, far exceeded shipments to Lisbon (AHU, Baia,
doc. 748, 3305, 4667, 6589).
For the first half of the eighteenth century Lisbon dominated the export
tobacco trade from Bahia. In 1698, for example, a year for which there are
comparative figures, just over 5.5 million pounds of Brazilian tobacco
were received in Lisbon (Hanson 1982:157). During the eighteenth
century Lisbon had to compete with the Mina Coast, or, to put it another
way, with Bahian merchants. Even so, Lisbon’s import trade grew
substantially during the period. In 1756 the figure reached 6.1 million
pounds and in 1784, a very good year for Bahian tobacco planters and
merchants, Lisbon accepted almost 12 million pounds of first growth
tobacco (AHU, Baia, doc. 3305; Lugar 1977:49).
No exports from Bahia ever compared to those destined for Lisbon and
the Mina Coast. However, it should be pointed out that there were
other primary destinations for Bahian tobacco even though their quantity
was never very large. On the African coast itself Bahian tobacco was
landed in Angola, São Tomé, Principe and Benguela. In 1753, for example,
exports to the last three destinations amounted to 3,500 rolls representing
1.2 million pounds’ weight of tobacco—though large in absolute terms,
these values were only about a quarter of the exports to the Mina Coast
(AHU, Baia, doc. 748). The available evidence suggests that shipments to
parts of Africa other than the Mina Coast fluctuated substantially from
year to year, undoubtedly in response to the slave trade in these areas.
Other than the African coast, Bahian tobacco also found its way into the
Asian market through Goa, Macao and Timor. Little is known of this trade
and even less about its size. Here and there in the documentation one
finds references to the Asian trade. In 1778, for example, two ships were
bound for Goa laden with almost 130,000 pounds of tobacco; a similar
quantity was exported four years later (AHU, Baia, doc. 9733, 10944). The
tobacco entering the Goan trade was different from that used in the
African trade, the difference being in curing methods. The curing method
for the Goan market was a Cuban innovation first introduced into Bahia
in 1757. The first shipments of tobacco using the new process, weighing a
total of 32,000 pounds, were sent at the end of the same year (Lugar 1977:
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 161
43; AHU, Baia, doc. 3275). As for the trade to China, it is not clear
whether the tobacco was shipped direct from Bahia, and therefore in an
unprepared form, or whether it came from Lisbon already prepared,
typically as snuff. The Bishop of Macao writing to Martinho de Melo e
Castro, the Secretary of State, in 1775 left little doubt that tobacco was the
principal commodity of the colony—this was probably tobacco in
powdered form manufactured in the tobacco monopoly’s factories in
Lisbon and of the most expensive variety (AHU, Macau, caixa 10, doc. 19;
Nardi 1986:19–20; Dermigny 1964:1254). Chinese preference for Brazilian
tobacco was widely acknowledged (AHU, Macau, caixa 10, doc. 11;
Blanchard 1806:473).
Bahian exports to Lisbon did not remain long in the capital. During the
second half of the eighteenth century at least half of the imports were reexported; in the 1780s the figure reached almost 70 per cent (Pinto 1979:
202; Lugar 1977:46–9). This re-export trade consisted of unprocessed
Bahian tobacco. The main markets were Italy, Spain, France and
Hamburg (Lugar 1977:46). The tobacco that remained in Lisbon, and
which was destined for the Portuguese market, was processed into
smoking and, increasingly in the eighteenth century, into powdered
tobacco (Nardi 1986).
Brazilian tobacco was, as we have seen, in demand in Europe, Africa
and Asia, supplied either directly from Bahia, or from Lisbon. There was
also a strong, but quantitatively unknown, market for Brazilian tobacco in
Amerindian communities in North America (von Gernet 1988:204–16,
221–39). Like their West African counterparts, eastern woodland
Amerin dians had a strong preference for Bahian leaf and firmly rejected
other types, including Virginia (von Gernet 1988:204). The Hudson’s Bay
Company was alarmed in the early 1680s to find many native traders
dealing with the French because they could supply them with Brazilian
tobacco. One official of the Company wrote the following in 1685,
reflecting a distinct policy change, a reaction to the leverage of the
consumer:
We are sorry the Tobacco, we last sent you, proves so bad, we have
made many yeares tryall of Engelish Tobacco be severall persons,
and whiles we have traded, we have yearly complaints thereof. We
have made search, what Tobacco the French vends to the Indians,
which you doe so much extoll, and have this yeare bought the like
(vizt.) Brazeele Tobacco, of which we have sent for each Factorey, a
good Quantety, that if approved of we are resolved in the future to
suppley you with the like, as you have occation…
(von Gernet 1988:207)
162 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
The Company was thereby forced to purchase its supplies from Portugal
with whom Britain had particularly good relations during the eighteenth
century. Even the London pipe makers got in on the act as the
Amerindian consumer preferred Bahian leaf in a clay pipe (Oswald 1978:
346; von Gernet 1988:284–8).
It hardly needs repeating that the pattern of tobacco exports from Bahia
was unusual in the context of early modern European political economy.
The ability of Bahian merchants to break down mercantilist ideology was
impressive; petitions from other Portuguese colonies for direct trade in
tobacco to other colonies were not so successful (AHU, Timor, caixa 3,
doc. 20). The British commercial and colonial system, by contrast, did not
allow for any exceptions.
‘WHOLLY BUILT UPON SMOKE’ 163
7
‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
Planter culture to 1800
The best smoker looks for the best cigar, the best cigar for the
best wrapper, the best wrapper for the best leaf, the best leaf
for the best cultivation, the best cultivation for the best seed,
the best seed for the best field. This is why tobacco-raising is
such a meticulous affair… The tobacco grower has to tend his
tobacco not by fields, not even by plants, but leaf by leaf. The
good cultivation of good tobacco does not consist in having
the plant give more leaves, but the best possible…the
cultivation, processing, and manufacture of tobacco is all care,
selection, attention to detail… Everything having to do with
tobacco is hand work—its cultivation, harvesting,
manufacture, sale, even its consumption.
So wrote Fernando Ortiz, in his justly celebrated work Cuban
Counterpoint (Ortiz 1947:24, 26, 39). Ortiz was appealing to his readers to
understand that the history of Cuba is deeply inseparable from the
history of the island’s two main crops, sugar and tobacco. Out of an
analysis of these two crops, especially of the contrast, born of distinct
botanical features, Ortiz was attempting to lay bare Cuba’s complex web
of social structures and cultural differentiation.
Ortiz has had his critics; the most serious charge against him points out
that the contrast between tobacco and sugar (so central to his analysis) is
not only exaggerated but presented as a moralistic argument; tobacco is
good and sugar is bad (Hirschman 1977:94–5). Yet, despite reservations,
Ortiz does provide an insightful point of departure for this chapter
simply because, as he and other historians have put it, there is a culture to
agriculture (Breen 1984:250).
This chapter has two main purposes. The first is to understand the
transformation of tobacco from the grower’s point of view: how it has
been affected partly by changes in the labour organization of cultivation,
broadly from plantation to smallholder; partly by changes in the nature
of the tobacco crop; and partly by changes in marketing and
manufacturing. Second, the chapter considers the symbolic value of
tobacco to grow ers, and how this has altered historically. While
historians and anthropologists agree that forms of cultivation, and plants
themselves, influence culture, it is important to appreciate that such
concepts as ‘tobacco mentality’ are specific in both time and place.
Chapter 2 argued that tobacco held special significance for Amerindian
societies. This significance pertained to both consumption and
production. The former has already been discussed in detail and there is
no need to repeat what was said there. What does need reiterating is that
the symbolic value of tobacco in consumption was mirrored in
production. Proscriptions in consumption were echoed in cultivation.
This took the form of laying down who, specifically, could cultivate
tobacco, whether it should be men or women of a particular status, or those
specifically chosen for the task. The Crow Tobacco Society is simply the
most stark example of this; but throughout North and South America,
wherever tobacco was cultivated, special rules existed for cultivation.
Moreover, within agricultural societies, tobacco was usually grown
separately from other crops and, as we have seen, tobacco was often the
only crop grown by fishing and hunting societies.
Europeans, not surprisingly, eschewed Amerindian proscriptions,
though they learned a great deal about the plant from them. Yet the
European involvement with the plant was far from neutral and, though
the cultural impact of tobacco was not constructed within a specific
cosmology as was the Amerindian, it had deep significance nevertheless.
One key to this lies in what I will call the labour history of tobacco.
Little is known about the early years of the transition in the cultivation
of tobacco from an Amerindian to a European crop. Certainly it was rapid
and there is little doubt that in these years, and in places such as Trinidad
and Venezuela Amerindians and Europeans worked side by side
(Lorimer 1978). Not only was the transition period rapid, it was
extremely short as the previous chapter showed. By the time tobacco
began its rise in the Chesapeake the Amerindian connection with tobacco
was both severed and forgotten, and its association with Europeans
firmly established. The rapid transformation of tobacco from an
Amerindian to a European commodity was reflected in the rapidity with
which Europeans reversed the original direction of the tobacco exchange
and began, increasingly, to dispense ‘European’ tobacco and ‘European’
smoking instruments to Amerindians (von Gernet 1988:187–318).
There was, however, nothing predetermined about tobacco’s early
connection with Europeans. That is to say, there was no particular
characteristic of the plant that made it European, in contrast to sugar
which, from its early beginnings in the New World, was inexorably
linked to African slave labour. The contrast between tobacco and sugar in
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 165
ethnic or cultural terms is one of the great and enduring themes in the
history of the plant, and it needs explaining.
Two main factors can account for tobacco’s Europeanness. The first is
economic. There were no economies of scale in tobacco cultivation: that is
to say, any increase in the area of land under tobacco demanded a
proportional increase in labour and capital. The economic size of the
tobacco holding could therefore vary quite widely. Smallholders were
not at an economic disadvantage as they were, for example, in sugar
cultivation. Tobacco cultivation could thus be embedded within a
European mode of agricultural production, typically the peasant or
independent farmer. It is not surprising that when tobacco was grown in
Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was grown by the
peasantry and the independent yeomanry (Roessingh 1978; Thirsk 1974;
Price 1973). There is no reason to doubt, therefore, that in principle the
same kind of labour system would have prevailed in New World tobacco
cultivation. Indeed Dutch tobacco growers were invited to migrate to
New Netherland in the seventeenth century for this very reason, and all
the available evidence confirms that tobacco cultivation in the colony was
similar to that in Holland (von Gernet 1988:171–6). The problem for the
Chesapeake, however, is that the colony, especially in its formative years,
did not attract these kinds of people, and labour shortage undermined
the colony’s future prospects. Not only was the flow of people to the
Chesapeake slow—1,700 between 1607 and 1616—but mortality was so
high as to make the settlement precarious: death rates in Jamestown
varied from 46 per cent to 60 per cent per annum between 1607 and 1610
(McCusker and Menard 1985: 118). The combination of open land and
short free-labour supply provided fertile ground for solving the colony’s
problems by coercing labour through some sort of bound contract. It is at
this point that the Chesapeake faced conditions that prevailed
throughout the colonies further to the south and were solved there by
resorting to the importation of African slaves. Here, then, is the second
factor. Rather than turning to Africa, England turned to its own people.
In England a system of servitude existed typically involving men and
women aged between 13 and 25 (Galenson 1984:3). The servant lived in
the master’s household under a contract normally lasting one year. The
Virginia Company looked to this institution to solve its problems of
labour recruitment (Diamond 1957–8). The indentured system in the
Chesapeake was transformed by stages between 1609 and 1620 by which
time it had elements specific to the conditions in the colony as well as the
changes taking place in the relationship between the immigrants, the
planters and the Virginia Company (Galenson 1984:3–6). Indentures
lasted anywhere from four to seven years and, after the servant had
repaid the cost of passage, he was, in principle, free to establish himself
as an independent planter, for example.
166 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
Whether in the Chesapeake or later in Bermuda and the West Indies,
indentured servitude, settlement and tobacco cultivation were
inextricably linked. The flow of indentured servants to Chesapeake
increased rapidly as the tobacco economy began to boom. Between 1617
and 1623, for example, at least five thousand English people emigrated to
the Chesapeake (McCusker and Menard 1985:118–19). In the 1630s over
ten thousand emigrated and the upward trend reached its high point in
the 1650s, when an estimated 23,100 immigrated, at least two-thirds of
whom were bound in servitude (Gemery 1980:215; McCusker and
Menard 1985:242). After 1660 the migration of indentured servants fell
back to a level 20 per cent below the peak of the 1650s, but thereafter the
pool of English people willing to migrate in indenture began to shrink
considerably despite efforts to attract these people to the colonies
(McCusker and Menard 1985:135; Gemery 1980:215). Nevertheless, this
flow, together with an appreciable decline in mortality, was responsible
for a surge in the colony’s population. In Virginia population grew from
a level of 1,300 inhabitants in 1625 to almost 63,000 at the turn of the
eighteenth century (Morgan 1975:404). Maryland’s population also grew
enormously from 600 inhabitants in 1640 to 34,100 in 1700 (McCusker and
Menard 1985:136).
In the seventeenth century the cultural composition of the Chesapeake
colonies was essentially white European; in 1670, for example, only 2,500
Africans lived in the Chesapeake, a mere 6 per cent of the total
population (McCusker and Menard 1985:136). And since the colonies’
main, and it could be argued only, staple was tobacco, as the population
increased, the association between Europe and tobacco deepened. What
kind of society was being constructed around this crop?
The first thing to remember is that the kind of society that both the
Virginia Company in Virginia and the Lords Calvert in Maryland hoped
to establish and see prosper never materialized. Their vision of a
hierarchical society modelled on the English pattern remained a paper
vision and much of the reason for this failure lay in the labour problems
encountered in both colonies (Kulikoff 1986:26–7). Rather than hierarchy,
what materialized in the Chesapeake was a society based on the
dynamics of the indenture system located within the tobacco economy.
High tobacco prices induced planters to recruit servants and allowed exservants to accumulate enough capital to become independent planters
themselves and procure their own servants (Horn 1979:92). Depressions
had the opposite effect. Immigration fell, profits were diminished and
recently freed servants, finding their entry into tobacco cultivation
blocked by the lack of resources, either tried their hand at some other
activity or departed for other shores. The booms and slumps of the
tobacco economy, therefore, provided a powerful context for the
evolution of Chesapeake society (Menard 1980; Wetherell 1984).
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 167
The Chesapeake colonies were transformed considerably during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by economic, social and political
forces but, in general, what continuity there was derived from tobacco
cultivation. Despite changes in labour organizations and significant
moves towards economic diversification, the tobacco crop continued to
stamp the region with a distinct culture. That culture, and the society in
which it was located, derived first and foremost from the pattern of work
that tobacco cultivation demanded.
Tobacco cultivation consisted of a series of distinct stages that took the
crop from seed to market. Unlike other staples of the period, tobacco was
unique in that a sustained labour input was required constantly, different
kinds of skills were called for at different times of the year, and each
stage had to be accomplished with the utmost care. Tobacco cultivation
did not lend itself naturally to gang labour, though as the Chesapeake
became a slave society that aspect did change (Galenson 1981b:151).
Nevertheless, the general features of tobacco cultivation remained
unaltered.
The first stage in tobacco cultivation was to plant seed in a seedbed and
not in the open field. The seedbed method of cultivating tobacco is nearly
universal, and is still the common practice today, suggesting several
possible advantages over planting in the open field. The first is that in the
seedbed not only does the plant has a better chance of survival than in
the open but in a fairly concentrated space there is less chance of weeds
and better opportunities for detecting diseases and pests. These are all
important factors in determining the intensity of labour use. The seedbed
could also be more intensively fertilized—with an appreciable cost
benefit—than the open field. Second, where the growing season is short it
would be impossible to grow a successful crop if the seedling growth was
added to the time in the field. Finally, there is evidence to indicate that
the act of transplanting the young plants from seedbed to open field
produces certain physiological effects that actually benefit growth
(Akehurst 1981:98). Though the last factor was probably not realized at
the time, there is little doubt that Chesapeake planters would have been
aware of the first two.
December and early January were typical times for planting seeds on
an area normally not exceeding one-quarter of an acre. In common with
agricultural practices followed elsewhere to minimize the overall risk of
loss, plant beds were frequently kept separate over some distance. The
beds were protected from the frost and winds and, with luck, the young
plants made an appearance in March and were generally ready for
transplanting to the open in April (Breen 1985:46–7).
The seedbeds required constant surveillance to give the plants the
optimum chances of survival. Even so, because of an inevitable rate of
loss, more plants were sown than required. The seedbed stage was not
168 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
particularly onerous on labour, but the transplanting to the open was.
Before the actual transplanting began, it was necessary to choose the
date. This was crucial for various reasons but most importantly because
the lifting had to be done when ground conditions were most favourable,
that is, just after a heavy rain when the root system was fairly free of the
surrounding soil. The entire operation of transplanting normally began in
late April and the work spread over many weeks, frequently spilling over
into June. This stage required all hands and they needed to be available
at just the right moment. The fields needed to be prepared and the actual
process of transplanting had to be done fairly quickly as the plants could
not be allowed to dry out. It is important to realize that transplanting was
done plant by plant. Plant populations, though not known precisely,
could easily have run into several thousand per acre (Akehurst 1981:201).
Landon Carter, one of the biggest Virginia planters, cultivated more than
one hundred thousand plants on his estate (Breen 1984:257). In the
seventeenth century land was not ploughed and, therefore, the tobacco
was transplanted into hillocks of prepared soil set in partially cleared land
—the hillocks were set at a predetermined distance apart, usually 3 feet,
and in parallel, a method of cultivation clearly inherited from
Amerindian practices (Middleton 1984:111; Carr and Menard 1989:415–16;
Herndon 1967).
Once in the field, the plants began to grow leaves at the same time as
weeds appeared around them. This caused problems, and the tobacco
fields had to be visited and worked upon constantly. Weeding absorbed
an enormous amount of time and energy but the growing plant needed a
lot of attention too. The tobacco plant needed to be topped, that is the top
of the plant had to be removed. Topping stopped the plant from
producing flowers, so that all the growing energy was put into the
leaves. But as soon as the plant was topped it produced secondary shoots
which had to be removed to allow the plant to process nutrients in the
leaves. Suckering, as it is termed, and topping were done plant by plant
(Breen 1985:48–9). Once again, the precise stage at which topping was
done was crucial to the final product. Late topping would have had
particularly serious results on both leaf quality and yield. Modern
research shows that, on average, each day’s delay in topping can result in
a yield loss of about 15 pounds per acre (Akehurst 1981:217).
To say that the preliminary stages of seed planting, transplanting,
topping and suckering were all critical to the viability of the final product
is no exaggeration, but in terms of the culture of the field the success at
these stages depended on an interaction between human and natural
factors. Obviously, despite the most careful attention to detail, natural
conditions could easily overwhelm all the human input. But, come
September, when the tobacco plant reached maturity, the planter had to
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 169
make the most difficult choice of all: when to cut. After this point nature
took a back seat, and all the pressure fell on the human agent.
Cutting, naturally, ended the biological life of the plant at the same
time as it began its transformation into a transactable commodity. Early
cutting was avoided as the plant would not cure properly and would be
worthless in the marketplace. Waiting for the right moment also had its
problems because climatic conditions in September were typically
uncertain. Frost, for example, could easily wipe out a crop (Breen 1984:
257). When to cut, therefore, was a decision fraught with anxiety and,
according to an authority on the subject, there was little precise guidance
available (Breen 1984: 258). William Tatham’s treatise on tobacco culture
gave his readers the following rule-of-thumb: ‘The tobacco, when ripe,
changes its colour, and looks greyish: the leaf feels thick, and if pressed
between the finger and thumb will easily crack’ (Breen 1984:258). This
may sound rather vague to modern readers, and there is little doubt that
it had the same ring to both the experienced and inexperienced
seventeenth-century planter. Experience alone, even today, is the key to
success.
After cutting, the autumn months were spent in producing the final
product, beginning with the curing stage. This was accomplished in
barns where the tobacco stalks with their leaves were allowed to dry out
naturally. Again it was an anxious period. Since air-curing depended
upon environmental conditions, themselves subject to daily change, the
point at which the tobacco reached a satisfactory point of dryness was
highly uncertain. Too much moisture and the tobacco would rot; too little
and it would turn to dust. Once the decision had been taken that the
tobacco was cured, the leaves needed to be stripped from the stalk and
the main stem of each leaf had to be removed. Stalking and stemming
could easily be a twenty-four-hour operation given the size of the plant
population. Once this was completed, the leaves were packed into
hogsheads in a process called prizing. This was usually not accomplished
until well into the next calendar year, and it would be a further two
months before the prized tobacco was ready for export.
Moreover, if that was not enough, by the time prizing was completed
the seedbeds needed to be well under way and the next production cycle
begun. Not surprisingly, the calendar of the whole year moved to the
rhythm of the tobacco plant, as did the labour of those on the land.
Recent research has clarified many aspects of the labour input required
to bring tobacco from seed to commodity. The tobacco plant has a
voracious appetite for soil nutrients, particularly potash, calcium and
nitrogen (Akehurst 1981:138). In modern production methods these
minerals consumed by the growing plant are replenished by the
application of large amounts of chemical fertilizer. In the Chesapeake,
however, the only form of fertilizer available was farm manure but,
170 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
because animals were not as a rule penned in, the supply of this was very
limited (Carr and Menard 1989:409, 417–18; Carr, et al. 1991:55–75). The
fertility of the soil was, therefore, restored in a system of long fallow. The
fallow period in the Chesapeake region was twenty years. Each hand
could tend no more than 3 acres successively for three years:
consequently, a tobacco planter needed 20 acres of land per worker to
turn a tobacco crop annually (Kulikoff 1986:47). It was the amount of
labour, paradoxically, that determined the size of the holding (Carr and
Walsh 1988:150). Twenty acres was, however, a minimum figure and did
not include any provision for land to grow food or to grow timber for
heating, constructing fences, barns and making tobacco hogsheads. When
these requirements were added into the tobacco land, it was generally
felt that planters needed 50 acres per worker (Kulikoff 1986:48).
Tobacco cultivation in the seventeenth century absorbed about half of
the year’s working time. The slackest time of the year was between
January and early April during which time the seedbeds were being
made and tended. In these months, typically the only time in the year
when workers could afford some leisure time, only about 10 per cent of
available working time was used on the fledgling plants. In April,
however, labour demands rose enormously. Transplanting absorbed
virtually the entire working schedule in both April and May. Some
respite came in June when weeds began to appear in the fields, but in July
and August topping, suckering and weeding left workers with no time for
leisure. September, October and November were somewhat less
demanding, but even then cutting, stripping, stemming and prizing
absorbed, on average, 50 per cent of the entire working schedule (Carr
and Menard 1989:414).
Tobacco cultivation was often merciless with labour. The planter, as we
have seen, did not escape lightly. Even if he did not work in the fields—a
rare event in the Chesapeake with the possible exception of the very big
landowners—his consciousness, if not his hands, was always involved in
critical decisions (Breen 1985:69). Although the discussion so far has
tended to treat labour as homogeneous, in reality this was not so.
Different kinds of skills were displayed throughout the year within an
unchanging regime of extreme careful handling. The most skilled work
occurred in cutting and in prizing. The cutter did not just perform an
intensive task —each plant had to be cut separately and handed carefully
to someone who would gather several plants at a time—but he had to
make decisions in the field as to which plants to cut and precisely where
to make the incision (Tilley 1948:58). Prizing was an activity that required
considerable judgement and acquaintance with the materials. The object
of prizing was literally to stuff a wooden barrel with as many layers of
tobacco leaf as possible without rupturing the container. These
hogsheads of tobacco, as they were called, were exceedingly heavy. In the
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 171
seventeenth century the weight of a hogshead varied between 400 and
800 pounds, the latter figure commonly for sweet-scented tobacco; in the
eighteenth century hogsheads containing sweet-scented tobacco weighed
from 950 to 1,400 pounds, while those with oronoco tobacco, though
typically smaller, nevertheless could weigh as much as 1,150 pounds
(Middleton 1984:113). What came out of the hogsheads on the other side
of the Atlantic was the result not only of the curing stage but more
importantly of prizing. Planters were under a strong incentive to pack the
hogsheads to breaking point since freight rates were reckoned on the
number not the weight of hogsheads (Breen 1985: 51).
Tobacco cultivation gave the Chesapeake region a particular work
rhythm that bound the colonies in a singular pursuit. Small variations in
this rhythm could be observed as slightly different soil and climatic
conditions meant adjusting the work schedule. Moreover, by the end of
the seventeenth century, tobacco planters had more or less settled on
growing two varieties named respectively sweet-scented and oronoco,
the former in the York basin and parts of the Rappahannock and the
latter in most other parts of Virginia and Maryland (Walsh 1989:396). These
varieties had somewhat different work schedules as oronoco was never
stemmed whereas sweet-scented normally was (Walsh 1989:397).
Time was, however, not the only dimension of Chesapeake culture that
was profoundly affected by the tobacco plant. The entire human and
material geography of the region was shaped by the demands, or
perhaps lack of demand, of tobacco. In the first instance, the large size of
holdings relative to labour meant that settlement was dispersed. In
Arundel County, Maryland, during the second half of the seventeenth
century, 78 per cent of the farms had no more than one bound worker
(Carr and Menard 1989: 410). Robert Cole, a ‘small’ Maryland tobacco
planter of the mid-1650s, had an estate of 300 acres, of which 90 to 100
acres was planted in tobacco; yet he had no more than five bound
workers (Carr and Menard 1989:411; Menard et al. 1983:186). Second,
tobacco cultivation required little in the way of auxiliary activities. Fixed
capital took the form of a barn and a ramshackle house built of wood and
a few farm implements, mostly hoes and axes (Morgan 1975:185; Carr
and Menard 1989:409). Beyond the farm tobacco needed little save
hogsheads and these were often made on the farm. Since the settlements
were on a river frontage; and the marketing, as shown in the previous
chapter, was a metropolitan monopoly; and processing, to the extent that
it was necessary, was done in England; and Europe was the eventual
consumer, all the planter had to do was roll his hogsheads to his own
wharf, or lay them into small craft. If neither of these methods of
transport was available, then the hogsheads could be rolled down
specially designed roads straight into the hold of ships waiting to return
to England (Middleton 1984:113). To put it succinctly, what need was
172 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
there of any services, other than those provided by the farm? There was
not enough time in the working schedule on the farm for manufacturing
and, at any rate, better-quality goods could be imported directly from
Europe. For all these reasons, Virginians and Marylanders did not live in
close communities and hardly any towns sprang up in the seventeenth
century (Rainbolt 1969). Even as late as 1770, with a total population
accounting for as much as 30 per cent of British North America, Virginia
and Maryland could count only two principal towns, Norfolk and
Baltimore, each of which had only 6,000 inhabitants, compared to 30,000
in Philadelphia; but both had, in fact, relatively little to do with the
tobacco trade (McCusker and Menard 1985:131). It is perhaps without
parallel elsewhere that both the Virginia and Maryland Assemblies,
dismayed by the lack of urban growth, legislated towns into existence.
Between 1655 and 1705 the former passed legislation six times, while the
Maryland Assembly, probably in even greater desperation, passed ten
town acts between 1668 and 1708 (Earle and Hoffman 1976:14). All to no
avail. By 1725 only seven small villages had materialized, containing
between fifty and a hundred inhabitants, some merchants, more
innkeepers and a doctor (Kulikoff 1986:105).
Until the 1680s Chesapeake society was typified by what some have
called the ‘age of the small planter’. The foundations and the reasons for
this are not hard to find, and they were the result of partly the economic
structure of tobacco cultivation and partly the demographic regime and
immigration pattern of the region. The Chesapeake tobacco economy
began its life in the second decade of the seventeenth century when
tobacco prices were extremely high. Between 1618 and 1624 tobacco
prices were in the range of 30d. to 36d. per pound with prices as high as
60d. and 90d. being recorded (Menard 1976:404). Profits from such high
prices were substantial and attracted both investment and immigrants to
the colony (Menard 1980:114–42). After 1625, however, prices fell sharply
as output grew rapidly, hitting the low level of 1d. per pound in 1630 and
barely scraping 3d. or 4d. until the 1660s (Menard 1976:405–8). Though
the tobacco economy swung from boom to slump over this period, in the
long run tobacco continued to be a profitable crop. Most of the
explanation for this rests in the ability of tobacco planters to increase
labour productivity. Although the data are scattered and not by any
means conclusive, what is available shows a distinctly clear rise in
productivity in all the Chesapeake tobacco regions from as early as the
1630s; more than a doubling of output per worker was recorded on
Maryland’s lower western shore, perhaps a tripling in the lower James
basin—productivity gains on Maryland’s upper eastern shore may have
been even larger, though the information available is too sparse for
confident conclusions (Walsh 1989: 395). Rising labour productivity
increased the demand for servants, especially male workers who, with
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 173
little previous experience or training, could be put to work in the tobacco
fields. Recent estimates suggest that only 25 per cent of the servants who
emigrated to the Chesapeake in this period were of yeoman stock
(Kulikoff 1986:32).
Those servants who survived the ‘seasoning’ and paid off their passage
could look forward to becoming planters and, in time, buying their own
servants. That this degree of economic and social mobility was a feature
of early colonial life in the Chesapeake is beyond doubt. Ex-servants
accumulated as much as £2 sterling each year they were free (Kulikoff
1986:36). Ex-servants held political office and enjoyed other advantages,
and though poverty and poor households existed there was far less
distance in economic fortunes between the lowest and highest
landowners than there was in other places and would be in the future
(Kulikoff 1986:36–7; Bernhard 1977).
The ‘age of the small planter’ is an accurate label for Chesapeake
society in the first eight decades of its existence. It was short-lived,
however. Beginning in the 1680s and then accelerating at a fantastic rate,
Chesapeake society was transformed from a society based on servitude to
one based on slavery; from relatively egalitarian to rigidly hierarchical;
and from ethnically European to ethnically African. This change has,
naturally, attracted a great deal of scholarship and, though the debate is
by no means settled, it is certain that the market for coerced labour was
undergoing a considerable transformation at the time (Eltis 1992). In
particular it seems that the supply of English indentured servants was
shrinking and their price rising relative to African slaves (McCusker and
Menard 1985:133–8, 238–45; Kulikoff 1986:37–44; Menard 1977). Though
tidewater planters seem to have preferred a European labour force, the
economics of the marketplace did not accommodate their needs. It was
not simply a change of labour supply, for what happened had a profound
impact on the course of Chesapeake, and American history, and also on
the relationship between planter and plant.
The total population of the Chesapeake colonies increased substantially
during the eighteenth century from a level of 98,000 in 1700 to 786,000 in
1780 (McCusker and Menard 1985:136). The black population, which at
the end of the seventeenth century was small in comparison to the white
population, rapidly overshadowed the growth of the latter. Whereas
blacks accounted for only 13 per cent of the population in 1700, the figure
reached nearly 40 per cent in 1780 (McCusker and Menard 1985:136).
Both a high rate of slave immigration and a high level of reproduction led
to this diverging experience between whites and blacks (Kulikoff 1977).
Tobacco farms were transformed into tobacco plantations. Instead of
servant labour, planters turned to slave labour, and wealth became vested
in the number of slaves on the plantation. There was a steady change in
the organization of tobacco cultivation in several ways, but in the end the
174 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
main result was a generally increasing size of unit, on the one hand, and
a growing complexity of management on the plantations, on the other.
Plantation records are sparse but their message is quite clear. In the first
place, over the eighteenth century it was increasingly unusual to come
across tobacco farms where there was no slave labour: in Anne Arundel
County, Maryland, for example, the proportion of farms without slave
labour decreased from 62 per cent to 32 per cent between 1658 and 1777;
at the same time those with more than three bound workers increased
their share from 13 per cent to 40 per cent over the same period (Carr and
Menard 1989:410). In the middle of the eighteenth century several parts
of the Chesapeake had a preponderance of large plantations. Around half
of the plantations in Anne Arundel County, in Lancaster County and in
the tidewater had more than twenty-one slaves, but on the big
plantations the number of slaves could be huge; Robert Carter, one of the
biggest plantation owners, owned 734 slaves in 1733 (Kulikoff 1986:331–
2). A second feature of the changing human geography of the
Chesapeake in the eighteenth century was the expansion of ‘quarters’,
plantations separate from the main or home plantation. These, even more
than the home plantations, showed an increasing concentration of slave
labour.
With the emergence of slave labour, tobacco cultivation itself became
socially complex. Unlike the seventeenth century, when planters
cultivated tobacco under fairly similar labour regimes, and with roughly
similar acreage, the eighteenth century witnessed cultivation under
distinct social relations.
At the one extreme were the great planters, men such as Robert and
Landon Carter, William Byrd, even Thomas Jefferson, whose stately
mansions began to appear along the banks of the Chesapeake tidewater
(Breen 1985:35). These families, and others like them, made up the
Chesapeake gentry, a social class which was in embryonic form in the
previous century (Kulikoff 1986:261–313). Slavery cemented social
relations while tobacco provided the gentry with material and symbolic
existence. These men, as a recent study has brilliantly portrayed, were
obsessed by tobacco (Breen 1985). The reasons are not difficult to find.
First, tobacco continued to be their primary staple, though on their large
plantations some amount of land was devoted to food crops, a proportion
of which was marketed (McCusker and Menard 1985:128–31; Clemens
1975; Walsh 1989). Second, their personal material world, their homes,
clothes and food, all of which were culturally European, were
accumulated through the consignment system operated by English
merchants (Breen 1986; Breen 1988; Shammas 1990). In rough outline, the
planter sold his output to an English merchant who would sell the
tobacco back in England and return to the Chesapeake with
manufactured goods and European foodstuffs. As Thomas Breen puts it:
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 175
‘this marketing device became a badge of class, a means of distinguishing
great planters from those of lesser status’ (Breen 1985:36). Finally, tobacco
was pivotal to a culture of debt that was endemic among the great
planters and which, during the second half of the eighteenth century,
would begin to undermine the structure of the Chesapeake economy
(Breen 1985: 160–203). On a symbolic plane, as plantations grew in size,
as the bound labour force expanded and as the demand for supervision
increased, planters became the repository of the almost mystical
understanding of the ways of tobacco. In contrast to the way in which
tobacco lore was passed to servants in the seventeenth century, this lore
passed from planter father to planter son in the eighteenth century (Breen
1984). If slave-owning was a gauge of wealth, then tobacco was a
measure of esteem. Individual planters prided themselves on the quality
of their output, which typically carried their owner’s name to market
(Breen 1985:64–7). Failure to harvest a fine crop in adverse climatic
conditions was viewed not as bad luck but as bad management. A
planter who achieved the finest results from his fields was given the
highest praise as a crop master (Breen 1985:61–3). In the same way as
tobacco was the medium of exchange in seventeenth-century Chesapeake
economy, so the tobacco leaf was representative of Chesapeake planter
culture (Morgan 1975:177). Of course, though they were present on their
main plantations, the Chesapeake gentry were gentlemen and not
labourers (Kulikoff 1986:280–300). Field work was the responsibility of
the overseer and the slave labourers (Carr and Walsh 1988; Morgan
1988).
All of this was in stark contrast to tobacco cultivation in areas distant
from the tidewater. Up the many rivers flowing into Chesapeake Bay lay
the Virginia frontier. White farmers, many of them ex-servants finding
their access to tobacco cultivation in the tidewater blocked by rising
labour costs, began to seek opportunities in this area. Thousands
emigrated to the piedmont between 1740 and the eve of the Revolution. At
first, the region was populated by poor families, cultivating tobacco on
smallholdings without slave labour (Kulikoff 1986:141–53). In contrast to
their counterparts in the tidewater region, small planters in the piedmont
did not sell their tobacco on consignment to English merchants but rather
directly to Scottish merchants who, as detailed in the previous chapter,
established country stores in the tobacco region (Kulikoff 1986:122–4, 226–
7; Price 1954; Soltow 1959; Farmer 1988). By involving themselves with
Scottish and not English merchants the small planters of the piedmont
retained an independence from the gentry class to the east and north
while at the same time being firmly locked into the transatlantic economy
(Price 1964). But the Virginia frontier was not static and, as the century
progressed, many large planters from the tidewater bought land, and
slave-holding on a large scale became just as common there as in the
176 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
tidewater. In Amelia County in Virginia’s southside the percentage of
households owning slaves increased from 23 per cent to 76 per cent while
the median number of slaves rose from two to six between 1736 and 1782
(Kulikoff 1986:154). This drift to tobacco slave societies was typical of
other counties in the southside and in central parts of the colony. But the
frontier continued to move westward and the small tobacco planter after
the 1780s was exploring opportunities in Georgia and Kentucky (Kulikoff
1986:161).
Chesapeake society was the first European society to develop on the
basis of tobacco. In many ways its history exemplifies the diverse cultural
arrangements that accompany tobacco cultivation. Though plantation
society swept through the region from the late seventeenth century, the
ideal of a yeoman tobacco planter continued to be pursued, albeit on the
fringes. It was these planters, together with the freed slaves after the Civil
War, who carried the cultural history of tobacco forward into the
nine teenth century; but before looking at that we need to retrace our
steps to other tobacco-growing regions of the New World and Europe.
As Chapter 3 showed, tobacco cultivation was attempted by Europeans
in many parts of the New World. Many of these areas did not pursue
tobacco cultivation for very long, yet their short-lived history is
nevertheless significant in terms of the theme of planters and tobacco
societies.
With the exception of Jamaica, the Caribbean islands colonized by
France and England were, as we have seen, based on tobacco cultivation
(Dunn 1973:149–87; Zahedieh 1986). The transatlantic servant trade that
featured so prominently in the early history of the Chesapeake was just
as evident in the Caribbean and, indeed, for several decades the islands
rather than the mainland were the primary destination for the indentured
(Gemery 1980). Over the seventeenth century about 60 per cent of an
estimated British emigration level of 378,000 was bound for the
Caribbean, compared with around 30 per cent for the Chesapeake; a little
under half of the Caribbean immigrants arrived there in the two decades
after 1630 (Gemery 1980:215). Death rates were so appalling that, despite
heavy immigration, population growth was miserably low: between 1630
and 1660, for instance, an immigration of some 144,000 English people
managed to increase the total population by no more than 43,000 over the
same period (Gemery 1980:197).
All of the British-controlled islands in the Caribbean followed a
roughly similar pattern in white population changes. Growth was
particularly rapid until the 1640s, followed by a much slower rate of
change reaching a maximum level around 1660, and then declining well
into the eighteenth century (Gemery 1980:212). Within the region there
were some marked differences in demographic experience. Nevis,
Montserrat and especially St Kitts, which experienced a drop in its white
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 177
population from a maximum of 12,000 to 1,000 in 35 years, sustained a
considerable decrease in their white population; Barbados, with the
largest white population among the islands, experienced a smaller and
slower decline, though by 1712, there were half as many whites on the
island as was the case seventy years before; Bermuda and Antigua (also
Jamaica) were the only islands to keep their white population stable over
the seventeenth century (Gemery 1980: 219–25).
What is significant about the white population pattern is that, in
general terms, the initial and often quite dramatic rise in population, and
the subsequent equally dramatic decline, were accompanied by, or even
caused by, the growth of and subsequent collapse of tobacco cultivation.
Barbados is a case in point and one for which there is relatively good
information. Settlement and tobacco cultivation went hand in hand, a
situation which was quite different from what happened in the
Chesapeake colonies. Grants of land to settlers were fairly large, on
average 100 acres between 1628 and 1629 (Innes 1970:9). Land usage was
organized along plantation lines and in the very first years of settlement
five such plantations came into being supported by a labour force of 150
people: within a few years, these five were reconstructed as thirteen
plantations while the number of settlers had risen to 1,850 (Innes 1970:4).
The point about these figures is that under Barbadian political and
economic conditions tobacco cultivation followed a path wholly distinct
from that in the Chesapeake. Unlike the planter with a servant or two,
typical of Virginia at the time, the Barbadian tobacco planter had a
substantial army of labour under his control, almost all of it bound.
Unfortunately there is no precise measure of the size of the labour input
on a Barbadian tobacco plantation. One indirect piece of evidence,
namely the labour structure on 15 plantations—probably cotton, indigo
and some tobacco—between 1639 and 1643, i.e. before the sugar period,
shows that all had at least 2 servants and several had more than 20
(Beckles 1985:34). That was in general terms, but the actual method of
cultivating tobacco was for smallholders to lease from 5 to 30 acres from
the estate (Innes 1970:16). As in the case of the Chesapeake, the motive
for accepting an indenture was surely a hope of becoming a tobacco
planter. On Barbados it was clear from the way the land was parcelled out
that the chances of a freed servant becoming an independent smallholder
were small, and became increasingly unlikely within a decade or two of
initial settlement (Innes 1970:10–11). Rather than hope to join the planter
class, freed servants were faced with a less satisfactory set of alternatives:
‘Their choice was to try one of the less congested Leeward Islands, or
return home, or stay as wage laborers in Barbados’ (Dunn 1973:53).
Whatever they decided to do, one thing is clear: until the 1640s, tobacco
was the most profitable staple in the English Caribbean. Output increased
substantially and population levels soared. Between 1628 and 1638 the
178 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
total amount of tobacco cultivated on Barbados and St Kitts rose from 100,
000 pounds to 675,000 pounds: total population on the two islands
increased from 2,400 to 25,000 (Beckles 1985:25; Gemery 1980:219, 223).
Even though the price of tobacco fell by 50 per cent between these dates,
rising output offset the effects of this price fall, in income if not in rate of
return (Menard 1980:157). One historian has estimated that yearly
incomes for tobacco planters on Barbados, given the prevailing levels of
productivity, averaged from £37 to £56 from the sale of leaf that each
planter raised (Batie 1976:8). Income, not rate of return, was the
important goal since investment in tobacco cultivation was insignificant.
At such high levels of income expectation it is small wonder that
thousands flocked to the islands and, just as in the Chesapeake, were
captivated by the tobacco plant. Descriptions of the material culture of
Barbados in the early years of settlement bear a striking resemblance to
those of Virginia. Here is how Sir Henry Colt summed up Barbadian
agriculture in 1631: ‘your grownd & plantations…lye like ye ruines of
some village lately burned,…all ye earth couered black wth cenders
nothinge is cleer. What digged or weeded for beautye?’ (Harlow 1925:65–
6). What was an affront to Colt’s eyes was nothing more than the attempt
by the early planters to adapt Indian agricultural practices to the
particular characteristics of the tobacco plant (Dunn 1973:6).
Barbados, St Kitts and many of the lesser islands were planted in
tobacco. Despite the growing populations and output there is a sense of
desperation on the one hand, and addictiveness on the other hand, about
tobacco cultivation that percolates through the surviving literary
evidence. It is hard to make complete sense of it, but there is little doubt
that tobacco growing on the English islands was becoming increasingly
difficult; but giving it up was not easy. The English attempt to colonize
the island of Providence off the coast of Nicaragua provides some
evidence of this double-edged experience. The island was settled in 1630
by a select group of Puritan grandees headed by the Earl of Warwick and
Sir Nathaniel Rich, both of whom were responsible for the settlement of
Bermuda (Kupperman 1988). Philip Bell, then Governor of Bermuda, was
attracted to the opportunities of planting tobacco in tropical climes,
reacting partly at least to the success of tobacco plantations on both
Barbados and St Kitts (Batie 1976). Writing to his financial backers, Bell was
clear on the wealth that would accrue: ‘in short time [it would] be made
more rich and bountiful either by tobacco or any other commodities than
double or treble any man’s estate in all England’ (Newton 1914:33).
Tobacco is what they settled on but the going was never good. Partly this
was because the enterprise itself ran into trouble and partly because in
the 1630s the glut on the market was eroding the commercial viability of
the crop, especially in the Caribbean (Kupperman 1988). William Jessop,
the Secretary to the Providence Island Company, put it succinctly in a
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 179
letter written in 1635 to a settler: ‘Tobacco’, he wrote, ‘sells now in
London for 15d. and the market beyond sea is so little above it that men
have no great stomach to ship it out’ (BM Add. Mss 63,854B, f. 127). In
1634, to put the matter into perspective, the Chesapeake colonies shipped
around 400,000 pounds to London, the Barbados and St Kitts colonies
perhaps another 200,000, and some more (exact amount unknown) was
shipped from Bermuda and Spain (Pagan 1979:254; Beckles 1985:25;
Williams 1957). The little that the Providence settlers could export would
have paled into insignificance when placed alongside the main
producers. The Providence Island directors were fully aware of the
market conditions for tobacco and tried to convince settlers to cultivate
other commodities. The alternatives ranged from silk grass, cotton and
sugar cane to pomegranates and figs; juniper berries were the flavour of
1634 (Batie 1976:10; BM Add. Mss 63,854B, f. 10). But tobacco had a hold
on the settlement, and though prices collapsed after 1634 tobacco was
still being planted as late as 1637 (Kupperman 1988:81; BM Add. Mss 63,
854B, f. 236). Whether this was for export, for their own consumption or
both is unknown.
It was not just falling prices, and increasing competition from the
Chesapeake, that produced problems for Caribbean producers. The
quality of their product, to judge from contemporary accounts, was
inferior. Condemnation of Barbadian tobacco in terms of quality was
voiced as early as 1628 when John Winthrop, upon receiving his son’s
consignment of tobacco in London, wrote back to him that it was ‘very ill
conditioned, foul, full of stalks and evil coloured, and your uncle Fones
taking the judgement of divers grocers, none of them would give five
shillings for it’ (Innes 1970:15). It is just possible that the quality problem
reflected nothing more than the fact that this tobacco was among the first
that Barbados exported, but later comments suggest otherwise. Archibald
Hay, the principal proprietary trustee for Barbados, was quite certain
that the difficulty in disposing of Barbadian tobacco lay in its poor
quality. In a letter of 1638 to Peter Hay, the Receiver General for the
proprietary estate in Barbados, Archibald Hay complained: ‘Your
Barbados tubaco cannot expect to come to a good Marcat any where it
hath the reputation to be so bad w[hi]ch the planters must help by
making lesse and better’ (Bennett 1965:15). Captain Daniel Fletcher, a
local planter, concurred. Tobacco, he argued, was ‘A Commodity of Noe
Better Estimation, not worth Any thinge, for it is the worst of all
tobaccoes and I am p[er]swaded Never will be worth one farthinge
token’ (Bennett 1965:15). Archibald Hay entreated his agent to encourage
planters to try cotton, and though they would do so in the next years to
come, it is instructive to hear Peter Hay on the reluctance of local planters
to abandon tobacco. In his reply to Archibald Hay he wrote as follows:
‘You desire us all to plant cotton, w[hi]ch is a thing the planters can
180 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
hardly doe, because they are indebted, that if they leave planting of
tobacco they shall never be able to pay thare debts…’ (Bennett 1965:16).
But the poor quality continued to plague Barbados, and probably other
islands. Richard Ligon, an especially eloquent observer of life on Barbados,
dismissed its tobacco in summary terms by calling it ‘the worst I think
that grows in the world’ (Batie 1976: 12).
Whatever the truth about the inferior quality of Barbadian tobacco, the
planters were handicapped by their lack of resources. Specifically, they
could not compete with the Chesapeake, for the simple reason that they
had limited land and given that there was no alternative to a fallow
rotation system, there was a physical limit to how much could be
produced. Also there is a strong possibility that Barbadian planters were
not achieving increases in productivity as evidenced in the Chesapeake.
All of these factors undoubtedly contributed to the demise of tobacco
cultivation on Barbados, which in the 1640s shifted to other staples and
especially sugar cane production (Green 1988). And with that shift there
was a correspond ing shift away from the use of indentured English
servants to African slave labour (Beckles 1981:237, 243; Beckles and
Downes 1987:228–9; Dunn 1973:68). The size of the slave population
soared, and that of the white population, both free and unfree, began to
shrink: in 1660 half the population of the island was white, the other half
black; by 1712 African slaves outnumbered whites by more than three to
one (Dunn 1973:87). Tobacco planters on the Leeward Islands, especially
on St Kitts, Antigua and Montserrat, continued to grow tobacco, though
by the 1670s the pattern established earlier on Barbados and on Nevis
began to be followed. Planters consolidated their holdings, shifted to
sugar and to a black labour force: white servants and smallholders started
looking elsewhere for a livelihood (Dunn 1973:117, 122, 131, 141).
Bermuda did-not share the experience of the other English islands. In
the first place, tobacco cultivation began on the islands as early as 1613,
according to one piece of evidence, but certainly by 1615 (Ives 1984:4–5).
Being thus contemporaneous with Virginia, there was less of a feeling on
Bermuda that planters there were in direct competition with an
established producer, as was clearly the case on Barbados and St Kitts. In
the early years, judging from the correspondence surviving in the papers
of the Rich family, there was considerable confidence among the islands’
settlers about the ability of tobacco to underpin the local economy. There
were no problems, as far as one can tell, about the quality of the output
such as faced by planters in Barbados, but other problems associated with
tobacco cultivation did emerge in Bermuda as elsewhere. There was, for
example, the perennial problem that planters did not put their efforts into
building settlements in the material sense of the word. Governor Tucker
pointed this out to Nathaniel Rich in a letter of 1617 where he advised
settlers on ‘not spendinge most of their tyme in Making Tobacco but to
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 181
manuer, plant and sett the Islands, for thereby the Plantacion would be
made to flourishe and yield more pleasure to the Inhabbitants’ (Ives 1984:
97). There was also that other perennial problem, namely that, as a
petition to the Commissioners of Bermuda so succinctly put it, ‘the
planting of Tobacco doth suck out the hart of the ground’ (Ives 1984:267).
Nevertheless, neither of these problems seems to have deterred the
planting of tobacco in Bermuda. For one thing the islands were
flourishing, as is apparent from population figures. In 1628, after 16 years
of settlement, the island supported a white population of 2,000, a level
slightly larger than that of Virginia at the same date (Gemery 1980:225;
Menard 1980: 157). By 1656 it had reached 3,000 inhabitants and by 1679
its maximum for the century at 4,000 (Gemery 1980:225). During all this
time the main staple was tobacco. Output grew slowly, reaching perhaps
500,000 pounds in the 1680s, a far cry admittedly from the 20 million
pounds from the Chesapeake, but respectable nevertheless (Gray and
Wyckoff 1940:22). What all this means is that Bermudans, though living
in an economy where both land and labour were scarce, were remarkably
successful in dealing with problems of soil fertility (Bernhard 1988). How
they coped is not certain, but there is some evidence that Bermudan
planters fertilized their ground with marl, and used crop rotation; they
also used their lands for growing food and were, therefore, not dependent
on external supplies (Ives 1984:267). Though other cash crops were
frequently put forth as alternatives to tobacco, none of these, in the
seventeenth century at least, made any real headway. Sugar cane was one
such crop that was heavily promoted by the absentee landowners but
found little favour with the tenant farmers. As was common in the
Chesapeake and in the Caribbean in the early days of settlement, tobacco
was also used in Bermuda as the medium of exchange (Ives 1984:49, 229,
382).
In many respects what happened on the English Caribbean islands also
happened on the French Antilles. These French possessions, specifically
Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Christophe, were settled with tobacco as
the staple crop, and though the date of the change from tobacco to sugar
varied, it produced changes in the organization of labour, land structure
and population profile very similar to those the English experienced.
Guadeloupe was the first of the French islands to abandon tobacco
cultivation; in 1671, according to the official land use survey, tobacco, in
terms of the area under cultivation, was the least important cash crop,
behind sugar and ginger—indeed, the area under tobacco was no more
than 3 per cent of the area under sugar (Schnakenbourg 1980:49). By that
date the white population of the island stood at 3,112 while the black
population stood at 4,627. The critical years for the change in the nature of
the economy and the social structure of the island were from 1656 to 1671
during which time the white population shrank from a level of 12,000,
182 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
and the black population increased by more than 50 per cent from a
figure of 3,000; the number of sugar mills rose from 10 to 107, and tobacco
cultivation fell precipitously (Schnakenbourg 1968:300, 302). The white
population began to increase again towards the end of the seventeenth
century but its growth rate was substantially inferior to that of the black
population (Davies 1974: 82). Martinique had a similar experience except
that the economic and social transitions happened later, and at a slower
pace, than in Guadeloupe. In 1671, for example, even though sugar was
clearly the most important cash crop in the settlement, tobacco cultivation
still occupied 15 per cent of the arable land and as many as 65 per cent of
the habitations grew tobacco (Kimber 1988:128; Petitjean Roget 1980:1396).
The white population of the island fell substantially between 1652 and
1685, though the extent of the fall is disputed because of uncertainty
surrounding the accuracy of the 1652 figure (Kimber 1988:115).
Nevertheless, by 1660, blacks outnumbered whites (Kimber 1988:115). As
in Guadeloupe, the white population did grow again in the eighteenth
century but not at the rate of the black population (Davies 1974:83).
It is clearly the case that the abandonment of tobacco on the French
islands was accompanied by the kinds of profound changes that had
already occurred on the English islands. The exception was that the
initial collapse in white population in the French islands was not
followed, as it was on the English islands, by a long period in which the
white population remained more or less stable (Gemery 1984:322; Wells
1975:260–8). The collapse in the white population was, in both the French
and English islands, caused primarily by the abandonment of tobacco, by
the shift towards cheaper African slave labour, and by consolidating
landholdings. The pattern of indentured servitude was also similar on
both sets of islands, though the timing of the decline of the servant trade
came naturally at a later date on the French islands than it did on the
English islands (Mauro 1986:99–101). If the experiences of tobacco
planters on Martinique were in any way general then it seems that the
market for indentured servants dried up primarily because of a lack of
demand on the part of the planter, but also because of the decreasing
ability of the indentured servant to pay back the cost of the indenture in a
reasonable time. On Martinique tobacco prices plummeted from 150
livres tournois per pound in 1636 to between 10 and 15 livres tournois in
the early 1660s. The effect of such a depression in tobacco prices was, on
the one hand, to double the cost of living calculated in tobacco and, on
the other hand, to make it increasingly difficult for an indentured servant
to pay back the cost of his passage within the period of his indenture
(Petitjean Roget 1980:1149–51). The diverging experiences after 1700 were
primarily the result of the introduction of other, non-plantation cash
crops, such as indigo, ginger, coffee and cocoa into the French Caribbean
economies, as well as the continuing emphasis on food crops (Kimber
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 183
1988:128; Schnakenbourg 1980:49; Davies 1974:190–2; May 1930). Tobacco
cultivation on St Domingue also suffered the fate of other producers in
the Caribbean, though the change happened much later. In 1674 St
Domingue was the largest producer of tobacco in the Caribbean area with
an output of between 2.5 and 3 million pounds. But this level was not
sustained, and output began to decline, reaching 50 per cent of its 1674
level in 1714 and more or less disappearing thereafter (Price 1973:83–
115). St Domingue was becoming a sugar island, with the typical pattern
of the concentration of land into the hands of a few large planters, and an
enormous build-up of slave labour. On the eve of the Revolution St
Domingue had a white population of 40,000 set against a slave
population exceeding 450,000 (Stein 1988:42–3). Free whites who were
not absorbed within the sugar economy withdrew to the hinterland
where, as small planters, they pursued coffee culture (Dupuy 1985: 92;
Trouillot 1981; Trouillot 1982).
Planters who abandoned tobacco on the French islands must have felt
that an important stage of the settlement of these islands was over. There
is little doubt that on both Martinique and Guadeloupe, as on
Barbados, tobacco cultivation provided the economic foundations upon
which the vast sugar empires were built. But the passing of the tobacco
culture did not go unnoticed. Father Jean-Baptiste Labat, the French
missionary who travelled extensively throughout the Caribbean region
towards the end of the seventeenth century, was clearly dismayed by
what had happened to the society of Martinique and Guadeloupe. In his
account of his voyages he reminded his readers in forceful language that
French island society was made possible by tobacco cultivation. He
maintained that the considerable progress of sugar cane came with a high
price. In the first instance, it led directly to the depopulation of French
people and the consequent erosion of a French cultural presence in the
region. A typical sugar plantation supported no more than four or five
Frenchmen whereas the same land area could support fifty or sixty
tobacco planters. African slaves, he admitted, were fine for work, but
they would not defend the rights of France against its enemies, nor would
they necessarily go about their activities in a peaceful manner as French
habitants did. The presence of so many slaves would, he predicted, lead
inexorably to protest and revolts, and the fact that by the time he arrived
in the area there had been no such unrest was nothing short of
miraculous. Second, tobacco cultivation on the islands had repercussions
on the metropolitan economy that sugar did not. Specifically, Labat was
thinking here that French islanders would demand all of the fine
manufactured goods and provisions that France could offer whereas
African slaves, as he put it, ‘need no more than 4 or 5 yards of linen and a
bit of salted beef’ (Labat 1742:334). The white depopulation was
deplorable, Labat argued. The only way to get French people to emigrate
184 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
was to renew tobacco culture. Fresh lands were available on some of the
least populated islands such as Marie-Galante, St Martin, St Barthélemy
and Grenada, but also in still uncultivated parts of Martinique and
Guadeloupe. As a pioneer crop tobacco had no competition. Sugar was
capital-intensive and, according to Labat, indigo and cocoa were not
much better since returns on the latter, for example, would not
materialize for five or six years (Labat 1742:328–37).
As we have seen, after Labat wrote, the white population in the islands
did increase without a return to tobacco culture. Despite his incorrect
predictions, Labat’s plea for tobacco cultivation must be understood in its
proper context as a powerful reminder of the tobacco mentality. It is
interesting to note that most of Labat’s section on tobacco is dedicated
not to a polemic about tobacco culture but rather to a description of how
tobacco is cultivated. Judging from the close similarity between Labat’s
description and that of later writers, both in the United States and in Brazil,
there is little doubt that tobacco culture for French island planters was as
exacting of time and care as in the Chesapeake (Labat 1742:300–18).
From the point of view of the social and cultural history of tobacco, it is
Labat’s insistence on the Europeanness of the plant that is so
striking. There is, of course, a danger in becoming deterministic about
this point: tobacco equals white labour, sugar equals black labour. The
relationship among staples, labour systems and ethnic cultures is
complex and is itself historically specific. What can be argued, however,
is that, for all the reasons that have already been elaborated, tobacco was
an eminently suitable pioneer or yeoman crop; and, as at least since the
sixteenth century pioneers and yeomen have been overwhelmingly
European, it is not surprising that links between culture and plants have
been made. The following chapter will pursue this theme further,
particularly in its elaboration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in
the wake of the abolition of slavery and the enormous expansion of
tobacco cultivation across the globe. For now, however, we need to
conclude this cultural history of tobacco by looking at Brazil.
The Chesapeake had William Tatham; the French Caribbean had JeanBaptiste Labat; and Brazil had André João Antonil, who wrote an
important description of tobacco culture in Brazil in the early part of the
eighteenth century (Antonil 1965). Brazilian tobacco cultivation was
concentrated in the heartland of Bahia in the north-east of the country.
The production cycle in Brazil was considerably shorter than in the
Chesapeake, requiring only six months from seed to harvest as opposed
to nine. Seeds were sown in specially prepared seedbeds by early May,
transplanted several weeks later into the fields that were prepared
beginning in February, weeded, topped and suckered in July and August
and harvested beginning in September (Antonil 1965:295–9; Lugar 1977:
32). Curing normally lasted three days and then the tobacco was ready to
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 185
be twisted into long cords about three inches in diameter. Over the next
months these cords hung in sheds and were frequently retwisted, the
moisture collected, mixed with a cocktail of anis, basil, pork fat and
molasses, and the cords brushed with this mixture: this was done as
much to preserve the tobacco as to give it a particular taste and aroma
(Antonil 1965:303–5). The final stage of preparation involved the rerolling of the twists on to sticks and then three of these were packed into
a roll weighing about 480 pounds, wrapped in leaves and bound in
leather ready for shipment (Antonil 1965:307–9: Lugar 1977:32–3).
According to Antonil’s description, the most intense use of labour
came in the preparation of the twists and the rolls, and it was brute force,
more than skill, that was needed, though someone with an intimate
knowledge of the process was in charge (Antonil 1965:313–15). The other
stages of cultivation seem to have absorbed labour time in much the same
way as in the Chesapeake, and also in the French Caribbean, judging from
Labat’s description. Cutting the tobacco plant was accorded the same
level of skill in Brazil as in the Chesapeake (Antonil 1965:311). However,
unlike the Chesapeake, the production cycle did not end with the
packaging of the rolls. In the Bahian Recôncavo, as apparently was also
the case in the Caribbean, the plant was not uprooted but rather cut at a
height of one or two inches above ground level. A second growth
normally occurred and, if the soil qualities were good enough, the same
procedure was followed to allow for a third growth (Antonil 1965:313).
As already discussed in Chapter 6, the tobaccos from these three
successive growths were destined for different markets: the first to Europe,
and the second and third typically to the African coast.
Whereas Chesapeake husbandry entailed a long-fallow system, in the
Bahian Recôncavo fallowing was normally combined with a routine
application of animal manure. Though tobacco was the cash crop in this
region, tobacco culture itself was embedded within a system of mixed
farming, especially cattle-raising. Thus in Brazil the huge land areas so
typical of the Chesapeake were not necessary. Soil fertility was not such a
great problem in Brazilian tobacco culture and the same plot of land
could be used for a much longer period of time than in the Chesapeake.
Thus a rather different pattern of land utilization emerged in Brazil. Farms
tended to be smaller, while the number of workers per acre tended to be
greater. For example, while one worker in the Chesapeake tended 9,000
plants on a 3-acre site, two workers in the Bahian Recôncavo tended the
same number of plants but on half the number of acres and with more
than one growth and enough land left over for their own food
requirements (Carr and Menard 1989:413–14; Lugar 1977:34).
In the Bahian Recôncavo as in the Chesapeake, there were no
economies of scale in tobacco cultivation; expansion of output resulted
from a proportionate increase in inputs (Lugar 1977:35). Therefore small
186 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
as well as large farmers were attracted to tobacco culture, in theory at
least. Whatever the size of the holding, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries most tobacco growers employed slave labour to a greater or
lesser extent. This was, of course, significantly different from the situation
in the Chesapeake, part of the reason being that Brazil was not settled
with indentured servants and partly because the Bahian region supported
an enormous sugar industry whose labour force from the latter part of
the sixteenth century was overwhelmingly African slaves (Schwartz
1978; Greenfield 1979). The number of slaves that any grower used was
determined by several factors, including size of holding, relative land
utilization (especially tobacco and cattle-raising), and, most importantly,
whether the tobacco was processed into rolls on site—this part of tobacco
cultivation often required from three to five slaves (Flory 1978:179; Antonil
1965:313). A small tobacco grower producing from 3,000 to 5,000 pounds
of tobacco, tending cattle and raising his own food crops required the
assistance of two or three slaves, if he did not do his own processing
(Flory 1978:180). Processing tobacco elsewhere seems to have been
typical of small-growers in the Bahian Recôncavo (Flory 1978:187). A
moderate-sized farm with processing facilities had around twenty-five
slaves (Flory 1978:180). The Bahian tobacco society, in fact, comprised
three groups. First came the large landowners, whose origins in the
region derived from the grants of land given to them in the early years of
settlement. The second, and by far most numerous—possibly typical—
group consisted of the tenants of the first group plus small landowners.
Finally, there was a group of landless subsistence farmers (Flory 1978:193–
4). The little evidence that does exist suggests that in the course of the
eighteenth century the small landowners became more numerous and
more important in the tobacco growing area of Brazil (Flory 1978:192). This
should not obscure the fact that, though small in terms of landholding,
these tobacco growers, while not of the stature of sugar growers, were,
however, far from poor, as evidenced by the fact that they were
significant slave-owners (Flory 1978:205).
By the end of the eighteenth century tobacco grown in colonial
America on plantations in the Chesapeake, and mixed farms in the
Bahian Recôncavo, both using slave labour, accounted for the bulk of
world output. The ideal of the peasant pursuing tobacco culture with the
help of family labour on small plots had been abandoned in the Americas
from an early date. As late as the 1770s Spanish officials interested in
stimulating tobacco cultivation in Louisiana realized that the success of
any attempt to expand and extend tobacco production depended
ultimately on access to slave labour (Coutts 1986; Clark 1970:190–1). The
ideal, though, did exist in Europe, especially in the Dutch provinces, and
in Germany, where numerous families derived their livelihood from
tobacco culture (Roessingh 1978). As for the Americas, it was slavery as
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 187
an institution and the slave trade as a capitalist enterprise that shaped the
nature of tobacco societies until the middle of the nineteenth century
when profound social transformations changed the social construction of
tobacco cultivation again. The age of the ‘poor man’s crop’ was just about
to begin.
188 ‘TOBACCY’S KING DOWN HERE…’
Part IV
This vice brings in one hundred million francs in taxes every
year. I will certainly forbid it at once—as soon as you can
name a virtue that brings in as much revenue.
Napoleon III (1808–73)
…preaching the cult of the cigarette and distributing millions
gratis so as to introduce a taste for tobacco in this particular
form into regions where it was as yet unknown… The streets
of Foochow are brilliant with [BAT’s] ingenious pictorial
posters, which are so designed to readily catch the eye by their
gorgeous coloring and attractive lettering, both in English and
Chinese
British Consul, Foochow 1909, quoted in Cochran (1986:162)
In tobacco the big gambler is the farmer himself. He has no
guarantee of anything. He takes a chance on raising his crop
and then when he gets it raised he doesn’t know what it will
bring. It’s a ninety day crop growing but, as the farmers say,
with the curing it takes thirteen months a year.
Sam Hobgood 1938, quoted in Daniel (1985:184)
I love tobacco… I love to fool with it and get the gum on my
hands and clothes. I love to smell it and I love to chew it and
smoke it. Annie dips. She tried to get modern and smoke, but
she got sick on it and went back to her snuffbox…nothing
gives me pleasure like tobacco. I have never raised anything
that I like to raise half so well… Tobacco farmers are like gold
miners always hoping to strike it rich.
Lee Johnson, tobacco farmer, quoted in Daniel (1985:194)
8
A POOR MAN’S CROP?
The globalization of tobacco culture since 1800
By the end of, the seventeenth century tobacco cultivation had become
dependent upon slave labour on large holdings yet the absence of
economies of scale allowed small-scale production to co-exist. Moreover,
it was the absence of economies of scale that permitted the spread of
cultivation as it tended to be small or even marginal growers who were in
the forefront of expansion. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries the social and economic history of tobacco cultivation has been
characterized by a distinct dualism, between the small scale of growing
operations and the giant scale of manufacturing and marketing. Only in
the last few decades in the West, as mechanization has finally begun to
make considerable inroads into traditional procedures of cultivation and
harvesting, has the age of the small planter come under threat of
extinction. In other parts of the world, in Africa and Asia especially, this
dualism still exists. This chapter has two objectives: to examine the
changing social relations of tobacco production; and to explore the global
spread of tobacco culture from the nineteenth century until the present.
Tobacco cultivation moved out of tidewater Virginia in the eighteenth
century and spread further west over the Appalachians to North
Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia, as well as to scattered
localities further west and north. By the turn of the nineteenth century, if
not earlier, tobacco production had become common in areas previously
unfamiliar with tobacco culture. The rapid spread of tobacco cultivation
was clearly related to a general westward movement of population, to be
sure, but the fact that pioneers took tobacco culture with them attests
once again to the dynamic impact of the plant.
Moreover, pioneers tended not to migrate with extra labour, in
particular enslaved labour, and therefore most of the early tobacco
enterprises on the frontier were family-run. Yet within a relatively short
time the racial profile of the society began to change as enterprising
farmers turned to slave labour in an attempt to step up production. In the
county of Pittsylvania, near the centre of the Old Bright tobacco belt (an
area straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border), for example, slave
labour was being considerably exploited by 1790, even though the area
had been settled only some two or three decades earlier (Siegel 1987:75,
176). As a proportion of the population of Pittsylvania, slaves accounted
for a steadily increasing share, reaching 46 per cent in 1860, compared
with 27 per cent in 1790; put another way, at the outbreak of the Civil
War nearly two-thirds of landowners were also slave-holders (Siegel
1987:176). By contrast, Lunenburg County, to the east of Pittsylvania and
therefore settled at an earlier date, began its transformation sooner. The
1790 slave population share for Pittsylvania was reached in Lunenburg in
1750, and the 1860 figure on the eve of the Revolution (Kulikoff 1986:
154).
Though in time tobacco growers in the piedmont shared some features,
especially the use of slave labour, with their counterparts in the
Chesapeake, in one important respect they were quite different. The
piedmont never developed a class of great planters as in the tidewater,
and large plantations were not common. Some insight into the nature of
the tobacco society to the west of the tidewater can be gained by looking
more closely at Pittsylvania.
On the eve of the Civil War almost 50 per cent of the farms in
Pittsylvania were under 200 acres in area, with a median size of 215 acres
(Siegel 1987:77, 79). These figures were not very different from those of
Augusta, an adjoining county which, unlike Pittsylvania, derived its
economic benefits from mixed farming, especially wheat and dairy
farming. The main point is that despite the fact that Pittsylvania had a
substantial and growing slave population co-opted to the cultivation of a
single cash crop, there was little difference in the land structure in the
two seemingly contrasting counties. The contrast in this part of Virginia
was not between a yeoman county such as Augusta and a tobacco county
such as Pittsylvania, but rather between eastern and western counties, in
part between those settled early and those settled late. Mecklenburg and
Fairfax counties, to the east of Pittsylvania and therefore closer to the
tidewater, had larger slave populations than Pittsylvania (Siegel 1987:88–
9). The point is an important one because it underlines the fact that
tobacco cultivation remained locked into a specific economic organization
which, while embracing slavery, did not lend itself generally to the
creation of a planter aristocracy. That this did occur in tidewater Virginia
before the Revolution is due more to other forces, social and political,
than to the attributes of tobacco culture. The contrast with cotton could
not be more stark. Taking five main cotton states—Alabama, Mississippi,
Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana—in 1860, we find that the median
number of slaves per holding averaged thirty-seven while in a sample of
tobacco regions the corresponding figure was around twenty (Gray 1958:
130–1). Seen in another way, in Kentucky in 1860 only 2.3 per cent of all
slaves in the state were employed on units of production that exceeded
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 191
fifty slaves; for Virginia the corresponding figure was 15 per cent, but in
Louisiana the proportion stood at 50 per cent (Gray 1958:530).
There is, though, a further feature, other than late settlement, that
distinguished Pittsylvania’s slaveholding pattern from that of the eastern
Virginia counties. One clue is that in Pittsylvania between 1820 and 1860
the average number (mean and median values) of acres owned declined
significantly, while total tobacco output increased (Siegel 1987:79, 92).
This change coincided with an increase in tenancy and, most
importantly, a concerted shift towards the cultivation of Bright, or, as it
came to be known, fluecured tobacco. The details of Bright tobacco
culture will be described later in this chapter, but for now it is important
to know only that Bright tobacco was grown on poor soil and cured in
enclosed barns, giving the leaf a distinct yellow colour, light aroma and
flavour. It was first used in the nineteenth century as a wrapper for the
chewing plug, and then increasingly for the plug itself. As a wrapper
Bright tobacco offered distinct advantages over the darker tobacco
varieties in that it did not change its colour when in contact with tobacco
juices and flavourings used in chewing tobacco manufacture (Herndon
1969:413–14). Prices for Bright tobacco were consistently above those of
other leaf varieties; in the postbellum period Bright tobacco often fetched
a price double that of dark fire-cured tobacco (Tilley 1948:125). The
increased demand for Bright tobacco in the antebellum period was
probably responsible for the shift towards this culture and to an increase
in tenancy; the price of what was once useless land surged ahead on the
expectation of its newly discovered profitability —in Caswell County,
North Carolina, land prices doubled in 1857 alone (Tilley 1948:32). There
is also some evidence that Bright tobacco culture was more intensive than
that of the dark varieties (Tilley 1948:37–88; Siegel 1987:162–3). The
development of Bright tobacco culture thus provided a possibility for
replacing the plantation system with smaller family-run enterprises.
Until the Civil War tobacco cultivation in the United States expanded
in both quantity and area. Production levels tended to fluctuate around
their maximum pre-revolutionary quantity for some time into the
nineteenth century, mostly because of dislocated and uncertain markets;
but they began to move ahead once international conditions settled. By
1839 the United States tobacco crop was only 75 per cent of its 1790 level
but on the eve of the Civil War the total crop was double that of 1839
(Herndon 1969:423, 427). Part of this expansion was caused by the growth
of cultivation in the older tobacco regions, but much more of it was
accounted for by the expansion of cultivation in Kentucky and North
Carolina, as well as in the western regions of Virginia (Herndon 1969: 427).
The postbellum period accelerated this pattern but it also ushered in an
entirely new history of tobacco cultivation, particularly in the social
relations on the land.
192 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
One of the most important features of postbellum tobacco culture was
the rapid spread of Bright tobacco, from its centre in what is commonly
referred to as the Old Bright Belt, a rectangular area approximately 80
miles by 150 miles positioned equally on both sides of the Virginia-North
Carolina border, about half way along the length of it (Tilley 1948:12).
From there Bright tobacco culture moved westward towards WinstonSalem, to the coastal regions of both North and South Carolina in the
1890s, when cotton prices collapsed below subsistence levels and farmers
turned to the golden leaf for salvation (Tilley 1948:141–50). During the
First World War, the Bright Belt extended into Georgia (Daniel 1984:
430). By 1919 Bright tobacco accounted for 35 per cent of the entire
tobacco crop of the United States (Tilley 1948:357; Herndon 1969:427). By
contrast, Kentucky and Tennessee continued to concentrate on Burley
tobacco in the postbellum period as they had done in the antebellum
period. These two states alone accounted for 45 per cent of the nation’s
tobacco crop in 1919 (Herndon 1969:427).
Alongside the geographical expansion of Bright tobacco culture, the
postbellum period witnessed the restructuring, or, as some historians
might argue, an acceleration, of social relations on the land. The most
visible aspect of this was the rapid increase in tenancy which, though in
existence before the Civil War, certainly grew dramatically after it (Tilley
1948:94). In the Old Bright Belt the percentage of farm tenancy ranged
from a low of 16 per cent to a high of 44 per cent in 1879, but this shifted
profoundly to the corresponding figures of 32 per cent, and 69 per cent in
1929 (Tilley 1948:94). Even higher proportions of tenancy were in
evidence in the New Belt, in coastal North Carolina, where figures of
over 80 per cent were not uncommon (Tilley 1948:95). The breaking-up of
the plantation system also resulted in a gradual decrease in farm size. In
the Old Belt the average size of farms fell from a range of 115–204 acres in
1879 to a range of 58–102 acres in 1929: in the New Belt, along the South
Carolina coastal plain, the range of average acreage over this period fell
from 82–210 acres to 46–68 acres (Tilley 1948:92).
Emancipation of slaves on tobacco plantations was, of course, part of a
wider movement throughout the South. The plantation system in the
cotton states also gave way to an enormous growth of tenancy, though
this form of labour organization was extremely rare before the Civil War
(Ransom and Sutch 1977:87–105). The sugar plantations in Louisiana
were not, however, transformed in this way, and in this agrarian sector
the plantation system, albeit with free labour, continued (Shlomowitz
1984). Wherever tenancy became the norm it tended to revolve around
some kind of sharecropping scheme. Three main kinds of contracts
prevailed, but in each of them the landlord provided the land, wood and
buildings. What distinguished one contract from another was the extent
of the landlord’s share of the output, ranging from one-quarter to oneA POOR MAN’S CROP? 193
half of the crop, the precise division depending on whether, and to what
extent, he provided seed and fertilizer (Daniel 1985:32).
Tobacco farmers, whether tenants or landlords, faced the latter part of
the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century with a high
degree of confidence. Until 1900 prices remained fairly buoyant; fluecured tobacco fetched between 8 cents and 12 cents per pound (Tilley
1948:125). After 1900 tobacco prices began to rise, a phenomenon
unknown in the flue-cured districts, at least, since before the Civil War
(Robert 1938:133). Between 1911 and 1920 tobacco prices soared to a
remarkable level, reaching the dizzying height of 86 cents per pound in
one locality in North Carolina in 1919; average flue-cured tobacco prices
reached over 56 cents per pound in the same year (Daniel 1985:35; Tilley
1948:125). As the 1920s began, however, the bubble burst and prices
crashed, in one year alone, to around 22 cents per pound (Daniel 1985:
35). For the next seven years tobacco prices maintained their level at
around 20 cents per pound, on average, but in 1927 the price dipped to
17.3 cents and continued to drop for the next few years until in 1931 a
level of 8.4 cents was reached, a price that had not been faced in the Bright
tobacco region since the late 1890s (Badger 1980:21; Tilley 1948:125). At a
price of 12 cents per pound, a farmer producing an average crop could be
expected to lose $16 per acre (Daniel 1985:38). Other crops, notably cotton,
were not a viable alternative to a depressed tobacco economy; cotton
prices during the 1920s fell even further than did tobacco (Badger 1980:22).
There was no escape, and, for the first time in their history, tobacco
farmers, upholders of the Jeffersonian ideal of the small farmer,
independently minded and suspicious of government, turned to Federal
authorities for help.
The government was, therefore, invited to alleviate the plight of
tobacco farmers, but the political scene was, as more often than not, very
complicated. Not least of the problems was that the tobacco
manufacturers benefited enormously from the fall in tobacco prices;
between 1927 and 1930 manufacturers’ profits rose by about one-third
(Badger 1980:23). By stark contrast, flue-cured growers received in 1932
one-third of what they had received in 1928 for their crop (Badger 1980:
22). Then there was the problem of what essential commodities should be
included in the Agricultural Recovery Program in this section of the New
Deal. In the end, tobacco was the only non-essential commodity
supported by this part of the legislative package, a fact that reflected
tobacco’s powerful position within the nation’s economy and within a
more local political environment (Badger 1980:39–40). What would have
happened to tobacco had it not been included is open to some interesting
speculation.
That there were problems within tobacco culture, some of which (such
as overproduction) were perennial and some of which (such as marketing
194 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
arrangements) were more recent, was well known. But before 1933 all
attempts to counteract these were largely failures; especially those
that operated on a voluntary basis. From the failures, however, it became
clear that, as far as practical measures were concerned, some method had
to be found of matching supply to demand so that farmers would not
suffer from price depressions while tobacco manufacturers and dealers
prospered. The only solution was to limit production, but how to do it
was a problem (Badger 1980:37).
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was passed on 12 May 1933
and set up the requisite institutions, and machinery, necessary to provide
tobacco growers with a route out of their economic plight. The tobacco
programme took shape over the months and into the next year, but
essentially what emerged was a many-sided solution that resulted in a
stabilization of the tobacco economy. Output controls were established by
acreage reduction, through what was called the allotment quota system,
whereby farmers were allowed to cultivate only a portion of their land,
the allotment, with tobacco. This was the quota for any particular farm. In
return for reducing their acreage, tobacco growers would be offered a
guaranteed price, as well as a benefit support, in the form of a direct
payment financed by a processing tax on the manufacturers (Badger 1980:
38–98). Small growers were offered special consideration, as the terms of
the payment agreements were adjusted to favour tenants over landlords
(Daniel 1985: 120).
The effect of this legislation was immediate and positive. The average
price paid to tobacco growers in 1933 stood at 15.3 cents, up one-third
from the previous year’s price and just about double the 1931 level; in
income the 1933 crop brought in $112 million, compared to just over $56
million in the previous year (Badger 1980:65). Though the AAA of 1933 was
made unconstitutional in 1936—many New Deal acts were similarly
affected in this way—the essential points of it were resurrected just over
one month later in the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act,
which cleverly re-established the quota-payments system under the guise
of conservation (Pugh 1981:31). The AAA came back in 1938 and, though
there were some minor modifications to the programme in the coming
decades, the basic system operated in a similar fashion until the
mid-1960s. Tobacco manufacturers, though opposing the tobacco
programme vehemently, agreed the processing tax, but, perhaps not
surprisingly, according to a confidential report by the United States
Department of Agriculture, passed the tax on to consumers (Daniel 1985:
126).
What were the results of the New Deal legislation on tobacco culture?
In the first place, acreage quotas stimulated tobacco growers to increase
yields. Before the New Deal, and back to at least the 1860s, there was very
little change in tobacco yields in the United States. In Kentucky, between
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 195
1866 and 1939, yields fluctuated around 800 pounds per acre and never
exceeded 1,000 pounds per acre (Tilley 1948:191; Axton 1975:120). In the
Bright flue-cured districts yields averaged around 450 pounds per acre
until the mid-1890s and then jumped to about 650 pounds per acre, a level
that was maintained until the early 1930s (Tilley 1948:191, 193). On a
national level yields increased by only 100 pounds per acre between 1860
and 1933 (Herndon 1969:434). Though improved agricultural techniques,
such as closer planting and higher topping, and increasing use of and
improvements to fertilizers, were adopted in the tobacco-growing
regions, little of this found its way into increasing productivity. The sharp
rise in flue-cured tobacco yields after the mid-1890s may have been
caused not by improvements to tobacco cultivation so much as by the
expansion of flue-cured growing into the coastal plain where soil and
climatic conditions alone were responsible for higher than average yields
(Tilley 1948: 194). This regime of relatively constant productivity was
shattered by the New Deal, and from that time on yields have been
increasing rapidly. On an average national basis yields soared from 1,000
pounds per acre in 1940 to almost 2,000 pounds per acre in 1965
(Herndon 1969:434). In the fluecured districts yields rose from 922
pounds per acre in 1939 to 2,200 pounds per acre in 1964 (Mann 1981:38);
in Kentucky yields began their upward movement in 1935 when the level
stood at around 800 pounds per acre—thirty years later farmers were
producing 2,500 pounds per acre (Axton 1975:136).
Many factors accounted for this dramatic change, including the use of
heavy fertilization, pesticides and chemicals to prevent the growth of
suckers, in addition to more intensive planting and efficient irrigation.
Both growers and manufacturers shared a desire for increased
productivity, and so turned to the land-grant universities in the tobaccogrowing districts for scientific help. Both North Carolina State University
and the University of Kentucky have been instrumental in applying
scientific solutions, especially those concerned with chemicals, to tobacco
cultivation. In 1949 one chemical, in particular, was found to be especially
effective in controlling suckers and by 1958 it was being used extensively
(Herndon 1969: 438). There is little doubt that chemical controls in the
form of pesticides, fungicides, and especially products designed to
inhibit sucker and secondary leaf growth, have been crucial in this
considerable rise in productivity (Axton 1975:123–4; Mann 1975:126–7).
Another important change in tobacco culture resulted directly from the
improvements to techniques that raised productivity so dramatically. The
chemical controls were applied to the pre-harvesting cycle with the
attendant consequence that labour requirements at this stage were
drastically reduced. Between 1952 and 1983, for example, the labour
expenditure on topping and suckering was reduced in flue-cured tobacco
culture from 24 hours to 1.25 hours (Johnson 1984:76). This change upset
196 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
a time-honoured work routine that placed considerable pressures on
labour demands both before, during and after harvesting. With chemical
controls over suckering, labour demands shifted more to the harvesting
stage and this placed new pressures on the share-cropping system (Mann
1981:40).
At the same time the New Deal legislation clearly upheld the ideal of
the small farm and the share-cropping system. Reference has already
been made to the financial rewards given to small farmers by the
government in the initial legislation. Further rulings in the 1930s singled
out for particular help those growers whose allotment fell below 3.2 acres
or whose output was below 3,200 pounds (Daniel 1984:441). The number
of farms in North Carolina, for example, rose from 117,000 to 150,000
between 1930 and 1950, while the average farm size fell from 5.8 to 4
acres (Green 1987:231).
Until the middle of the 1950s, the small farmer continued a tradition of
tobacco culture that stretched back to post-emancipation days and, even
though changes on the farm were conspiring to undo the protective
legislation of the New Deal, there was still little sign in the 1940s and
early 1950s that these would overwhelm the legislative effort. Yet this did
occur and the three postwar decades witnessed profound changes in
tobacco culture that have obliterated a substantial part of the traditional
culture. But the transformation in tobacco culture was not gradual; it was
characterized by a series of distinct changes.
The first of these occurred in the 1950s when landowners began to
dismiss their share-croppers, in response to the effect on the work cycle
of tobacco cultivation, resulting from the technological improvements to
the pre-harvest cycle, as well as other, legislative moves to shift power
from small to large landowner (Daniel 1985:262). Instead of relying on the
traditional market for labour through share-cropping, landowners now
sought labour for harvest time, and used mechanical means as best they
could to prepare the fields for planting. In North Carolina, for example,
the number of farms declined by over 37,000 between 1954 and 1959
(Daniel 1985:262).
The second main attack on the small grower came from federal
legislation that was passed between 1961 and 1968. The various pieces of
legislation abruptly changed the allotment system, allowing for
individual farms to amass acreage across a county, by a leasing
arrangement, at the same time as changing the quota system from one
based on acreage to one based on poundage; and one particular piece of
legislation passed in 1968 allowed tobacco to be marketed in loose-leaf
sheets, as opposed to being neatly tied (Mann 1981:41). Flue-cured
tobacco was the first to undergo legislative alteration, but Burley tobacco
followed suit.
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 197
The legislation was revolutionary for tobacco culture because it
provided a legal and structural framework for farm consolidation, and
ushered in the forces necessary to dismantle the small farm. The impact
on tobacco farm size was dramatic. Between 1964 and 1974 the average
size of a tobacco farm in the North Carolina flue-cured district soared
from 5.2 acres to 9.5 acres (Dalton 1981:65); in one county alone the
number of tenants over this same period collapsed from 1,834 to 361
(Daniel 1985: 266–7). Leasing, by contrast, increased substantially
between 1964 and 1974, from about one-third of farms to over two-thirds
(Dalton 1981:70).
The new tobacco framework did not stop at legislation: it also paved the
way for perhaps the most profound change to take place in tobacco
culture: mechanization. Until the mid-1960s, tobacco culture had
successfully resisted mechanization. It was not that the technical problems
were insuperable, though there is little doubt that they were not easily
overcome. Various inventions and machines capable of harvesting fluecured tobacco appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but none was
taken up seriously by farmer or manufacturer, and in the Burley area of
Kentucky mechanical devices designed specifically for Burley culture in
the early 1960s seemed to have suffered a similar fate (Herndon 1969:443–
6). What retarded mechanization was a combination of the allotment
system and the consequent small scale of enterprise, together with the
predominant use of family labour. Once these vestiges were swept away
by the legislative momentum of the 1960s, mechanization could proceed
unabated. The tobacco harvester, first proposed in the mid-1960s by the
giant tobacco company R.J.Reynolds, began to appear on tobacco fields in
the early 1970s. It was profitable only for use on large farms—those
exceeding 40 acres—and, because it produced as much as 15 per cent leaf
loss, acreage quotas worked against its introduction (Berardi 1981:48–9).
Both of these obstacles were overcome by leasing arrangements, and the
shift from acreage to poundage quotas (Berardi 1981:49). In 1972 only 1
per cent of the flue-cured acreage was harvested mechanically (Martin
and Johnson 1978: 656); eight years later 46 per cent of North Carolina’s
crop was harvested in this manner (Daniel 1984:451).
Mechanization has also entered into the curing stage, where progress
has been extremely rapid. The main change in curing was the
introduction of the bulk-barn, where the tobacco leaves are packed
loosely into crates, the crates are stacked up in a barn, and then hot air is
forced into and around the leaves from an outside heating system
(Herndon 1969:441–2). Bulk-curing first appeared at the beginning of the
1960s—in 1962 there were fewer than 300 bulk-curing units (Akehurst
1981:246–7); by 1976 the number of units had increased to 30,000 and by
1979 two-thirds of the flue-cured acreage was bulk-cured (Akehurst 1981:
247; Dalton 1981: 66). Bulk-curing not only allows a greater density of
198 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
tobacco leaf to be cured at any one time but also considerably reduces
both labour time and care, even more than changes in harvesting have
done. Comparing labour requirements on a typical tobacco farm in 1952
with a large, 40-acre, farm in 1983 shows labour time in curing falling
from 190 hours per acre to 61 hours per acre; if harvesting time is
included, then the labour time falls from 355 hours per acre to 66 hours
per acre (Johnson 1984:77–9).
Burley tobacco cultivation has been far less affected by mechanization
than has flue-cured tobacco. While legislation paved the way for the
mechanization of flue-cured tobacco, no such legislation was targeted for
Burley tobacco. Consequently the scale of Burley operations has remained
much smaller than those for flue-cured tobacco; in 1970, for example, an
average flue-cured allotment was 3 acres in size while that for Burley was
0.8 acres (Johnson 1984:46). How long this situation will last is not clear,
especially as Burley farmers are more exposed to world market
conditions than in the past.
The demise of traditional tobacco culture in the flue-cured districts
(and, in time, likely in the Burley districts) has not been without pain but,
seen over the long term, what has happened to tobacco farmers since the
Second World War has already occurred to other agricultural pursuits.
The two other plantation crops of the South, cotton and rice, have been
transformed into agribusiness over a longer period than tobacco, and the
recent trend in tobacco culture has simply brought that plant into line
(Daniel 1984). Yet while American tobacco culture is transformed beyond
recognition, cultivation in other parts of the world, notably in Africa and
Asia, continues to thrive on the combination of small scale and labour
intensiveness. While Americans can afford to displace labour from the
tobacco fields, this is not the case for the Third World, where tobacco
cultivation is in many cases central to economic survival.
In global terms the United States has been, in the postwar era, a
declining player in tobacco production. The United States share of total
world tobacco output has been falling steadily from 29 per cent on
average around 1950 to 9 per cent in the late 1980s (Grise 1990:9). The
lead has been taken by other countries, notably China, India, Brazil and
Zimbabwe, on the one hand, and the countries of the European
Community and Eastern Europe, on the other hand. One of the results of
the changing geographical distribution of tobacco culture has been to
allow for distinctly different modes of production, involving not only
scale of operations and degree of mechanization but also differing social
and economic relations between growers, on one side, and multinational
tobacco corporations and the state, on the other. This diversity of tobacco
culture globally has been a feature mostly of the twentieth century.
Consumers of tobacco are generally unaware of this aspect of tobacco
production, largely because manufacturing firms in the West have
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 199
endeavoured to produce tobacco of similar quality over a large part of the
world.
One strong contrast that exists in tobacco culture is the degree to which
growers have leverage in their relationships with the large tobacco
companies. In the United States tobacco farmers have, in the twentieth
century at least, attempted to wrest some control over the details of the
growing and marketing of tobacco from the large tobacco
companies. Elsewhere, but especially in Third World countries, the role
of the tobacco company is very different.
Kenya is an excellent case illustrating relations between growers and
companies and the state. In 1974 British American Tobacco (BAT) together
with the Ministry of Agriculture embarked on a programme of import
substitution by expanding tobacco cultivation. The programme began
with recruiting 8,700 contract farmers; by 1983 the number engaged in
tobacco cultivation had risen to 10,000 (Currie and Ray 1984:1,133). The
contracted farmers generally had no previous experience with tobacco,
being mostly subsistence farmers, but with the help and advice of, as
well as the guarantee of selling their tobacco to, BAT they were in a fairly
secure position. The size of holdings was small, on average about 1 acre
in extent (Currie and Ray 1984:1133). Interestingly, the introduction of fluecured tobacco culture has been a stabilizing force in peasant household
economies, in contrast to fire-cured tobacco culture with its relatively low
financial rewards and lesser status (Heald 1991).
A similar pattern emerged in Tanzania. Between 1955 and 1976 output
of flue-cure tobacco increased more than tenfold from around 3 million to
30 million pounds, far outstripping fire-cured tobacco (Boesen and
Mohele 1979:17). A growing proportion, and by the mid-1970s the
overwhelming proportion, was accounted for by peasant farmers. As in
Kenya the scale of operations is very small—between 1 and 1.5 acres was
the average size of a tobacco holding in the mid-1970s and indirect
evidence would suggest that the number of large farms fell considerably
in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Boesen and Mohele 1979:35, 53). Parallel
to the increase in peasant cultivation has been the growth of supervision
over cultivation by outside agencies, from the state and tobacco
companies. These have increasingly encroached upon the peasant
producer to the extent that all aspects of cultivation, including the
infrastructural demands, are controlled externally (Boesen and Mohele
1979:126–45). In Malawi, too, tobacco is grown on small farms averaging
just over one acre in size, though flue-cured tobacco is increasingly
grown on large estates (Åberg 1980:84; Muller 1978:77). In 1985 55 per
cent of the country’s foreign exchange was earned by tobacco (Stebbins
1990:231).
On the other side of the Atlantic, in Brazil, a similar, if not more
intensive, relationship exists between grower and company. There
200 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
tobacco is grown on small farms, using family labour, under contract
either to tobacco companies or leaf exporters. Their experts guide all
aspects of tobacco cultivation, from seedbed to curing and grading (Grise
1990:31). There is more than a suggestion that tobacco growers,
concentrated in the south of the country with no alternative cash crop at
their disposal, do not receive a fair price for their output and are in debt
to the companies and dealers (Muller 1978:81; Cravo 1982).
Tobacco culture has traditionally rested on the twin features of
labour intensiveness and small scale, in theory at least. Wherever tobacco
has been grown it has absorbed more labour time than any other crop. As
late as 1977 the United States Department of Agriculture reckoned that,
on average, it took 281 working hours per acre to produce tobacco,
compared with 42.6 for potatoes, 23 for cotton, 5.1 for maize and 2.9 for
wheat (Berardi 1981:57). Historically, however, the ‘age of the small
planter’ has been very short, though it has appeared several times over
the centuries, in the United States after emancipation, and in Brazil after
the ending of the slave trade, for example. So short have these periods
been that it would be more accurate to speak of the ‘small grower’ as an
ideal, at best, or as a myth, at worst. Even where the small grower seems
to predominate today, as in Brazil, Tanzania, Kenya and China, their
power as small producers is almost non-existent, dependent as they are
on tobacco companies, dealers and the state.
How and why did tobacco culture spread globally in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries? Until the end of the eighteenth century tobacco
cultivation was inseparable from colonialism, and European overseas
settlement in particular. The fact that the world’s production of tobacco
at the time was almost wholly concentrated in the United States, Brazil
and Cuba attests to this powerful association. In the Chesapeake region
alone output increased threefold in the eighteenth century reaching a
maximum value of over 100 million pounds of tobacco. By any standard
of measurement the New World expansion of tobacco cultivation and
production was explosive. Almost all of the output was, of course,
destined for European and, to a lesser extent, other overseas markets and
largely in an unmanufactured form. The colonial ideology of the period
ensured that colonies cultivated and the metropolis manufactured.
The developments in the history of tobacco production after 1800 could
be predicted only dimly on the basis of tobacco’s past. In the first place,
tobacco cultivation expanded to every part of the world. Much of this
expansion occurred during the twentieth century but a significant amount
also took place in the nineteenth century, principally in Asia. A
considerable amount of this expansion was accounted for by a new
association between European settlement and tobacco culture. Noncolonial possessions, including the countries of Europe itself, also
participated in this movement. In 1984, according to the Food and
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 201
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, tobacco was being
grown in 115 separate countries, with total output ranging from as little as
100 metric tons in Samoa to as much as 1,526,000 metric tons in China
(UN 1983–4:540–1). Second, there has been a gradual increase in the
developing world’s share of tobacco cultivation (UN 1983–4:540–1; Grise
1990:9) Third, the expansion of tobacco cultivation has been extremely
rapid in the twentieth century, during which period output has grown
more than fivefold. Finally, the very nature of the product, and the way it
has been consumed, has changed substantially over the two centuries
under consideration. Lighter, brighter tobaccos using flue-curing have
come to dominate tobacco cultivation in all parts of the world, eclipsing
the heavier, darker varieties, using both fire- and air-curing methods,
typical of the earlier period.
The remarkable expansion of tobacco cultivation since 1800 is a key
feature of the history of tobacco since Europeans first encountered it. To
understand what happened it is necessary to return to the United States,
since that country has not only dominated tobacco culture until quite
recently but has shaped global production, marketing and consumption.
On the eve of the American Revolution Britain imported just over 100
million pounds of tobacco from the American colonies, nearly all of it
from the Chesapeake colonies (USBC 1975:1,189–90). In the succeeding
years of commercial dislocation after Independence the tobacco crop of
the United States remained below the level of the pre-revolutionary
period. By 1820, however, cultivation began to gather pace and output
surpassed previous levels. By the outbreak of the Civil War the United
States was producing over 300 million pounds of tobacco (Mulhall 1892:
42). Output doubled again by the 1880s, and in 1910 it surpassed 1 billion
pounds (USBC 1975:517). From the First World War until the middle of
the 1980s, output fluctuated, though on an upward trend. Since 1945 total
output has averaged 2 billion pounds annually—it is only since the
mid-1980s that output has, for the first time, declined progressively
(USBC 1975:517; UN 1983–4:540).
Within the context of an enormous increase in American production
since 1800 there have been two particularly important trends. The first
was that cultivation in the nineteenth century began to drift away from
the traditional area of the Chesapeake tidewater inland towards the
piedmont, and from the states of Virginia and Maryland. This
development was not particularly dramatic though it was sustained. In
1839, for example, the states of Virginia and Maryland together accounted
for just under 47 per cent of the total tobacco crop of the United States;
twenty years later, in 1859, that figure had fallen to just over 37 per cent
(Jacobstein 1907: 40). In 1912 the Department of Agriculture reported that
these two states’ share had slumped to 13.4 per cent (US Dept of
Agriculture 1913:627). Virginia’s and Maryland’s loss was a gain for
202 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. By 1870 Kentucky had become
the largest producer of tobacco in the United States (Jacobstein 1907:69).
Whereas these three states accounted for 46 per cent of United States
output in 1839, in 1912 the corresponding figure had risen to just under
55 per cent (Jacobstein 1907:40; US Dept of Agriculture 1913:627). Other
states, such as Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, also
participated in this westward movement of tobacco culture.
The migration of tobacco cultivation out of the original heartland was
caused by several factors. Partly it was due to the fact that tobacco
caused soil exhaustion and erosion. There was, in both Virginia and
Maryland, a natural momentum to the opening of virgin lands to tobacco
cultivation. It is generally accepted that tobacco planters needed 40 to 50
acres of land for each labourer, and the land could be planted with
tobacco for three or four years before it was abandoned—left to its own
devices, the abandoned land would regain its natural level of fertility
after twenty years (Craven 1926:69). The westward movement of tobacco
was part of a general westward movement of cash crops stimulated
largely by population growth. But the most important reason for the
diffusion of tobacco cultivation was the growing realization that the best
soils of Virginia, and the rich dark clay soils of the piedmont, did not
necessarily produce the best tobacco.
Tobacco is very sensitive to the kind of soil in which it is grown.
Tidewater planters, cultivating fertile, heavy soil, produced dark tobacco
as a general rule. But because soil is not homogeneous, even in a small
area, these planters, though using similar seed, often cultivated a
considerable range of tobacco in terms of quality, weight, colour and size.
The Chesapeake varieties were often subsumed under the names of
‘oronoco’ and ‘sweet-scented’, but within these distinct categories
variations occurred. In the York River area of Virginia, in particular, as
early as the mid-seventeenth century one particular grade of tobacco was
cultivated, known as ‘E.Dees’, and renowned for its mildness and aroma
(Tilley 1948:6). At the time, though the land on which the tobacco was
cultivated was known to be generally less fertile than other soils in the
region, the connection between low soil fertility and tobacco quality was
not recognized. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, there was
a growing insight into this relationship, and agricultural literature of the
period often made it explicit (Tilley 1948:8). In short, the light sandy soils
west of the tidewater, by semi-starving the growing plant, also deprived
it of its darkness, heaviness and high nicotine content (Tilley 1948:11).
Ironically, thin soil unfit for other purposes produced a thin, lightlyflavoured and yellow leaf that came to be known, and is generally still
referred to, as Bright tobacco.
The cultivation of Bright tobacco, while expanding during the first half
of the nineteenth century, was not regular. The secret of producing a
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 203
consistent product turned out to lie in the combination of thin soil and a
new curing method developed slowly also during the first half of the
nineteenth century.
Every stage in the growing of tobacco required an enormous outlay of
time and care, and each stage needed to be completed as perfectly as
possible. Most authorities on tobacco, agriculturalists and historians alike,
would nevertheless argue that, of all the stages in the cultivation of
tobacco, harvesting and curing were the most important in determining
the nature of the finished product. Curing was the first stage of
cultivation to undergo radical change in the nineteenth century. The
objective of curing is simple enough: to continue the process of change,
growth and decay that is natural in the plant, and to fix in the leaf those
characteristics that are desirable, for example nicotine content, taste and
combustibility, in the case of smoking tobacco. Curing is the human
intervention in the life of the tobacco plant that results in a specific
commodity. In short, curing involves killing the tobacco plant by denying
it both moisture and food (Tilley 1948:57). Precisely what happened in the
curing stage, that is the chemical changes attendant upon leaf starvation,
was not fully understood until the twentieth century, though towards the
end of the nineteenth century in the United States some experts had some
insight into the chemistry of ripening tobacco (Tilley 1948:57). Until the
first decade of the nineteenth century tobacco was typically cured by air
or sun drying methods (Siegel 1987:101). Fire-curing, whereby wooden
fires were lit underneath the tobacco, became more popular during the
1820s. It was at this point, while planters were beginning to appreciate
the effect of wood smoke on the curing of the tobacco leaf, that a chance
discovery led to what can best be described as the critical step in
producing a consistently high quality product. In 1839 it was discovered
by accident that charcoal fires, that is fires that were nearly smokeless,
turned the curing leaf towards the desired colour of bright yellow and
orange more dependably and consistently (Tilley 1948:24). The
advantages of charcoal fire-curing over wood fire-curing were strongly
advocated throughout the Bright tobacco growing belt, and most curing
facilities appear to have turned over to the new method fairly quickly.
Yet there was still a problem, in so far as fire-curing using either form of
fuel was not wholly controllable. Since curing depended on maintaining
even temperatures in the curing barn, while at the same time being able
to control the amount of heat, fire-curing remained problematic. From as
early as the 1820s, however, planters started experimenting with fluecuring, in which the heat was transferred into the curing barn from a fire
outside, by way of flues. The early flues were rudimentary and progress
towards improving their use proved to be very slow, partly because of
the obvious success of charcoal fire-curing and partly because flue-curing
required a relatively high capital investment. Indeed, at about the same
204 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
time that people were working on the flue, more progress was being made
in charcoal curing, especially in finding methods of consistent curing.
One of the most important advances occurred in the early 1870s when
one prominent planter, Major Robert L.Ragland, correctly perceived that
the curing process actually consisted of three distinct stages, each of
which corresponded to particular heat levels (Tilley 1948:60). This was, of
course, an extremely important insight, as it gave planters a precise
guideline to achieving as consistent curing as possible; and it also gave
those who advocated or were experimenting with flue-curing a decided
advantage since it was much easier to control the level of heat in the
barn from outside. Flue-curing began to be adopted slowly towards the
last years of the 1860s and more rapidly after 1872 (Tilley 1948:64). But it
took many more decades, indeed into the twentieth century, before fluecuring can be said to have become the generally accepted method (Tilley
1948:64–71; Gage 1937:47). In 1919 one-third of the American tobacco crop
was Bright tobacco and most of it flue-cured (Tilley 1948:391); in the
mid-1930s flue-cured tobacco accounted for 48 per cent of total
production whereas in 1978 the proportion had reached 61 per cent
(Akehurst 1981: 168).
The other major change that took place in tobacco cultivation in the
nineteenth century was in harvesting techniques. Before the twentieth
century harvesting was normally accomplished by cutting the whole
plant. Cutters, whose main responsibility was the harvest, were highly
skilled at their task. Because of the real danger of bruising the leaf (which
made curing extremely difficult and reduced the value of the final
product), cutters occupied a position of prominence in the tobacco
culture (Tilley 1948:57–8). It must be appreciated that, in harvesting by
cutting, the tobacco leaves are not all at the same stage of ripeness and
therefore will cure differently. This was not a serious problem as long as
chewing tobacco was the main form of the product. Cigarette
manufacturers, however, were not content with an average product, and
demanded a cured product that was consistent (Tilley 1948:71). Under
pressure from these manufacturers and from those who were themselves
experimenting with other methods, harvesting by cutting gradually gave
way, after the mid-1880s, to harvesting by priming, or removing, each
leaf separately (Tilley 1948:71). Besides satisfying manufacturers,
harvesting by priming had distinct economic benefits for planters; costs of
harvesting were slashed, curing times fell dramatically, fewer curing
barns were needed and the relative price of primed leaf rose (Tilley 1948:
73, 80–1). By 1920 cutting and cutters were all but forgotten in the Bright
growing region of the United States. Priming also reinforced the fact that
tobacco cultivation was highly labour-intensive and that the family was
the pivot of the labour structure of tobacco culture. Mechanization was
consequently very slow in advancing and it was not really until the 1970s
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 205
that mechanical harvesting became an acceptable and efficient alternative
to hand labour (Martin and Johnson 1978; Daniel 1985: 264–6).
The considerable developments in curing and harvesting methods, and
the successful cultivation of Bright tobacco, were certainly among the
most important changes in the nature of tobacco production. Flue-cured
tobacco was very much the speciality of the eastern tobacco regions
centred on inland Virginia and North Carolina. Further to the west,
especially in Kentucky and Tennessee but also to an extent in corners of
North Carolina and Virginia as well as into Ohio and Missouri, a new
variety, as opposed to a new grade, of tobacco emerged. This variety,
known as Burley, appears to have been discovered in 1864, by accident,
growing as a mutation, in a tobacco field in Ohio (Robert 1952:186). Its
culture spread very rapidly, especially into Kentucky and Tennessee. The
output of tobacco in Kentucky, for example, more than doubled between
1860 and 1890, whereas total American output rose by a mere 10 per cent
(Jacobstein 1907:69). Unlike Bright tobacco, which required a relatively
elaborate curing method and a significant investment in plant, Burley
tobacco achieved its excellence by air-curing. In the long run, although
the United States produced other varieties of tobacco using other curing
methods, especially fire-curing, Bright and Burley tobacco gradually
came to dominate the entire culture. By 1970 Bright and Burley tobacco
accounted for 92 per cent of the country’s output; the figure was identical
to this in the late 1980s (USBC 1975:517; Johnson 1984:100; Grise 1990:9,
12). In addition, over the period, other changes in cultural techniques have
made both Bright and Burley tobacco milder (Robert 1952:186).
The shift in production to Bright and Burley tobacco was not only
welcome for tobacco farmers moving into areas where land was
considered worthless—it was reported, for example, that land values in
North Carolina rocketed from 50 cents to $50 per acre (Jacobstein 1907:
38). For manufacturers, exporters and consumers the change was also
significant. Manufacturers, for example, quickly realized that both
tobaccos had distinct advantages over the darker, heavier varieties.
Bright tobacco rapidly became the typical wrapper for plug (chewing)
tobacco while Burley became the preferred variety for the filler (Siegel
1987:102; Robert 1952: 186). The level of output of manufactured tobacco
and snuff tripled between 1870 and 1900 (Johnson 1984:16). While the
adoption of both Bright and Burley varieties in chewing tobacco was
important, it was overshadowed by the use of both in what was, in the
second half of the nineteenth century, the relatively new industry of
cigarette manufacturing. The story of the cigarette has been covered in
Chapter 5, but it is well to note that the incredible growth of cigarette
manufacturing would not have occurred in the absence of the changes in
tobacco cultivation. Cigarette production, even before the invention of
the cigarette machine, expanded exponentially. In 1870, for example, 16
206 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
million cigarettes were produced in the United States; ten years later the
figure stood at 533 million (Johnson 1984:16). Once the Bonsack cigarette
machine proved to be operational, the production of cigarettes went
through the roof. In 1895 output reached 4.2 billion cigarettes (Johnson
1984:16). Exports of unmanufactured tobacco also soared. On the eve of
the Civil War exports averaged 175 million pounds annually. The figure
increased steadily until around the turn of the twentieth century the level
of exports stood at 325 million pounds; over the same period the value of
such exports rose considerably from $16 million to just under $30 million
(Jacobstein 1907:171). Consumers benefited because the final product was
milder and more attractive. The shift to cigarettes has already been
noted, but in general the change to milder tobaccos was reflected in a
steady increase in per capita consumption which rose from an average of
1.8 pounds in the early 1870s to an average of 5.98 pounds in the first few
years of the twentieth century (Holmes 1912:4–5). Though the increase
was considerably less than in the United States, per capita consumption
in the major European countries also rose in the same period (Jacobstein
1907:45).
As stated earlier, the United States has been the world’s foremost
producer of tobacco since the start of commercial production in the
seventeenth century. Until the nineteenth century the United States’
position in the international tobacco market was unchallenged, partly
because competitors were few—Brazil and Cuba in the western
hemisphere, and Holland and Germany in Europe; and partly because
the colonial system ensured a relatively clear segmentation of the
international market. With the breakup of this system, beginning with the
American Revolution and culminating in the total dissolution of
colonialism in South and Central America in the course of the nineteenth
century, the United States found itself with a new situation. Before
embarking on a discussion of the spread of tobacco cultivation to other
parts of the world, the international context as it affected United States
production and exports should be outlined.
Although reliable statistical information is not available for much of
the period, it would appear that, as far as production was concerned, the
immediate effect of the opening of new regions to tobacco cultivation
outside the United States was to reduce the American share in overall
world output. Around 1800 the United States was probably responsible
for as much as 70 per cent of world production. In 1884, a year for which
reasonably accurate figures exist, the proportion had fallen to under 30
per cent (Mulhall 1892:568). Output grew at a faster rate between 1870
and 1910 in North America than elsewhere in the world. In 1910 North
American share of world output had improved to about 40 per cent (US
Dept of Agriculture 1913:625–6). By the middle of the 1970s, however, the
share had fallen to near 18 per cent, and in 1984 it stood at a mere 13 per
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 207
cent. In the special area of Bright and Burley production, the alteration in
the United States’ position was particularly rapid in the postwar era. In
the late 1950s, for example, the United States accounted for about half of
the world’s output of these tobaccos, but by 1980, the figure had shrunk
to 25 per cent (Johnson 1984:100). A similar change seems to have
occurred in the United States’ share of world export in unmanufactured
tobacco. In 1840 the United States was almost alone in exporting tobacco
leaf. Only Brazil shared in tobacco export earnings. In that year the
United States accounted for 87 per cent of the world export market by
value (Hanson 1980:174). With the appearance of new producers,
especially the Dutch East Indies, and the continued expansion of Brazil
and Cuba, the American share of the export market shrank considerably.
By 1900 the American share was 45 per cent and falling (Hanson 1980:174).
In 1910 the United States accounted for almost 40 per cent of world
tobacco trade; in 1980, by contrast, the American share of the lucrative
Bright and Burley export market had been reduced to under 30 per cent
(US Dept of Agriculture 1913:630; Johnson 1984:101).
The most significant development to occur outside the United States
was the rapid expansion of tobacco cultivation in Asia during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nineteenth-century developments
were stimulated largely by imperialism, particularly in the Dutch East
Indies and in India. In the Dutch East Indies imperial control of economic
resources was formalized in the 1830s under what was called the Culture
System. This system, which operated mainly in the 1830s and 1840s, was
designed to organize the production of export crops, primarily by the
peasants of Java and, to a lesser extent, Sumatra. Peasants were
compelled to allocate part of their lands to producing crops for the
government. Sugar, coffee and indigo were the first crops to be included
in the Culture System, but in time many others, including tobacco, were
brought in. For various reasons the Culture System did not yield
significant profits, and crops were dropped from the system and allowed
to be cultivated on a private basis (Ricklefs 1981:114–18). Tobacco escaped
the grip of the Culture System in 1866 (Caldwell 1964:83). Almost
overnight production began to grow, partly, it has been argued, because
of the advantages of private enterprise but also because one of the main
tobacco estates, in the Deli district of Sumatra, successfully developed a
very exportable kind of tobacco. Exports of Sumatran tobacco soared from
an average level of 17 million pounds in the late 1860s to nearly 170
million pounds in the years before the First World War (Caldwell 1964:
83). The Deli region accounted for about one-third of the total crop of
Sumatra (Jacobstein 1907:182). Before the First World War, on account of
this vast expansion of tobacco cultivation, the Dutch East Indies were the
second largest exporters of tobacco leaf, accounting for about 18 per cent
of total world exports (US Dept of Agriculture 1913:630). Ironically, a
208 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
significant proportion of total Sumatran exports went to the United States
(Jacobstein 1907:181). In the 1880s, many planters from Deli, both
Germans and Dutch, were attracted to North Borneo, and there, under
the administration of the North Borneo (Chartered) Company, tobacco
cultivation by Europeans expanded enormously (John and Jackson 1973).
On the eve of the First World War the level of output exceeded 2 million
pounds (John and Jackson 1973:105).
During the nineteenth and for a good part of the twentieth century the
Dutch East Indies were the primary exporters of tobacco in Asia, but they
were not the largest producer. That distinction went to India.
Surprisingly, given the amount India produced, little is actually known
of the history of tobacco in that country. What is known, however, is that,
in terms of output, Indian production, certainly towards the end of the
nineteenth century, was not far behind that of the United States. In 1884,
for example, India produced 340 million pounds of tobacco, or, in other
terms, roughly 80 per cent of the United States output (Mulhall 1892:568).
Just before the First World War the level of output was up to 450 million
pounds, rising to 761 million pounds on average between 1935 and 1939
and 1.1 billion pounds in 1984 (US Dept of Agriculture 1913:626;
Akehurst 1981: 7; United Nations 1983–4:541). Most of Indian production
was, and still is, dark, air-cured tobacco, used largely for the domestic
consumption of bidis and cheroots, as well as in hookahs (US Dept of
Commerce 1915: 34; Akehurst 1981:317). According to available statistics,
before 1914 exports of tobacco from India represented around 5 per cent
of overall production, the most important market being Aden; imports
were even smaller but significantly almost three-quarters of the import
level was accounted for by cigarettes, nearly all of which came from
Britain (US Dept of Commerce 1915:34–5). This pattern has been
maintained throughout this century. In global terms India has been the
world’s second largest producer of tobacco for a good part of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was only in the 1930s that India
relinquished second place to China (Akehurst 1981:7). In the postwar
period India has steadily increased the share of its tobacco production
destined for the export market; in 1980 17 per cent of output was
exported, though the figure is low in comparison with other producing
countries and represents only 5 per cent of world tobacco leaf trade (UN
1983–4:541; Tucker 1982:182).
China is now the world’s largest producer of tobacco. In 1984 it
produced one-quarter of the world’s output, one-half of Asia’s output
and twice that of the United States (UN 1983–4:540–1). Less than 5 per
cent of output is exported (Muller 1978:19). China has expanded its
tobacco production in the twentieth century to a greater extent, and much
faster, than any other country. In 1911 total production stood at 18 million
pounds; seventy years later the corresponding figure was 3,400 million
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 209
pounds, and during the late 1980s output averaged 4,700 million pounds
annually (US Dept of Commerce 1915:8; Grise 1990:9).
With the single exception of the Dutch East Indies, Asian tobacco
production in the nineteenth century expanded solely on the basis of
meeting domestic demand. And during that period, and for a while into
the twentieth century, the production concentrated almost entirely on
dark, air- and sun-cured tobaccos. In China, for example, the first harvest
of Bright tobacco dates from 1913, when the British American Tobacco
Company purchased its first supply from Chinese farmers; the Chinese
had been introduced to Bright tobacco from as early as 1906, when James
Duke, the head of BAT, sent tobacco experts from North Carolina to China
to experiment with American seed (Cochran 1986:163). In 1915 BAT
purchased over 2 million pounds of Bright tobacco from Chinese
farmers, but only about one-quarter of it was flue-cured, the rest
being sun-cured (Cochran 1986:163). China was probably the first country
in Asia to grow Bright tobacco and have it flue-cured. Certainly in 1915
neither the tobacco nor the curing process existed in India or the Dutch
East Indies. Flue-cured tobacco, once in demand by BAT, came to account
for an increasing share of the Chinese tobacco output. Output of fluecured Bright tobacco quadrupled between 1920 and 1937, while imports
of the same stagnated (Cochran 1980:233). Not surprisingly, the rising
output of flue-cured tobacco was paralleled by a huge increase in
cigarette consumption which saw levels rise from 7.5 billion cigarettes in
1910 to 87 billion in 1928 (Cochran 1980:234). In 1959 38 per cent of
China’s total tobacco production was flue-cured, at a time when India,
for example, was only just embarking on the cultivation of this variety
(Akehurst 1981: 170, 173). At the end of the 1970s flue-cured tobacco
accounted for 60 per cent of China’s production and it was, at the time,
the largest producer of this variety in the world; since the late 1980s, fluecured tobacco has accounted for almost 90 per cent of the country’s
tobacco crop (Akehurst 1981:170). Flue-cured tobacco production in India,
while lagging behind that of China, nevertheless accounted for 30 per cent
of its total tobacco output in 1978 (Akehurst 1981:175; UN 1983–4:541).
Even Indonesia, though a substantial producer of dark tobacco, entered
the flue-cured tobacco sector; in 1975 the flue-cured crop accounted for as
much as 19 per cent of total output (Akehurst 1981:183; UN 1983–4:541).
The shift towards flue-cured tobacco in Asia, especially in the postwar
era, is part of a much more general transformation of patterns in the
global production and consumption of tobacco. In Africa, especially, the
development of flue-cured tobacco has had a profound effect not only on
tobacco cultivation but on many aspects of the political economy of the
continent.
Tobacco has been consumed and/or cultivated in Africa since the end
of the sixteenth century. It was not, however, until the nineteenth century
210 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
that commercial cultivation began. North Africa, especially Algeria, was
the main producer in the nineteenth and a good part of the twentieth
century, and almost all of the output was exported to France. The Cape
Colony in South Africa cultivated tobacco from as early as 1657, but
production was meagre; in 1875 the Colony boasted an output of only 3
million pounds (Akehurst 1981:11). Elsewhere in Central and southern
Africa tobacco cultivation did not begin until the end of the nineteenth
century, and started in the British colonies. In 1912 total African
production stood at just under 44 million pounds, 56 per cent of which
originated in Algeria (US Dept of Commerce 1915:8). In the twentieth
century, generally speaking, production has been growing, though the
share of Algerian production in overall output has been falling. In 1980
the African continent accounted for only 6 per cent of world output, the
leading producers, in order, being Zimbabwe, Malawi and South
Africa, Zimbabwe alone producing 41 per cent of the continent’s total
(UN 1983–4:540).
What is interesting about African tobacco production in general (and
particularly that of the former British colonies) is the extent to which
tobacco played a similar role in settlement to that which it had in the New
World. In Zimbabwe, for example, tobacco was a critical component of
what has been termed the ‘white agricultural policy’, whose origins can be
dated to 1908. The British South African Company worked hard to
stimulate production and, by association, European farming and
settlement. In what would become a common practice, the Company
appointed a tobacco expert to introduce the cultivation of Oriental
tobacco (Palmer 1977:233). Output soared, increasing ten-fold between
1909 and 1913 (Palmer 1977: 233). Though European tobacco cultivation
in Zimbabwe dates from 1893, very little was produced until the
encouragement of European settlement from above. Output continued to
grow, despite a few setbacks, until 1925–6 when output reached 5.7
million pounds, all of it Oriental tobacco (Palmer 1977:236). Zambia’s
tobacco cultivation, by contrast, was of two varieties: European farmers
cultivated flue-cured tobacco, while Africans cultivated their own,
indigenous, variety. Once again it was the British South African
Company that encouraged the cultivation of flue-cured tobacco expressly
for the South African market (Kanduza 1983:204). Production expanded
swiftly from 500 pounds in 1912–13 to 800,000 pounds in 1918–19 and
reached a maximum level of just over 3 million pounds in 1927 (Kanduza
1983:207, 216). Until 1938 the flue-cured sector was effectively closed to
Africans, except, that is, as labourers (Kanduza 1983:202). The control
over tobacco production by Europeans was also reflected in Zimbabwe
where the indigenous tobacco industry, situated in the Inyoka country,
was allowed to wither away (Kosmin 1977). In Malawi, however, the
picture was more complicated, as both flue-cured and fire-cured tobacco
A POOR MAN’S CROP? 211
production was encouraged: the former was the responsibility of
European estates, while the latter was produced by African tenant
farmers (McCracken 1983; Chanock 1972). Since the Second World War,
there has been a swing away from Oriental and Burley tobacco, primarily
in Zimbabwe. In 1980, for example, Zimbabwe’s share of world fluecured tobacco production stood at 5.6 per cent while the share of world
exports was 10.5 per cent, ranking third in the world (Tucker 1982: 179).
In the latter years of the 1980s, 97 per cent of Zimbabwe’s total tobacco
output was flue-cured (Grise 1990:9, 12).
We turn finally to South America. Throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries Brazil has been the chief producer and, unlike many
countries, its production has been rising continuously, but especially in
the postwar period. Between 1950 and 1980 output increased fourfold to
over 800 million pounds (Nardi 1985:32). As in other parts of the world,
the shift to flue-cured tobacco has been particularly marked, reaching 67
per cent of total output in 1970; and in 1980 77 per cent of Brazilian
tobacco exports were of this type (Nardi 1985:33, 35); in the period 1985–8
flue-cured and Burley accounted for almost 80 per cent of Brazil’s total
tobacco crop (Grise 1990:9, 12). Concurrent with the shift towards fluecured tobacco has been the relative decline of the traditional culture
based around Bahia, and the expansion of production in Brazil’s southern
states, predominantly from Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina
(Akehurst 1981: 173). Cuba stands out, by contrast, as the most important
example of a country which has not gone over to flue-cured tobacco. Its
production of over 100 million pounds of tobacco in 1981 was almost
entirely dark air-cured tobacco (UN 1983–4; Stubbs 1985).
The shift in global tobacco culture away from dark to light tobacco, and
from air- and sun-curing to flue-curing, has had a profound impact on
the history of tobacco production—and consumption—in the second half
of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. The shift itself occurred
progressively, as far as one can tell, in the twentieth century. By 1935–9
the production level of light tobaccos was equivalent to that of dark
tobacco, and growing (Akehurst 1981:30). In 1980 88 per cent of the world’s
tobacco crop was light, and in the same year, flue-cured tobacco itself
accounted for 43 per cent of the world’s output (Tucker 1982:178). And
the proportion continues to rise—flue-cured tobacco accounted for 54 per
cent of world output annually between 1985 and 1988 (Grise 1990: 9, 12).
Unlike other methods of curing tobacco, flue-curing is both capital-and
resource-intensive, particularly in its use of wood. Because of both capital
and resource costs, flue-cured tobacco engenders an organization and
management of labour strikingly different from that found in air- and
sun-cured tobacco culture. It has also been the foundation of an equally
remarkable transformation in the manufacture of the final product, the
subject of the following chapter.
212 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
9
‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
Tobacco is big business
Despite some early objections to the consumption of tobacco, the state
seized on tobacco as a revenue generator: throughout the fiscal history of
tobacco the only question asked by the state was how great a tax burden
could tobacco carry before it would become self-defeating. Tobacco’s tax
burden has varied both over time and space but it has always played an
important role in the finances of the state which, in turn, have been
enlarged by the increasing consumption of tobacco.
The central role of the state in the history of tobacco needs to be
understood in two ways: the level of revenue it has extracted, and the
means by which it has done so. Both aspects are, of course, interrelated
since the actual amount of revenue flowing into the state purse was
determined to a large extent by the efficiency of collecting it. The
efficiency was in itself a function of the mechanisms that were used to
ensure that as few loopholes as possible existed.
Looking across a wide range of mechanisms for collecting revenue from
tobacco, the most striking difference was between those states that taxed
the importer, by customs and duties, and those that taxed the consumer,
through excise. Both presented their own problems and brought forth
some interesting solutions.
In the early modern period most European states established tobacco
monopolies, both purchasing and frequently processing tobacco for
consumption. The pressure to collect as much revenue as possible in the
most thoroughgoing manner was increasing throughout Europe as the
costs of maintaining bureaucracies, armies and navies were rising
steadily; the days when governments turned to extraordinary taxation as
an emergency measure were fast disappearing (Bean 1973; Parker 1974;
Parker 1976). The coincidence of the increasing availability of tobacco
after 1600, initially from Spanish-American sources and then from
Virginia and Brazil, together with escalating governmental costs and the
perception of tobacco as a luxury, encouraged governments to turn to
this commodity to augment fiscal resources.
Tobacco monopolies appeared in Europe from the 1620s: the one
in Mantua, established in 1627, was probably the first of its kind
(Rogoziński 1990:65). Over the succeeding forty years most Italian states
established some form of tobacco monopoly. In Spain the tobacco
monopoly grew out of the monopoly which organized the American
trades. In 1614 the Spanish crown authorized Seville to be the sole
importer of Spanish-American tobacco, and this move led naturally to the
city becoming the only manufacturing point for tobacco; indeed in 1684
the tobacco monopoly extended to Seville the sole right to manufacture
tobacco (Rogoziński 1990:68). The royal tobacco monopoly was extended
to all of Spain’s colonies in Latin America and the Philippines in a series
of decrees beginning in 1764, thus bringing cultivation within the
monopoly’s jurisdiction (Hanson 1982:150; de Jesus 1980; Deans 1984).
Portugal, too, established a tobacco monopoly along the Spanish model.
The first contract for the monopoly was granted in 1633, but, as this
happened during the period of the Iberian union, the revenue flowed
elsewhere. It was only after the end of the union, in 1640, that a proper
tobacco monopoly was created in Portugal, though for two crucial years,
between 1642 and 1644, Portugal operated a free trade policy for tobacco
(Hanson 1982:152). The ending of this policy and the re-establishment of
the monopoly in 1644 reflected the realization that collecting revenue
from tobacco was very difficult unless it was well-supervised. In the
Habsburg lands monopolies farmed out to private individuals appeared
to be the rule in the seventeenth and first few decades of the eighteenth
century. Though the status of the tobacco monopoly fluctuated for most
of the eighteenth century, in 1784 it officially became an administration of
the state and, as the Tabakregie, has remained so until the present day
(Rogoziński 1990:68–9; Hitz and Huber 1975). By contrast, the states in
Germany tended to enforce taxation rather than creating a monopoly; for
a short time only, monopolies were established in the two largest states,
Bavaria and Prussia, but essentially the German lands were a free trade
area for tobacco (Rogoziński 1990: 71).
Tobacco monopolies were generally farmed out to individual
entrepreneurs, though there were some important exceptions to this. The
French tobacco monopoly was farmed until 1791, and turned into a state
monopoly after 1810; the Spanish monopoly remained farmed until after
the Second World War as did the Portuguese, though its monopoly was,
since 1674, much more restricted by state action than was the case in
either Spain or France (Hanson 1982:153; Nardi 1986). The Austrian
Tabakregie has been one of the longest surviving state tobacco
monopolies of its kind. No monopolies have existed in Britain, the
Netherlands and the United States.
Whether tobacco was to be administered through a monopoly, private
or state-controlled, or left to the free market, the state was under
enormous pressure to contain powerful countervailing forces for
contraband. All of the evidence available suggests that in the early
214 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
modern period, at least, smuggling was a perennial problem and was so
highly organized in many parts of Europe as to constitute another, and
very important, trading system, in a sense a parallel economy. The image
of the lone smuggler operating on a small volume could not be further
from the truth; most of the regulatory schemes that governments
followed were designed to combat smuggling.
The problem of smuggling could be approached from two main
directions. Those states with tobacco monopolies tended to prohibit
domestic tobacco production in an effort to close as many channels for
illicit trade as possible. The reason for this was quite simple: no
monopoly, either private or state-run, could monitor and police
agricultural production, and there was therefore no way of telling
whether, and to what extent, a tobacco farmer was withholding some of
his output for sale in the black market. Spain, Portugal, Austria and, to a
lesser extent, France and the Italian states prohibited domestic cultivation
by decrees authorized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
England was the only country without a monopoly to follow suit but, as
we have seen in Chapter 6, this decision was bound up as much with
state finances as it was with colonial politics. All of these countries
preferred to import their tobacco primarily from overseas since they
believed there was less risk of losing revenue from maritime than from
overland traffic. Because the costs of entry into the tobacco trade were
rising during the seventeenth century, most European states were
confident in the belief that none of the production of colonial tobacco
would find its way to Europe illicitly.
Most of the European states who prohibited domestic cultivation were
probably successful in this area of combating smuggling. Certainly this
was true for England and for France. In both countries tobacco farmers
were sacrificed at the altar of state revenues. The brutality of the
measures taken by the English Crown in the West Country was no less
draconian than that executed by the armed police of the French tobacco
monopoly (Price 1973:482). In Portugal the Junta da Administraçaõ do
Tabaco, which had responsibility for the entire tobacco trade, including
manufacturing, also tried and sentenced contrabandists (Hanson 1982:
154).
Bearing down on tobacco farmers who contravened regulations was
one thing; even though it was difficult to police these regulations, it was
equally difficult to cover up a field of tobacco. By the very nature of the
culture, tobacco growing was typically a small-scale activity and those
farmers who tried to evade the system usually lacked political influence.
Contraventions of this kind were probably more of a nuisance than a
threat to the state’s authority. In the case of France the desire of the
tobacco monopoly to eradicate domestic production entirely,
contradicted the political strategy of the central authorities intent upon
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 215
keeping peace in sensitive provinces, and the resulting policies were
compromises.
The real threat to the revenue came not from the peasantry but from
the contrabandists who handled the imported commodity. The success of
the state, or its tobacco administration, in containing domestic cultivation
contrasted with its problems in dealing with smuggling. Though by its
very nature there are no precise measures of the volume of the
contraband trade, one recent study of the English and Scottish tobacco
trade in the eighteenth century suggests that as much as one-third of
tobacco consumed in England in the 1730s was contraband (Nash 1982:
365). What the proportion was in other countries is not known but it is
very unlikely to have been any less.
While it is one thing to profile the merchants who handled the
legitimate trade in colonial tobacco, it is quite another thing to do the same
for the illicit trade. Yet, as pointed out previously, the smuggling trade
was lively and highly organized. Though we do not know much about it
there is enough evidence to give us some indication of its pervasiveness
if not its exact extent.
One of the most important obligations of the Portuguese Junta do
Tabaco was to ensure that tobacco filled the state coffers, and that this
should be arranged, initially, through the delivery of Brazilian tobacco
into the customs warehouses, located principally in Lisbon but also in
other major ports of international commerce in the country. There were,
according to the Junta, several routes by which tobacco escaped the
revenue net. Ships returning to Portugal from Brazil often held hidden
stores of tobacco, not registered on the ship’s manifest, and these would
be unloaded before the inspectors arrived; some consignments were
stolen instead of being warehoused; some tobacco was purchased directly
from the ships on the high seas before the shipments reached shore; and
some amount of tobacco that was re-exported to Spain, for example,
would be smuggled back into Portugal in a manufactured state (Hanson
1982:157–8). This illicit tobacco would then be put straight on to the black
market. In Portugal itself it appears that the clergy were responsible for
some large, but imprecise, part of the distribution network of black
market tobacco. The preferred form of black market tobacco was snuff,
and several searches by the superintendents of the Junta yielded illegal
operations of snuff production in monasteries and convents. In 1700, for
example, the Junta learned that the sisters of one convent were selling as
much as 250 pounds of tobacco per day (Hanson 1982:155). The Junta
believed that there was not a single monastery or convent in Oporto that
did not engage in contraband traffic (Hanson 1982:155). In response to
such flagrant defiance the Junta retaliated with a series of measures
aimed at both ends of the tobacco network, in Bahia and Portugal, as well
as by increasing penalties for offenders: for example, the standard
216 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
penalty for engaging in contraband trade on the Brazilian side—two
years’ banishment in Angola—was increased to five, together with a stiff
fine (Hanson 1982:159). None of the measures appears to have done much
to stem the tide, partly because of the impossibility of checking each
single shipment, port and border crossing, not to mention each religious
house, in the country, and partly because of the sheer volume of tobacco
that was crossing the Atlantic. In desperation the Junta awarded a
contract to a strong man from Spain, a wealthy merchant, for the
distribution of tobacco in Portugal, but within two weeks of its signing,
and the supposed strangling of the black market, the sisters of the
Esperança convent were at it again (Hanson 1982:161). The royal tobacco
monopoly continued to be plagued by what Carl Hanson has called ‘a
parallel economy…a network of clandestine entrepreneurs’ while tobacco
revenues continued to be the leading source of royal income (Hanson
1982:155, 161).
In England the customs and the state believed they were being
deprived of a substantial portion of their rightful revenue by smuggling;
one contemporary writer put the proportion at more than 50 per cent
(Linebaugh 1991: 159). Before 1700 the smuggling trade seems to have
been unorganized and based on the movement of small volumes of illicit
tobacco, usually by theft, helped by judicious doses of bribes to the
customs service (Rive 1929:554–7; Linebaugh 1991:158–9, 161). This trade
was facilitated by the nature of the tobacco trade from the Chesapeake, in
which tobacco was transported in unencased parcels. After much
pressure from the mercantile community, Parliament, in 1699, legislated
that tobacco could be exported from the Chesapeake only in hogsheads,
which increased in average weight over the course of the eighteenth
century, eventually reaching over 1,000 pounds (Nash 1982:357; Shepherd
and Walton 1972:65–7).
Once the packing of tobacco was transformed in this way, the
smuggling trade changed its structure, and became much more centrally
organized. According to a recent study on contraband tobacco operations
in the port of London, the parallel economy that unloaded Chesapeake
tobacco hogsheads operated alongside and within legitimate commerce,
and as much as the latter incorporated colonial tobacco cultivation,
packing and shipping, the former did the same (Linebaugh 1991:163–70).
The object of all who were involved, in one way or another, in the
contraband trade was the hogshead, and it was its fragility, or its liability
to break up, either on the transatlantic journey, or in London, as it was
being moved, that provided the contrabandist with the goods. Taking, or
socking, tobacco became a customary right among London’s riverworking population (Linebaugh 1991:172–3). In addition to straight theft,
the customs service itself was involved in illicit tobacco trade, defrauding
the revenue by under-weighing hogsheads in the accounts. UnderTOBACCO IN HISTORY 217
weighing in the outports could be as high as 15 per cent of the total, true,
weight, as evidenced in Bristol around 1730, but in London a figure of
around 5 per cent was more likely (Nash 1982:358–60).
The drain on royal revenue was so serious that the customs service
was purged, informers placed on the waterfront, and demands for
convictions raised. Indeed, the problem was so serious as to bring forth
an attempt by the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, to
revolutionize the entire means by which tobacco revenue was collected;
that is, by substituting an excise tax for customs duty, to shift the burden
directly from the importer to the consumer (Hausman and Neufeld 1981;
Price 1983; Hemphill 1985: 190–302). The excise tax scheme had a covert
political purpose but overtly it was proposed as a means of undoing both
socking and under-weighing (Linebaugh 1991:178). The scheme did not
go any further than that because of the enormous opposition raised from
many different quarters, and socking and under-weighing continued for
the time being.
Solid quantitative, as opposed to qualitative, evidence is lacking on the
extent of this kind of port fraud. An estimate of it has been made which
shows a rise from around 600,000 pounds at the turn of the eighteenth
century to a maximum level of 2,700,000 pounds around 1730 (Nash 1982:
366). Following these estimates suggests that port frauds decreased
substantially thereafter and, according to the author of these estimates,
virtually disappeared by mid-century (Nash 1982:366). They were not,
however, the only form of fraud, and while their importance declined
after 1730, that of other types of fraud grew to replace it.
The re-landing of re-exported tobacco, that is after the payment of the
drawback, and the smuggling of tobacco into England from Scotland
were the principal routes of contraband operations. Re-landing
operations were carried on from the Channel Islands, Dunkirk and
Ostend and, to a lesser extent, the Isle of Man. The amount of tobacco
that passed into the domestic market in this way has been estimated at
around one-quarter of that officially documented as being retained for
home consumption (Nash 1982:356, 362). Fraud in Scottish ports was a
serious problem until the Scottish customs service was united to the
English service (Barker 1954; Price 1984a; Nash 1982:366–7).
Despite attempts by the British government to thwart the operations of
the smuggler, it seems that no amount of tinkering within an unchanged
taxation structure had much effect. As Nash’s work shows, as soon as one
form of fraud declined another form rose. Legislation bore down on the
tobacco trade in the last few decades of the eighteenth century,
culminating in the excising of tobacco in 1789 (Rive 1929:566–8).
The problem of smuggling was widespread in Europe, and though we
have far less information about it than we would like, there is no reason
to suppose that the European experiences with smuggling and smugglers
218 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
varied significantly. Certainly the problems that the French tobacco
monopoly encountered with illicit tobacco trade were not very different
from its British, or Portuguese, counterparts; the pattern of smuggling
where certain kinds of fraud appeared under different conditions, was
broadly similar in Britain, Portugal and France (Price 1973:127–33, 446–54,
796–7; Hanson 1982; Vigié 1989). Yet while smuggling was undoubtedly a
drain on resources, both in depriving the state of revenues and in raising
the costs of enforcement, its impact was not simply financial. As Peter
Linebaugh has shown in his study of the criminal proletariat in
eighteenth-century London, tobacco fraud was a venture that linked the
slave and the planter in the Chesapeake to the river men, porters and
customs officers on the Thames. A similar case can be made in the BahiaLisbon tobacco circuit (Hanson 1982; Lugar 1977). The driving force of
this parallel economy was, of course, the state. Ironically, while
smuggling deprived the state of funds, it reinforced the state’s insistence
on deriving revenue from taxing tobacco as it became increasingly
committed to its production, distribution and consumption.
Part of the problem of smuggling stemmed from aspects of the
organization not of trade but of production. Before the end of the
nineteenth century tobacco manufacturing was on a very small scale.
Manufacturing enterprises were limited not only in size but also in the
extent of their operations. The consumer, and not the manufacturer, still
did a lot of the work transforming the tobacco leaf, whether in a raw or
semi-processed state, into the final product. One of the central changes in
the history of tobacco was its transformation into a commodity of
industrial, as opposed to commercial, capitalism.
Since its earliest introduction into Europe, consumers have taken
tobacco principally by smoking, chewing or as snuff. Across Europe not
only were there differences in the ways tobacco was consumed, as
Chapter 4 described, but there were significant differences in the way
tobacco was manufactured for consumption. The differences arose, in the
first instance, between tobacco manufactured from Chesapeake and
European tobacco, on the one hand, and Brazilian tobacco, on the other.
Chesapeake tobacco arrived in Europe cured but unprocessed. Once
out of the hogsheads, its moisture content needed to become fixed before
it could be processed any further. The aim of fixing the moisture content
was to preserve the tobacco and though this was done by a variety of
methods it essentially involved adding a liquor of additives (sugar and
water plus other ingredients) that fermented the tobacco (Alford 1973:8;
Price 1973:423). Once it was sufficiently moistened, the tobacco went for
processing. Some of the tobacco, that destined primarily for smoking,
was stripped before fermentation and then cut, ready for the consumer,
as was the case in England, or spun into a roll and then cut for the
consumer (Alford 1973:8; Price 1973:423; Rogoziński 1990:44). Tobacco
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 219
that was not intended solely for smoking passed through several other
stages of manufacture, involving further bathing in vats containing a
wide variety of flavourings and other additives, spinning, rolling and
pressing. The most common form the tobacco took after these procedures
was as a roll weighing over 100 pounds. In this form the tobacco could
take on any one of several uses: it could be cut off and used as a smoking
mixture, or, more commonly, as chewing tobacco; or it could be
processed further, by pressing and rolling, into a shape, known as a
carotte, destined principally to be ground into snuff (Alford 1973:9; Price
1973:423). European, that is Dutch and German, tobacco passed through a
similar, though not identical, process of manufacture. Much of the Dutch
tobacco used by the French tobacco monopoly came already processed in
rolls, at least around the turn of the eighteenth century; later purchases
were primarily of leaf, and the manufacturing done in France (Price 1973:
193).
Brazilian tobacco underwent a degree of processing in Bahia. Brazilian
tobacco imported into Europe had already been fermented and spun into
rolls. Part of the Brazilian tobacco import went straight into use as
chewing tobacco, its chief use in north-western Europe, and part of it into
the manufacture of snuff (Price 1973:182).
Compared to other industrial enterprises, until the middle of the
nineteenth century tobacco manufacturing was one of the least
capitalized activities in both the United States and Europe. In England,
for example, while tobacco was one of the country’s most important
imports, and certainly the main commodity from the American colonies,
tobacco manufacturing was among the smallest industries (Alford 1973:
15). In Holland, too, despite the concentration of tobacco-processing
facilities in Amsterdam, these were of far less importance to both the
city’s and the country’s industrial structure, though, in the size of its
labour force, tobacco manufacturing was in the top ten activities (Israel
1989:356).
For the most part, with some important exceptions, tobacco was
processed, and not manufactured, before the middle of the nineteenth
century. Processing was, however, a specialized activity. The principal
locations of processing, aside from that done under control of a tobacco
monopoly, were, on the European Continent, in Dunkirk, Strasbourg and
Amsterdam. In Britain processing took place at the port; there were
facilities, therefore, in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, but,
because at the time the distinction between a tobacconist (i.e. a retailer of
tobacco) and a tobacco manufacturer was unclear, most British towns
could boast some degree of tobacco processing (Alford 1973:13–14).
Available evidence suggests that, on average, the processing workshops
in Strasbourg, Amsterdam and Dunkirk employed one hundred persons
each around the turn of the eighteenth century, a figure which, in
220 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
comparison to other industrial activities of the time, suggests a fair
degree of concentration (Price 1973:487, 504; Israel 1989:266, 356).
The largest concentration of processing activity was not, however, in
those countries where tobacco importation, processing and distribution
were unregulated but rather in those countries where all three were
organized and controlled by a monopoly. The French tobacco monopoly
was the single most important producer of processed tobacco in Europe
until at least the nineteenth century. Though it processed an enormous
quantity of tobacco—20 million pounds annually, on average, in the
eighteenth century—it had only a handful of manufactories; there were in
the eighteenth century no more than ten such establishments at any one
time (Price 1973:411–12). Most of them were located in the north of the
country—41 per cent of total leaf tobacco was consumed by the
manufactories in the Seine area on the eve of the Revolution—and, on
average, they employed around a thousand workers each (Price 1973:411–
22). The Portuguese royal tobacco monopoly had only two manufactories
in the country, the main one in Lisbon and the other in Oporto. Though
smaller than their French counterparts, both the Lisbon and the Oporto
manufactories were probably larger than the average establishments in
Dunkirk, Strasbourg and Amsterdam; the Lisbon manufactory employed
around 350 workers in the second half of the eighteenth century (Nardi
1986:17). The Spanish royal tobacco monopoly concentrated its efforts on
the manufactory in Seville (Perez Vidal 1959:228–37).
There was a limit to the degree to which tobacco could be processed in
a workshop. Once the leaves had been moistened and fermented and had
been spun or rolled, the tobacco was ready for smoking or chewing—no
further processing was necessary. For snuff, however, there was a choice
of further processing stages, and this depended entirely on whether the
consumer or the manufacturer prepared the snuff.
The earliest preparations of snuff were done by the consumers
themselves. Starting around the middle of the seventeenth century, and
then growing in popularity over the following century, recipe books,
detailing myriad concoctions for the flavouring and colouring of snuff,
appeared across Europe, beginning in France. It is impossible to tell how
much snuff was prepared by the consumer and how much by the
manufacturer, but there is little doubt that over the eighteenth century
the trend was towards the centralized production of snuff, either in the
manufactories of a tobacco monopoly or in the workshop of a tobacco
manufacturer or tobacconist (Price 1973:423–5). The records of the French
tobacco monopoly show clearly that by 1789 more than half of the
monopoly’s sales consisted of manufactured snuff; tabac ficelé, processed
tobacco that the consumer ground into snuff, accounted for about onequarter of the total sales (Price 1973:426). The Portuguese royal monopoly
produced powdered tobacco in its manufactories from 1680, but it was
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 221
not until the latter part of the eighteenth century that it began producing
snuff for immediate consumption (Nardi 1986:16, 19). The Austrian state
tobacco monopoly also had a significant investment in snuff manufacture;
in the first year of its operation, 1784, prepared snuff accounted for over
30 per cent of the monopoly’s sales (Rogoziński 1990:88). In England, too,
the only sizeable investment in plant and machinery was in the
manufacture of snuff (Alford 1973).
At the turn of the nineteenth century tobacco manufacturing was not a
particularly important branch of industry and, except for those countries
where tobacco monopolies controlled both distribution and manufacture,
activities were not very concentrated. The only sizeable investment was
in the equipment and plant for producing prepared snuff. The extent to
which consumers interposed between production and consumption was
still very great, and there was, at the time, little sign that much would
change. Judging from information available on some tobacco firms in
England as well as the records of the Austrian tobacco monopoly, it
would appear that most of the changes that occurred in the sector of
manufactured tobacco products for a good part of the nineteenth century
were organizational in character; technical changes principally involved
an increase in the mechanization of a process that remained
fundamentally unaltered (Alford 1973; Hitz and Huber 1975).
The situation in the United States was not very different. Until the
American Revolution there is no evidence of any tobacco manufacturing
in the Chesapeake, though some snuff was made in the northern colonies
(Price 1956:14–15). Compared to the European tobacco industry, the
American tobacco industry hardly existed in 1800 and even the little
manufacturing that did exist was based on the production of Europeanstyle prepared snuffs. It was not until the 1820s that manufacturing began
in earnest in Virginia and North Carolina, and this resulted as much from
the general industrial development of the United States as from an
important shift in the way tobacco was consumed. This has been
described in Chapter 4 but certain aspects of it need to be restated.
Americans appear to have taken particularly to chewing tobacco,
shunning snuff. Some have argued that this was a manifestation of the
willingness of Americans to see themselves as separate from Europe, but
it is hard to prove the point. The fragmentary evidence that does exist on
consumption patterns in the United States does, however, point to
chewing as the major form of tobacco use without giving any clue as to why
it superseded snuff taking (Gottsegen 1940:2–10).
Processing, or manufacturing, chewing tobacco was relatively
straightforward and, as this form of tobacco use was of less importance in
Europe than it was in the United States, Americans developed a
technology and an organization of production that differed from that in
Europe. During the 1820s and 1830s tobacco manufacturing grew very
222 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
quickly first in the main centres of the tobacco export trade in Virginia
and North Carolina, but soon it expanded into the countryside where
planters became small manufacturers (Siegel 1987:123). Planters, and
others, were undoubtedly attracted to producing chewing tobacco
because of the ease of its manufacture, and the small demands it made on
capital investment. In many ways the manufacture of chewing tobacco
was a natural complement to tobacco culture since, in economic terms at
least, the two activities were intensive of labour rather than capital. The
slack time after curing, in the winter months, was perfectly suited to
manufacturing. Furthermore, each small producer would, in fact, be
making a unique product, partly because of the differences that existed in
the nature of the leaf and partly because of the flavourings used.
Liquorice and sugar were the basic ingredients but many others were
used: ‘sweet’ spices such as vanilla and nutmeg and pungent or bitter
ones including coriander and valerian (Tilley 1948: 511–14, 690–1).
The number of manufacturers in the Virginia-North Carolina tobacco
belt increased considerably until the Civil War while, at the same time,
tobacco manufacturing grew in importance in the regional economy; in
1860, for example, around one-third of the total value of Virginia’s
manufacturing wealth came from the tobacco industry (Siegel 1987:120).
Towns such as Danville, Lynchburg and Richmond were largely
supported by tobacco manufacturing; in Danville this activity employed
half of the labour force (Siegel 1987:129).
Competition among the manufacturers was intense but as soon as one
went out of business, another came to fill the gap, so low were the costs
of entry into the trade. In addition manufacturers used a variety of means
of selling their products including peddlers, commission merchants and
wholesale tobacconists (Tilley 1948:521–40). The proliferation of
manufacturers and marketing methods was matched by the proliferation
of brands; one manufacturer in Winston advertised forty name brands
(Tilley 1948: 522). In a foreshadowing of things to come, manufacturers
named their brands after people, or events, or images, or places that they
believed were attractive to a particular customer. Considering the
enormous number of brands available, selecting a small sector of the
market by brand naming was obviously a good move (Tilley 1948:522–4).
The concentration by manufacturers in the Virginia-North Carolina
tobacco belt on chewing tobacco was part of the general preference in
American society for this form of tobacco consumption. But it was also a
reflection of the fact that the local tobacco was especially suited for
chewing. Bright tobacco, which increased in importance in this area,
especially in North Carolina, around mid-century, also found favour as a
chewing tobacco, partly because of its pleasing appearance and partly
because Bright, flue-cured tobacco was capable of absorbing more
moisture and additives than was the dark air-cured tobacco of the
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 223
tidewater. The production of cigars and snuff, for which Bright tobacco
was unsuitable, was located elsewhere in the country, using imported or
northern-grown tobacco (Cooper 1988; Cox 1933).
Even as late as 1860, despite the prodigious industrialization of the
American economy, tobacco manufacturing remained technically
backward; there were many establishments, but the average size of the
factories, in terms of their labour force was small; in Richmond, one of
the most important industrial centres, an average factory on the eve of
the Civil War employed fewer than seventy workers (O’Brien 1978:512).
Technological and organizational changes did occur, but only on a
limited scale. The most important improvements were in economies of
waste and of time (Tilley 1948:493). Other improvements were made in
mechanizing the manufacture of the chewing plug, but again these were
very limited.
It is not immediately clear why chewing tobacco manufacture did not
follow the trajectory taken by other American industrial concerns, at least
until the 1870s. But, unknown to most of those who manufactured
chewing tobacco, workers and owners alike, a revolutionary change was
about to transform the industry beyond recognition. In the matter of a few
decades after the Civil War not only was the tobacco industry internally
revolutionized, but the firms that dominated the industry emerged as
some of the largest in the country.
Before one can understand this phenomenon it is necessary to discuss
another form of tobacco consumption, smoking. As pointed out in
Chapter 4, Americans were unique among consumers in preferring to take
tobacco by chewing it in plugs and twists, as the forms were termed. The
manufacture of chewing tobacco was concentrated in the Virginia-North
Carolina tobacco belt; northern tobacco manufacturers concentrated on
cigar production. Though tobacco factories in Virginia and North
Carolina were small when compared to other contemporary industrial
establishments, especially in the northern states, they were much larger
than the cigar-making concerns in New York and Pennsylvania, and
there were fewer of them. In 1860, for example, there were around 350
tobacco factories in the two southern states; in 1912, even after a degree
of consolidation of facilities, there were still 20,000 firms making cigars in
the United States; Richmond, the most important tobacco manufacturing
centre in the country, produced more tobacco, by value, than did the
entire state of New York (Cooper 1988:784; Robert 1938:187–8).
Smoking tobacco factories, on the eve of the Civil War, were in a clear
minority in the southern tobacco industry; only 2 per cent of the total
establishments produced smoking tobacco (Robert 1938:170). The largest
smoking tobacco factory in the region, several times larger than its nearest
rival, employed only twelve workers, yet it produced over 500,000
pounds of manufactured tobacco in 1860 (Robert 1938:183). That there
224 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
was little demand for the product in the country is attested to by several
sources, both statistical and literary. Yet, unforeseen by anyone it seems,
a combination of factors in the years after the end of the Civil War
combined to create an upsurge in the demand for, as well as in the means
of production of, smoking tobacco.
There were, in the first instance, the important developments in
tobacco culture itself, especially in the flue-curing of Bright tobacco and
the growing popularity of Burley tobacco, both of which produced a
distinctly milder, more mellow and cooler-burning smoke. This, in itself,
undoubtedly led to an increasing interest in smoking tobacco, but
whether it explains the phenomenal rise of smoking is another matter.
Among other factors that have been suggested was the invention and
availability of the friction match, and then the safety match, from the midnineteenth century, making smoking a mobile pastime; the replacement of
the clay pipe by the briar, again after mid-century; and the possible risk
of contagion of spittle (Alford 1973:110–11; Dunhill 1924). The briar pipe
was especially well-suited to the flue-cured and Burley tobaccos, while the
clay and the meerschaum pipes were better suited to dark air- and firecured varieties (Alford 1973:111). There is also the possibility that the
Civil War heavily disrupted trade in flavourings and sweeteners, the
most important of which were imported, reducing the supply of these
essential ingredients and thereby raising the price of the final product:
plugs that could not sell at the price, those that spoiled, and tobacco that
was unflavoured could readily be turned into smoking tobacco (Tilley
1948:497–8).
Changes in the ingredients, and the means of consuming tobacco
through smoking, certainly had a bearing on the growing popularity of
both the pipe and the cigar; in per capita terms, the consumption of cigars
tripled between 1850 and 1870, from ten to thirty cigars per annum
(Gottsegen 1940:10, 13). But there were also important changes occurring
on the supply side that may have been more significant for the
transformations in tobacco production.
In the area of technical innovation, and indeed, in the extent of
technological inputs, the smoking tobacco industry was far more
advanced than that of chewing tobacco. Whereas chewing tobacco was
intensive of capital, with a low level of embedded technology, such as
vats and presses, smoking tobacco could be produced with a minimum
of capital equipment, no more than some simple tools to shred the
tobacco. The investment in chewing tobacco manufacture before the Civil
War mostly affected the final stages of pressing the tobacco into
conveniently sized shapes, but evidence suggests that these changes
actually led to an increase in the costs of production (Siegel 1987:134). By
contrast, most of the technical innovations in smoking tobacco
manufacture increased physical productivity through mechanization.
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 225
Between 1865 and 1885 significant advances were made in the cutting or
shredding of tobacco, but there was also a growing tendency to use
centralized motive power by way of steam engines. Even before the
invention, and diffusion, of mechanical shredding machines, smoking
tobacco factories were more concentrated than their counterparts in the
manufacture of chewing tobacco; two tobacco factories, equipped with
steam power in 1860, produced as much smoking tobacco as all the
others put together (Robert 1938:212). Steam power, together with an
improved version of the shredding machine (first patented in 1866 by a
manufacturer of agricultural machinery), launched the smoking tobacco
industry on a path of industrialization. The prodigious volume of
smoking tobacco that the new machinery produced put severe strain on
traditional methods of packing the output and, when that problem was
solved in 1885, manufacturing could be said to have been mechanized
(Tilley 1948:500–1).
Smoking tobacco could be produced in different degrees of fineness,
from an almost granulated to a thickly shredded form. There is no
indication, unfortunately, as to the relative value of the different grades
of smoking tobacco during the early years of the expansion of this
manufacture. What is clear, however, is that finely shredded tobacco was
being consumed before the Civil War (Tilley 1948:508). The significance
of this needs to be stressed, for, while the industrialization of tobacco
manufacture was located in the smoking tobacco sector, it was the
manufacture of fine smoking tobacco, packaged in a cigarette, that
integrated mechanization of production with mass consumption.
The history of the cigarette has been told in Chapter 5, where it was
argued that, in the United States at least, cigarettes first gained popularity
during the 1870s. Though the first cigarettes were made of Turkish
tobacco it soon became clear to manufacturers that flue-cured tobacco
could be used most profitably in this manner (Brooks 1937:172). The first
cigarettes were manufactured in New York in 1869, by F.S.Kinney and
Company, using flue-cured tobacco, and employing a largely female
labour force, instructed by East European cigarette rollers, hand-rolling
for the market (Tilley 1948:508). Once Kinney entered the market, others
followed suit; William S.Kimball and Company of Rochester began
manufacturing cigarettes in 1876, and, at about the same time, Allen and
Ginter of Richmond, and Goodwin and Company of New York (Porter
1969:61–2; Tilley 1948: 508; Tennant 1950:19). In 1880 these four firms are
estimated to have accounted for 80 per cent of the entire cigaratte output
of the country (Tennant 1950:19). In several significant ways the cigarette
industry differed from other branches of the tobacco industry. There was,
in the first place, a considerable degree of concentration of production in
the early enterprises. Unlike the chewing, cigar and, to a lesser extent,
smoking tobacco sectors, all of which were characterized by a
226 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
proliferation of small-scale enterprises, entry into cigarette production
was restrictive. Partly this was because of the scarcity, and hence the high
price, of labour; and partly because those firms that entered the market
did so as an extension of an existing smoking tobacco business (Tennant
1950:17; Porter 1969:61). Second, cigarette manufacturing was located in
two regions of the country, in New York which had expertise in cigar
manufacturing and in tobacco marketing, and Virginia and North
Carolina where there was, of course, an abundance of tobacco knowledge
(Robert 1938:223–5). Unlike the other branches of the tobacco industry,
the manufacture of cigarettes, as we will see, integrated the substantial
and different skills available in the north and south, and this factor, more
than anything else, was crucial in the industry’s incredible development.
Finally, the industry settled on a specific raw material, Bright flue-cured
tobacco, as its characteristic ingredient, a tobacco that was American and
distinctive.
In the first year of its existence the New York firms dominated the
cigarette industry; in 1881, with a total output of over 380 million
cigarettes, they accounted for 72 per cent of the country’s total production
(Tilley 1948:510). The firm of Allen and Ginter was no match for a giant
of the industry, such as the Kinney Company who had a branch plant in
Richmond, but very quickly, possibly because of its insistence on using
only Bright tobacco, the Richmond firm moved into the fast track: by 1883
they had a branch plant in London and were selling throughout Europe
and Australia (Tilley 1948:509).
There are no comparative production figures for the cigarette
companies in the early years of the 1880s, but during this decade their
performance was eclipsed by an extremely aggressive newcomer from
Durham, North Carolina. James Buchanan Duke, the youngest son of
Washington Duke, who had begun manufacturing smoking tobacco
outside Durham after the close of the Civil War, quickly rose within the
firm to a position of power. When in 1878 the family invited two
outsiders to join the partnership, it was James Duke who was clearly at
the helm (Tennant 1950:22). The partnership ended in 1885, and the firm
was incorporated as W.Duke, Sons and Co. (Porter 1969:63). Four years
later Duke was the largest cigarette company in the world, and one year
later, in 1890, the five principal manufacturers of cigarettes—who
together produced over 90 per cent of total American cigarette production
—joined to form the American Tobacco Company, one of the largest
American corporations, with James Duke as its president (Tennant 1950:
22).
The story of the rise of James Duke within his own firm, and then to
the very top of the American cigarette, and finally American tobacco,
industry has been told elsewhere and need not be repeated (Jenkins 1927;
Winkler 1942; Porter 1969; Durden 1975). What is of concern here,
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 227
however, is the effect that the changes in the organization of the industry
had on the nature of tobacco as a commodity.
It is generally agreed that Duke’s decision to manufacture cigarettes in
1881 was taken because he believed that he could not compete effectively
against W.T.Blackwell and Company, manufacturers of the leading
smoking mixture of the time, Bull Durham (Porter and Livesay 1971:201).
Though the other partners were not convinced by the wisdom of the move
—Durham lacked skilled rollers, for example—the cigarette industry was
booming: between 1870 and 1880 total cigarette consumption in the
United States had increased from 14 to 409 million units (Gottsegen 1940:
28). This prodigious growth in output was accomplished by factory girls
rolling several thousand cigarettes by hand each day. Because of a lack of
economies of scale, output could increase within an unchanging
production technology only by adding labour. The search for a
mechanical means of mass production began to move up the managerial
agenda in the cigarette industry, as it had across the broad spectrum of
American industry (Chandler 1990; Bruchey 1989; Roberts and Knapp
1992). And it was precisely during this decade that a large number of
machines designed to make cigarettes appeared, and/or were patented in
the United States, Britain and France; but none was successful, and their
absorption into production was minimal (Tennant 1950:17–18; Porter
1969:67). In 1881, ironically in the same year that Duke began to
manufacture cigarettes, James Bonsack, himself from Virginia, patented a
cigarette-making machine; two years later the machine was put on the
market, on a rental basis only, by the newly-formed Bonsack Machine
Company (Porter 1969:67–8; Robert and Knapp 1992). While other
manufacturers, such as the rival Richmond firm of Allen and Ginter,
declined to use the Bonsack machine or had their own machines—
another patented device was used by Goodwin and Company of New
York—Duke took immediately to the mechanical cigarette maker and
ordered two, which were installed in 1884 (Tennant 1950:21). In that year
a single Bonsack machine produced between 100,000 and 120,000
cigarettes per day, equivalent to the labour of thirty to forty hand
workers (Porter 1969:690).
Because Duke provided the Bonsack Company with the first solid
order in the American cigarette industry, he was able to negotiate
extremely favourable terms for himself, particularly in reducing the
licence fee, and finally in obtaining exclusive rights to the machine itself
(Roberts and Knapp 1992:277–8). The control over the Bonsack machine,
combined with its physical productivity, not only secured Duke a leading
position in the industry but also lowered production costs; they fell by
more than 50 per cent, from 80 cents to 30 cents per thousand, and, as the
machine was further improved, the costs fell even more, reaching,
228 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
according to United States official calculations, no more than 8 cents per
thousand in 1895 (Tennant 1950:69).
Meanwhile, the Bonsack Company renewed its efforts to corner the
cigarette technology market by purchasing competing patents—a
business strategy typical of the period in highly capital-intensive
industries—and by 1889 this was accomplished. The convergence of
technology within the industry, together with a broadly similar raw
material, resulted in a manufactured product that was, in essentials,
undifferentiated from one manufacturer to the other. Prices were already
at rock bottom, demand was levelling off, and though the initial response
to this situation was a vigorous and, in retrospect, highly significant
campaign to gain market share through advertising, eventually the forces
for mergers grew to dominate the competitive environment. An
agreement by the major manufacturers on leaf purchases in 1889 was the
final step to integration which, as we have seen, was initiated and headed
by Duke himself in 1890 (Porter 1969:69–72).
For the first few years of its existence the American Tobacco Company
concentrated on the manufacture of the cigarette on which the whole
combination was founded. But Duke’s vision extended well beyond the
cigarette, and, as the name of the firm suggests, his strategy was to
control as much as possible of American manufactured tobacco. In a
series of battles with producers of other products, beginning with
chewing tobacco between 1894 and 1898, and then moving on to snuff in
1899 and 1900 and finally to the cigar in 1901 and 1902, Duke attempted
to buy out, or ruin, as many manufacturers as possible (Porter 1969:74–5;
Burns 1982). With the exception of the cigar industry, which proved
extremely difficult to capture because of its fractured structure, Duke’s
strategy was very successful; in 1910 the tobacco trust constructed around
the American Tobacco Company accounted for no less than 75 per cent of
the country’s manufactured tobacco output—cigarettes, snuff, chewing
tobacco, smoking tobacco and cigarillos (Tennant 1950:27).
What happened to tobacco manufacturing in the last two decades of
the nineteenth century in the United States was part of a wider
movement towards the creation of enormous corporations with
monopolistic or oligopolistic control over production, technology and
marketing. In one extremely significant area, the tobacco trust experience
differed from that of most other industrial combinations. In the
restructuring of the American industrial economy in the second half of
the nineteenth century it became normal for firms to integrate both
forwards, into distribution, and backwards, into the acquisition of raw
material supplies (Chandler 1977). Though the tobacco trust, or the
American Tobacco Company, in particular, purchased subsidiary
companies that made boxes, foil and pipes, it did not involve itself in
owning tobacco fields (Porter and Livesay 1971:207). Why the trust chose
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 229
not to enter tobacco cultivation is not entirely clear. There is the
argument that the American Tobacco Company was not threatened by
the suppliers of tobacco, and therefore saw no need to control the supply
directly (Porter and Livesay 1971:297). That there was no threat is
certainly true, but that does not explain the company’s reluctance to
control supply directly; not all of the company’s strategic actions were
defensive. Most likely there was no need to control supply directly
because the company already had all of the bargaining power it needed
because it acted virtually as a single buyer, while most farmers, as we
have seen, produced too little to affect the market price (Tennant 1950:
316–41). Whatever the reason, Duke’s decision not to produce his own
tobacco reinforced the enormously inequitable division of power between
cultivators, on the one hand, and distributors and manufacturers, on the
other, that characterized tobacco culture from the beginning, and
continues to do so even now.
When the American Tobacco Company was formed, all of the
signatories to the agreement, James Duke excepted, expressed misgivings
as to the legality of the decision. Despite their worries, the combination was
formed but the question of its legal basis did not disappear, though the
concern shifted from the partners to the United States Department of
Justice. After several important rulings against other combinations,
notably Standard Oil, the Department of Justice ruled, in 1911, that the
American Tobacco Company had infringed the Sherman Act—designed
to safeguard industrial competition—and the trust was broken up into
constituent parts. Assets and plants were redistributed into four newly
created companies—the American Tobacco Company, Liggett and
Myers, R.J.Reynolds, P.Lorillard—and a handful of much smaller firms
(Tennant 1950:60–1). Until the period immediately following the Second
World War the three largest companies, American Tobacco, Reynolds,
and Liggett, accounted for as much as 80 per cent of cigarette output,
which itself was growing in importance when compared to other
manufactured products (Tennant 1950:94). It has been only in the last
four or five decades that this position has been altered, partly because of
the rise in importance of some of the smaller producers, such as Philip
Morris, and Brown and Williamson, but also because of the development
of multibranding (Tennant 1971:227). In 1979, Philip Morris accounted for
29 per cent of domestic American sales, and Brown and Williamson a
further 15 per cent; in 1930 the corresponding figures were 0.4 per cent
and 0.2 per cent respectively (Johnson 1984:23). R.J.Reynolds and Philip
Morris are now the largest cigarette producers in the United States.
James Duke’s insistence on mechanizing cigarette production; his
dedication to, and dependence upon, advertising as a means of increasing
market share and overall demand; and his corporate strategy—these all
revolutionized the American tobacco industry. Duke’s innovations did
230 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
not end there, however. Duke was crucial to the history of tobacco in
other ways. First, his corporate strategy in controlling markets was not
limited to the United States. In 1901 American Tobacco bought Ogden
Ltd, one of Britain’s leading tobacco manufacturers (Alford 1973:250). By
comparison with the United States the British tobacco industry was not
only much smaller but far less concentrated. Small firms made up the
majority of the industry and there was no movement towards
concentration, as in the United States. Nevertheless, six firms, including
Wills in Bristol, Cope in Liverpool, Lambert and Butler in London, John
Player in Nottingham and Mitchell in Glasgow, accounted for about 20
per cent of total tobacco sales in Britain near the end of the nineteenth
century (Alford 1973:161). Ogden was not in this group, but its strength
was increasing. Duke’s purchase signalled his intentions not only of
extending his operations beyond the American shore but also of
capturing the market in Britain as well as Europe (Alford 1973:251). The
response of British manufacturers to Duke’s incursion was swift and
powerful. Within a few months, the thirteen largest tobacco
manufacturers combined to form a new company, the Imperial Tobacco
Company headed by W.D. and H. O.Wills Ltd. (Alford 1973:263). A year
later three more firms joined Imperial Tobacco (Alford 1973:267–8).
Imperial attempted to withstand competition from American Tobacco by
increasing advertising, relying upon the brand strength of its chief
products and by negotiating to purchase an American tobacco
manufacturing firm of its own in retaliation (Alford 1973:267–8). The
strategy paid off, and in the same year, 1902, as Imperial Tobacco
constituent companies were enlarged, American Tobacco settled on a
negotiated truce, the results of which had a far-reaching impact on the
history of tobacco.
Likened to the division of the world drawn up by Pope Alexander VI in
the Treaty of Tordesillas, and signed by Spain and Portugal, the
agreement between American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco affected a
similar organization of the world’s tobacco market (Alford 1973:269).
American Tobacco withdrew from the British market, as Imperial did
from the American market, though they agreed to retain trading rights in
each other’s brands: tobacco demand in the rest of the world was to be
supplied by a new company, two-thirds of which was owned by
American Tobacco, and the other third by Imperial. It was registered in
Britain and took as its name the British American Tobacco Company Ltd
(Alford 1973:269; Cox 1989:45–6).
Duke’s second main innovative action was to tap markets for cigarettes
outside the United States. He had already embarked on an export drive in
1883, when he sent one of his salesmen, R.H.Wright, on a nineteen-month
world trip (Jenkins 1927:72). The world tobacco market was not wide
open, however. It was, for example, almost impossible to break into those
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 231
European markets controlled by monopolies. Markets in areas of
European settlement, especially Canada, Australia and South Africa,
presented obstacles, especially the presence of British firms, particularly
Wills (Cox 1989:49–50; Alford 1973:217–19). The most promising markets,
therefore, appeared to be in the Far East, particularly those countries not
under colonial control, and given to preferential trading structures.
Indeed there is a story that Duke had already targeted China as his
company’s main export market upon hearing of the Bonsack machine’s
capabilities (Cochran 1986:152). In 1888 Duke entrusted James Thomas
with the task of opening markets in the Far East, and in 1890 sold his first
cigarettes there; in 1902 the Chinese market was absorbing 1.25 billion
cigarettes (Cochran 1986:152; Thomas 1928). That exports became
increasingly important to the firm is borne out by the fact that in 1898,
according to one estimate, one-third of Duke’s production of cigarettes
was exported (Alford 1973:217). Around the turn of the twentieth century
the Asian market, principally China, accounted for 54 per cent of all
cigarettes exported from the United States (Jacobstein 1907:172 [434]). A
small factory was established in 1891, but the real assault on the Chinese
market did not occur until 1903 when, under the new British American
Tobacco Company, the factory in Shanghai began producing cigarettes
from imported American tobacco leaf (Cochran 1986:155–6). After several
years of expansion, including the opening up of factories in Hankow and
Manchuria, British American Tobacco was selling 12 billion cigarettes in
1916, of which between one-half and one-third was manufactured in
China, some part of it being manufactured from Bright tobacco grown in
the country (Cochran 1986:158, 163–4).
Once British American Tobacco had made successful inroads into the
Chinese market, it began to exploit other opportunities, first in India,
where Wills had already begun operations before the turn of the century.
The strategy of gaining a foothold in the Indian market was based on the
experience in China: first, the company marketed its imported products
and then began to manufacture its own cigarettes (Cox 1989:52). BAT also
moved into British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. In Africa the
company first operated in Egypt—by the late 1920s four factories were
manufacturing cigarettes in the country—but the rest of Africa was also
opened up within a short period of time, though manufacturing facilities
were not established until the 1930s (Cox 1989:53). Ironically, Japan was
the only country where Duke was forced to give up, and this after it had,
in 1899, acquired a controlling interest in one of the most important
Japanese tobacco firms (Durden 1976). After describing Duke as a
‘capitalist…intending to monopolize the whole world’, the Japanese
government nationalized the tobacco industry, forcing Duke out in 1904
(Cochran 1986:183–5).
232 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
The late nineteenth and the twentieth century have witnessed the total
transformation of the tobacco industry from one characterized by smallscale and labour-intensive production, with either local or national
distribution and marketing systems, to one characterized by
multinational enterprise in all sectors. The change from one state to the
other was very rapid, occurring in a span of less than two decades. The
present shape of the industry has resulted clearly from the early actions
by Duke, the formation, and final dissolution, of the American Tobacco
Company, but there have been other factors as well.
In the first place, in terms of the total production of manufactured
tobacco products, cigarettes have continued to account for an increasing
proportion of the total production. In the United States, at the turn of the
twentieth century, cigarettes accounted for only 3.4 per cent of leaf
consumed; the figure reached 50 per cent in 1937 and continued to grow
unabated to 77 per cent in 1967 (Tennant 1971:217). Today the figure
would be approaching 90 per cent, as it is in most of the developed
world. On a global level, the corresponding figure for 1980 can be
estimated at around 70 per cent (Tucker 1982:35, 173; Johnson 1984:65).
A second important change was the explosion in the number of
cigarettes that were produced, first in the United States and then
throughout the world. The increase is staggering. In the United States in
1870 there were 16 million cigarettes made which, though it appears to be
a lot, should be compared to the 1.2 billion cigars made in the same year
(Johnson 1984: 16). The billion figure was reached in 1885, after the
successful use of the Bonsack machine: in 1981 the comparable figure was
734 billion (Johnson 1984:19). In 1980 the world consumed 4,373 billion
cigarettes; in 1988 5,270 billion (Tucker 1982:190; Grise 1990:22).
Possible explanations of the phenomenal success of the cigarette, in
both relative and absolute terms, have been offered in Chapter 5, but one
factor has not been mentioned: the change in technology that made the
growth in production levels possible. The Bonsack machine, at the turn of
the twentieth century, was able to produce 500 cigarettes per minute.
Improvements to that machine, as well as other machines, raised physical
productivity considerably (Hall 1978). In 1976 one of the most widely
used cigarette machines, the Molins machine (partly owned by BAT and
Imperial), was rated at 5,000 cigarettes per minute (Clairmonte 1979:265).
There are few cigarette technologies available, and they are marketed
globally; cigarette companies have financial interests in them (UNCTAD
1978:18).
In the western world the date at which the cigarette has dominated
consumption—50 per cent or more, by weight of total consumption—has
varied considerably. Several countries had already gone over to cigarettes
in the 1920s, notably Britain, Turkey and Greece; but most switched over
either during or immediately after the Second World War (Rogoziński
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 233
1990:113). The Netherlands was later than most, and a few countries,
Norway and India in particular, are still wedded to cut tobacco, as in the
case of Norway, or traditional forms such as bidis and hookahs in India
(Rogoziński 1990:113). Japan had changed to cigarettes as early as 1923,
and China probably by the same time (Rogoziński 1990:113).
This remarkable expansion of the cigarette habit has been satisfied by a
very small number of enterprises. In 1980 multinational tobacco
companies furnished 35 per cent of the total output, but monopolies
accounted for 55 per cent (Tucker 1982:69). The principal monopolies are
located in France, Italy, Spain and Russia in Europe; China and Japan in
Asia. The largest monopolies in the world are those in Japan and China.
In 1980, the former manufactured 307 billion cigarettes in thirty-six
factories, had a turnover of $11 billion and employed 40,000 people
directly and 460,000 indirectly (Tucker 1982:106–7). The Japanese tobacco
monopoly is a nationalized industry, but in China it is part of the
Ministry of Light Industry. In 1980 the latter manufactured 750 billion
cigarettes in 1,000 different brands in eighty-three factories—the Shanghai
complex alone produced 41 billion cigarettes in the same year (Tucker
1982:113–14). BAT, as the largest foreign company in China, was expelled
in the 1949 Revolution, but in 1980 Chinese cigarette factories, under
agreement with R.J.Reynolds, started manufacturing Camel cigarettes
(Tucker 1982:115). The largest monopoly in Europe is that of the former
Soviet Union, where in 1980 350 billion cigarettes were produced: all of
the Eastern European countries have their own monopolies (Tucker 1982:
116–17). SEITA, the French monopoly, MONTAL, the Italian monopoly
and Tabacalera, the Spanish monopoly are large manufacturers—SEITA,
for example, produced 86 billion cigarettes in 1980—and, though they are
technically no longer monopolies under the laws of the EC, they are still
responsible for the production of ‘domestic’ brands (Tucker 1982:109).
The monopolies may be the world’s largest producers of manufactured
tobacco, but all of their manufacturing facilities are located in the country
of jurisdiction and, with few exceptions, their products are sold
nationally: only SEITA has made any inroads into the global
marketplace. It is precisely on this point that the multinationals differ, for,
while there are many fewer multinational tobacco companies than
monopolies, they are truly global in their operations, in both production
and marketing, and, one might add, in purchasing leaf. In 1980 five
tobacco multinational companies manufactured just over 1,500 billion
cigarettes. Table 9.1 provides a profile of their sales, employees and
cigarette production in that year.
With the exception of Rothmans each of the tobacco multinationals had
its origin in the dissolution of the American Tobacco Company in 1911.
They have all developed globally, but through a series of interlocking
(and changing) agreements, they have certain areas of the world market
234 ‘TO LIVE BY SMOKE’
where they predominate. BAT is the most international of the companies,
operating on each continent, in manufacturing as well as sales. In 1980 its
largest market was Europe, as it was for Rothmans and American Brands
(Tucker 1982:70). The United States market, the single most important
market outside the monopoly system, was served almost entirely by
Reynolds, Philip Morris, BAT (through Brown and Williamson) and
American Brands, the first two companies accounting for over 60 per cent
of total cigarette consumption in the country (Johnson 1984:23). None of
the companies relies exclusively on tobacco for their turnover: they are
all well diversified, though important differences exist in the nature and
degree of their diversification (Tucker 1982:71–103).
The cigarettes of multinational companies have been available,
throughout the world, for a large part of the twentieth-century, and their
availability, and penetration of domestic markets, even those protected
by monopolies, continues to grow. Well behind the multinationals, as a
group at least, are the national producers, those with significantly little
international production and marketing. These companies include
Imperial—in 1980 the company produced 70 billion cigarettes—in the
United Kingdom, and Reemtsma in Germany (Tucker 1982:104). Lorillard
and Liggett are the main national companies in the United States.
Table 9.1 Multinational company cigarette output 1980
Source: Tucker 1982:70
TOBACCO IN HISTORY 235
Conclusion
Wayne McLaren, who portrayed the rugged ‘Marlboro Man’
in cigarette ads but became an anti-smoking crusader after
developing lung cancer, has died, aged 51… His mother said:
‘Some of his last words were: “Take care of the children.
Tobacco will kill you, and I am living proof of it”.’ …Mr
McLaren, a rodeo rider, actor and Hollywood stuntman…was
a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker for about 25 years. In an
interview last week, Mr McLaren said his habit had ‘caught up
with me. I’ve spent the last month of my life in an incubator
and I’m telling you, it’s just not worth it.’
Guardian, 25 July 1992
10
TO DIE BY SMOKE
Whither tobacco?
One of this book’s principal objectives is to explore the processes and
reasons for tobacco’s pervasive global entrenchment. That entrenchment
has many aspects to it, and there have been many books written about
tobacco that have explored this phenomenon. Most, however, have
adopted a contemporary perspective. The argument of this book is that
the process of tobacco’s entrenchment has a profound historical
dimension that is much more than simply a background to the
contemporary issues. Indeed the usual explanations offered by
contemporary commentators on the ‘tobacco problem’, such as the
addictive properties of nicotine, central government demand for revenue
through taxation, underdevelopment and underemployment in the Third
World and the corporate strategies of tobacco manufacturers, have all
been determined historically.
Tobacco and smoking pose massive problems of health, welfare and
ecology. Though there have always been dissenting voices against
tobacco, not until this century, and especially since the 1950s, has tobacco
been condemned from so many quarters. There is, in the West at least, a
growing sense of the smoker as a social outcast, of smoking as a vice. The
rights of non-smokers have been publicly acknowledged while those of
the smoker have been sacrificed. Tobacco smoking has become the
subject of intense ethical debate (Goodin 1989a; Goodin 1989b).
Why? There are many reasons for the changed meaning of smoking, but
before looking at these it might be well to preface the discussion by
emphasizing that the meaning has changed only for a small proportion of
the world’s population, and that these people are to be found largely in
the industrialized West, predominantly among the middle classes. The
meaning has not altered for most people in the Third World, and for a
large proportion of the industrialized population; neither has it changed
for most governments; and certainly not for multinational tobacco
companies and state tobacco monopolies. Perhaps, rather than speaking
about the changed meaning of smoking, as some have done, it is more
accurate to describe what is happening now, as part of the historical
process of defi nition in which several key arguments are involved. What
will finally emerge remains to be seen.
Those who seek to define smoking as dangerous and the cigarette as a
noxious artefact have powerful arguments on their side. First and
foremost, tobacco kills. The latest reports on what is termed ‘smokingattributable mortality’ make for depressing reading: the number of
deaths is appalling, and has been rising. On the situation in the
developed world alone, I quote:
annual deaths from smoking number about 0.9 million in 1965, 1.3
million in 1975, 1.7 million in 1985, and 2.1 million in 1995 (and
hence about 21 million in the decade 1990–99:5–6 million European
Community, 5–6 million USA, 5 million former USSR, 3 million
Eastern and other Europe, and 2 million elsewhere [i.e. Australia,
Canada, Japan and New Zealand])…at present just under 20% of all
deaths in developed countries are attributed to tobacco, but this
percentage is still rising, suggesting that on current smoking
patterns just over 20% of those now living will eventually be killed
by tobacco…
(Peto et al. 1992:1,268)
Smoking-attributable mortality worldwide in 1991 was estimated at 3
million by the World Health Organization, roughly two-thirds in the
developed, and one-third in the developing, world (USDHHS 1992:91).
But this pattern is certain to change as the cigarette smoking epidemic
spreads through the Third World, as all commentators predict it will
(Peto and Lopez 1990:66–8; Chapman and Wong 1990).
In 1990 the United States Surgeon General stated that ‘smoking
represents the most extensively documented cause of disease ever
investigated in the history of biomedical research’ (USDHHS 1990). This
outpouring of research has resulted in a second argument against tobacco
use: the enormous dangers of passive smoking (USDHHS 1986).
Evidence from various studies suggests that passive smoking increases
the likelihood of getting lung cancer by more than 30 per cent (Goodin
1989a: 598); a recent large-scale study of non-smoking wives of smoking
husbands in Japan showed that two-thirds of those women who were
non-smokers and died from lung cancer were married to husbands who
smoked (Hirayama 1990: 37). The decision by many governments, both
central and local, to ban smoking from public places reflects the
enormous impact that the statements on the health hazards of passive
smoking have had on public opinion. Further prohibitions on smoking in
public places are expected to come soon.
The third argument in the anti-smoking, and anti-tobacco, arsenal is
the social cost of smoking. How much it costs is a matter of debate but
238 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
the figures that have been proposed are devastating. In a comprehensive
study of the costs of smoking, which included medical costs and costs of
pro ductivity losses because of mortality and morbidity, the United States
Office of Technology Assessment calculated that smoking cost the United
States anywhere between $39 billion and $96 billion annually (USDHHS
1992:110–11). Comparable figures for other countries are relatively scarce
(Markandya and Pierce 1989; FAO 1989:22–3).
Finally, the identification of nicotine as an addictive drug has led to a
change in the image of the smoker and the appropriation of a lexicon
typically reserved for descriptions of addicts of hard drugs. Moreover, it
has also led to a restoration of the concept of tobacco use as a disease in
itself, partly by a change of language, introducing, for example, words
such as ‘nicotinism’ and ‘tobacconism’. In other words nicotine addicts
are seen as needing help to quit (as most smokers attempt to do more
than once in their smoking life); and the act of smoking is no longer
portrayed as ‘a private-regarding vice’ but rather as a serious addiction:
‘…once you have become addicted to nicotine, your subsequent smoking
cannot be taken as indicating your consent to the risks’ (Goodin 1989a:
574, 587).
Cigarette companies have continued to deny that cigarette smoking
causes disease: governments continue to contradict themselves, giving
health advice and legislating for the rights of non-smokers, on the one
hand, and collecting excise and duty taxes, and supporting tobacco
growers with subsidies, on the other hand (Warner 1991; Joosens and
Raw 1991; Grise 1990). On an international level, contradictions abound.
The World Bank, for example, has been actively involved in supporting
tobacco production in the developing world through loans: between 1974
and 1988 over $1.5 billion of World Bank money was placed at the
disposal of tobacco projects supposedly to help the developing world
(Chapman and Wong 1990:30–1). Moreover, governments who publicly
pronounce on environmental damage caused by modern agriculture, and
the depletion of the world’s rain forests, turn a blind eye to tobacco even
when there is ample evidence that tobacco growing has profound
ecological implications. Soil nutrient depletion is one of the problems, but
another, and less publicized, problem is the use of wood in curing
tobacco (Chapman and Wong 1990:32). This is a very controversial
subject and different studies give different results on the impact on the
forests of tobacco processing. Some reports present the following
statistics: one tree is felled for every 300 cigarettes; 1 hectare of tobacco
requires between 0.5 and 1 hectare of woodland for curing; one in twelve
trees felled worldwide is used in curing tobacco; or, each kilo of tobacco
demands about 160 kilos of wood (USDHHS 1992:125). Another report,
based on detailed data for seven developing countries, presented a rather
different picture, downgrading the environmental impact of tobacco
TO DIE BY SMOKE 239
processing and publishing relatively low figures for specific fuel
consumption—the ratio of wood usage to tobacco. Rather than the figure
of 160, these reports offered an average of 7.8, but conceded that on some
individual estates the level ran as high as 40 (FAO 1989:13). Nevertheless,
while concluding that tobacco processing did not pose an ecological
threat in general, the report did stress the point that many parts of the
world with serious deforestation problems also grow tobacco (FAO 1989:
14; Chapman and Wong 1990:57–63).
Whither tobacco? In recent years tobacco companies have been put in
the position of having to defend their product. Decisions in court have
raised issues of liability and responsibility that have far-reaching
implications. Perhaps we are getting to the position, well described by
Robert Goodin, of undoing a remarkable bit of cultural hypocrisy. As he
so aptly states: ‘Cigarettes kill 25% of their users, even when used as their
manufacturers intended they be used. Suppose a toaster or lawnmower
had a similar record. It would be whipped off the market forthwith’
(Goodin 1989a:588). However, it is hard to envisage this happening even
in the West—and the battle in the developing world has hardly begun.
One of the real ironies of tobacco is that those who consume it are
addicted to a drug, nicotine, which has powerful, but not generally
harmful, results. There is nothing inherently wrong in this. Every society
uses mind-altering substances to a greater or lesser extent, and both
history and archaeology confirm that the history of substance use, and
abuse, is as old as human kind itself. The unbelievably rapid, and
permanent, absorption of tobacco in so many different cultures across the
world is testimony to the overwhelming attraction that mind-altering
substances have had, and continue to have. The tragedy of tobacco is that
the drug is consumed in a deadly form. Nicotine, caffeine and ethanol
form a triad of acceptable drugs in many of the world’s cultures, where
there are no specific proscriptions against them (such as occur in Islam
with regards to alcohol). According to Professor M.A.H.Russell, a leading
expert on nicotine and smoking, it is tobacco, not nicotine, that should be
expunged. Here is his version of a possible future:
Some time in the 21st century we may see the demise of tobacco
use, but it is doubtful whether nicotine use will be abandoned. It is
the impurities in tobacco and its smoke which kill, while nicotine
provides most of the pleasure, stimulation and relief from stress. It
is not so much the potential of purer forms of nicotine as temporary
aids to smoking cessation, but their potential use for long-term selfadministration which merits the most serious consideration.
Conventional tobacco products may in future be as archaic as the
unrefined use of alkaloids in folk medicine appears now in
comparison with the modern products of the pharmaceutical
240 TOBACCO IN HISTORY
industry. The principle for all drugs has been to purify them as
much as possible. If the tobacco industry does not do this with its
drug, the pharmaceutical industry will. It is beginning to do so
already.
(Russell 1987:47)
However desirable this outcome, it fails to address the cigarette as a
cultural artefact. As an exercise in commodity history, this book has
argued that tobacco is best understood in historical terms. The cigarette is
the result of a complex process of cultural accretion of which changes in
cultivation, production and marketing are an essential part. Any attempt
to eradicate tobacco from our lives, however well meant, will founder
unless the complexity of its cultural significance is recognized.
TO DIE BY SMOKE 241
GLOSSARY
Tobacco is categorized according to type and method of curing, as well as
to whether it is light, dark or Oriental. The latter distinction refers to colour
as well as quality. The table below shows the main methods of curing and
types referred to in the text.
Source: Akehurst 1981:31
Burley (mostly), Maryland and Virginian flue-cured tobacco is light;
cigar tobacco and Virginian fire-cured tobacco is dark.
Types
Burley. Also referred to as White Burley, this tobacco type first appeared
as a mutant in 1864, in a tobacco field in Ohio. It has a very light nature,
blends well with other tobacco types and has very high absorbent
characteristics. First used in chewing tobacco, it is now the essential filler
of the American blend cigarette, accounting for one-third of its
composition.
Bright. This type, also referred to as Virginia outside the United States,
was developed in the nineteenth century, in North Carolina, together
with the process of flue-curing. It is light-bodied, bright yellow in colour
and relatively low in nicotine. Almost all of this tobacco is destined for
cigarette production. The terms ‘Bright’ and ‘flue-cured’ are
synonymous. The ‘Virginia’ cigarette is composed of 100 per cent fluecured tobacco.
Oriental. This type, formerly known as Turkish, produces a very aromatic
product, used primarily in American blend cigarettes, accounting for
about 15 per cent of the tobacco mixture. It is mostly grown in the eastern
Mediterranean and Black Sea coastal areas, its traditional home. The
distinctiveness of Oriental tobacco is the result of specific environmental
conditions and the chemical changes caused by sun-curing the leaf.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 271
INDEX
Adshead, S.A.M. 14
advertising 101;
see also cigarettes
Africa, tobacco cultivation in 210–14
agaric family 19
Agricultural Adjustment Act 195
Agricultural Recovery Program 194
Alarcón, Ruiz de 26–9
alkaloid research 113–16
allotment system 197
Amazon, English and Irish settlements
135
American Tobacco Company 101, 229;
dissolution of 230
Amerindian cosmology 20;
see also tobacco in Amerindian life
Amersfoort 139
Amsterdam, tobacco trade in 151
Anglo-Spanish truce 130
anti-cigarette campaign 116–19
anti-tobacco legislation, United States
117
anti-tobacco societies 115–18;
in Britain 116;
in France 115–19;
in United States 116
Antonil, André 65, 185;
on chewing tobacco 65;
on snuff 82
Atlantic slave trade 159
Austria, tobacco monopoly 213;
see also tobacco monopolies
ayahuasca 22
Bahia 159;
curing of tobacco in 185;
fallow system in 186;
growing cycle of tobacco in 185–8;
slave labour in 186–9;
structure of landownership in 186–
9;
tobacco cultivation in 137, 160
Baillard, Edmé, on snuff 44, 71, 76
Barbados:
labour in tobacco cultivation on
178;
quality of tobacco on 180;
settlement of 136;
tobacco cultivation on 136, 177–80;
see also English West Indies
Bermuda:
fallow system in 181–4;
population of 181;
settlement of 135;
tobacco cultivation on 181–4;
tobacco exports from 135;
see also English West Indies
bidis 11, 93
Blackwell, W.T. and Company 98–1,
227
Bonsack, James 100, 228
Bonsack cigarette-making machine,
output of 100, 206, 228, 233
Bontekoe, Cornelis 73
Brazil, tobacco cultivation in 200, 211–
15
briar pipe 225
Bright tobacco 190–6, 195, 203, 206, 224–
8,
see also flue-cured tobacco;
in China 209–13
272
British American Tobacco (BAT) 9, 231;
in Africa 232;
in Asia 232;
in China 209–13, 232, 234
brus 94
Burley tobacco 199, 205–9, 224–8
calumet 31
Camel cigarettes, advertising of 102,
106–9;
see also cigarettes
Cameo cigarettes 100
Camporesi, Piero 41
Cardenas, Juan de 43
Carr, Julian 98–1
Chang Chieh-pin 51–3
Chesapeake:
ethnic distribution in 167, 174;
population of 174;
slave labour in 174–8;
see also tobacco cultivation
chewing and smoking tobacco,
technological changes 225–9
chewing tobacco:
consumption in United States 90;
factories in United States 223–7;
use in Europe 64–8
China:
cigarettes in 92–5, 231–5;
tobacco cultivation in 209–13;
tobacco monopoly in 233–7
Chinese rhubarb 38
Cibola 129–3
cigars:
consumption in United States 225;
use in Europe 64
cigars and cut tobacco:
consumption in Austria 90;
consumption in Italy 88
cigarette brands, output levels in
United States 103
cigarette cards 100
cigarettes:
advertising of 97, 103;
advertising and women 104–8, 110;
consumption of 11, 92, 95;
consumption in India 93;
consumption in Italy 88–2;
consumption in Kenya 94;
consumption in United States 91,
103, 107, 124, 207;
and disease 125;
filter-tipped 108–11;
and flue-cured tobacco 96–9;
and gender 110;
and health 107;
low-tar, low-nicotine brands 109–
12;
male consumption in United States
104;
manufacturing by multinationals
and monopolies compared 9–10;
manufacturing firms 226–32;
menthol brands 107;
multibranding 107;
origins of 95–8;
output levels 9;
output levels in China 233;
output levels globally 233;
production 206, 227;
production in New York City 96;
production in United States 96;
women smokers 104–9;
women smokers in Britain 104, 106;
women smokers in Italy 106;
women smokers in United States
104, 106
coca, use in Inca culture 48–50
coffeehouses 80
Columbus, Christopher 35
Cope’s 100
consignment system 155–9, 157, 175
contraband trade 144–8, 216–20
Costa Rica, tobacco cultivation in 143
Counterblaste 44
Crow tobacco society 30
Cuba:
tobacco cultivation in 143;
tobacco output 212
Cuicuru Indians 17
curing methods 170
cutting tobacco 169–2
datura 18–1, 22, 41
INDEX 273
Depression and tobacco 194–8
Dioscorides 38
Duke, James Buchanan 99, 227–4;
and use of advertising 99–3
Duke, W.Sons and Company 227–1;
in Japan 92
Dutch East Indies, tobacco cultivation
in 208
Dutch merchants, in tobacco trade 150–
4
Dutch settlements 130
Dutch West India Company 135
ecology, impact of tobacco processing
239–4
Edison, Thomas 116–19
El Dorado 130
emigration, European to New World
129
enemas and clysters 33, 82–5
England:
outports 148;
Spanish-American tobacco imports
144
English West Indies: population of 137,
177;
sugar revolution in 140;
tobacco exports from 140;
tobacco output in 178;
see also individual islands
ergot 41
Estienne, Charles 45
European botanists, and New World
plants 38, 43
European physicians, and New World
medicines 39–1
farm size 197–1
Ferrant, Louis 76
Fiji 94
flue-cured tobacco 196, 204–8;
in Brazil 211–15;
chemistry of smoke 96–9;
global output 212;
in Zimbabwe 211
Foust, Clifford M. 14
France:
imports of tobacco 154;
purchases of tobacco from Britain
154–8;
settlements in New World 129–3,
see also French West Indies;
tobacco cultivation in 139, 141
freight rates 148
French tobacco monopoly 64–8, 152–8;
in Scotland 157;
see also tobacco monopolies
French West Indies:
ethnic composition 182–5;
population of 182–5;
sugar revolution in 141;
sugar and tobacco plantations 184;
tobacco cultivation in 182;
see also individual islands
Galen, and Paracelsus 42–4
Gaston, Lucy Page 116
Germany, tobacco cultivation in 139
Ginzburg, Carlo 41
Glasgow 156–60
Goa, tobacco imports 161
Gohory, Jacques 46–9
gold 128
Graaf, Regnier de 82–5
grocery trade 149–3
Guadeloupe 182–5;
tobacco cultivation in 137;
see also French West Indies
guaiacum 38, 42
Guiana, English settlements in 134–8
hallucinations 41
Hamor, Ralph 132
Hariot, Thomas 47
Hart, James 57
Hernandez, Francisco 36, 39
hogsheads, weights and freight rates
171–4
Holland, tobacco cultivation in 139–3
hookah 84–7
Hudson’s Bay Company 162
humoural system 38–39
Imperial Tobacco Company 231
274 INDEX
indentured labour:
in Chesapeake agriculture 166–9;
in English West Indies 177;
market for 174
India, tobacco cultivation in 208–12
Iroquois tobacco myth 30–3
Italy, tobacco cultivation in 139
Jamestown 131
Japan 232;
cigarette consumption in 92–5;
tobacco monopoly in 233
Kalm, Peter 60
Kemp, William 73
Kentucky, slave labour in 191;
see also Burley tobacco
Kenya 200
kreteks 12, 93–6
Labat, Father Jean-Baptiste 65, 76–77,
184
Las Casas, Bartolomé de 35
legume family 19
Liébault, Jean 45
Liggett and Myers 101, 230
Lisbon, imports of tobacco 160
L’Obel, Matthias de 46, 48
London:
share of tobacco trade 147–3;
tobacco smuggling in 217, 219
Lorillard, P. 101, 230
Louisiana, tobacco cultivation in 187
Lucky Strike 102–5, 105, 107
lung cancer 120–6;
and cigarettes 123;
deaths from in United States 121–5;
and occupational diseases 120–3;
and tobacco 123–6
Macao, consumption of tobacco 161
Magnen, Johann 73
Malawi 200
Marlboro cigarettes 105, 110–13
Martinique 137, 182–5;
see also French West Indies
Maryland:
population of 136;
settlement of 135–9;
tobacco cultivation in 136;
see also Chesapeake
Mattioli, Pier Andrea 50
medicines 36–9, 41
Mexico, tobacco cultivation in 143
Mina Coast 159–3;
imports of tobacco 160;
ships trading to 160
Mintz, Sidney 14
Molins cigarette-making machine 233
Monardes, Nicolas 43–7, 72–6;
on coca 49
Morris, Philip 9, 230;
see also Marlboro cigarettes
multinational companies: cigarette
output 234;
distribution of markets 234–8
narcotics, in Europe 41–3;
see also datura, ergot, New World
hallucinogens
New France, tobacco cultivation in 138
New Guinea 94
New Netherland, tobacco cultivation in
138
New Sweden, tobacco cultivation in
138
New World hallucinogens 18, 20
Nicot, Jean 46–8
Nicotiana rustica 1–3, 23, 131
Nicotiana tabacum 1–3, 23, 132
nicotine:
as an addictive drug 239–4;
chemical isolation of 114;
chemistry of 3;
physiological effects of 5;
trials of 114–17;
understanding of 119–2;
uses of 115
North America, as market for Brazilian
tobacco 161–5
Ogden Ltd 230
Ortiz, Fernando 163
INDEX 275
panacea 42
Pané, Ramon 48, 66
papelate 95
Paulli, Simon 77
peyote 22
Philaretes 73–7
Philip II 36
pipe-making:
in England 61–5, 68;
in Holland 62–6;
in London 61
pipes:
in Africa 87;
in Asia 84–7;
in Europe 63–7
pipe smoking:
in Britain 91;
in France 88
Pittsylvania County 190–5
Platt, Hugh 41
Portuguese Africa, imports of tobacco
161;
see also Mina Coast
priming 205
prizing tobacco 171
Providence Island, tobacco cultivation
on 137, 179
quota system 195–9, 197
Redi, Francesco 113
re-exports 149–3, 161
Reneaulme, Paul de 60
Ribault, Jean 129–3
R.J.Reynolds 102, 105, 230;
see also Camel cigarettes
Risse, Guenter 39–1
Roe, Sir Thomas 132, 135
Rolfe, John 131–6
Rothmans International 9
Royal College of Physicians 125
Russia 152
safety match 225
Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de 30, 35
Sahlins, Marshall 40–2
St Christophe 137;
see also French West Indies
St Domingue:
tobacco cultivation on 137, 183;
see also French West Indies
St Kitts:
settlement of 136;
tobacco cultivation on 136;
see also English West Indies
Salaman, R.N. 14
Santa Croce, Prospero de 47
Schudson, Michael 106
Scottish merchants, in Virginia 156–61,
176
SEITA 234
Sertürner, Friedrich Wilhelm 114
Seville 128
shamans 20–4
share-cropping 197
silver 128–2
slave emancipation 192–7
slave labour, in English West Indies
180–3;
see also Chesapeake
smoking:
clubs and schools 63–7;
passive 238;
social costs of 238–3
smoking-attributable mortality 238
smoking tobacco factories 224
snuff:
in Austria 90;
in Britain 91;
among clerics 66–67;
in China 86;
debates on 76–79;
devices for 70–4;
in England 68;
in Europe 66–68;
and expectoration 81–4;
in France 87–1;
in Italy 88;
manufacturing in Austria 221–5;
manufacturing in England 221–5;
manufacturing in France 67, 221;
manufacturing in Holland 67–1;
manufacturing in Italy 67;
manufacturing in Portugal 67, 70,
221;
276 INDEX
manufacturing in Spain 67;
manufacturing in United States 222;
modes of consumption 72, 80–3;
in Paris 79;
preparations and recipes 71–5;
prices in Holland 68;
and respectability 79–3;
and sneezing 77–1;
in Sweden 90;
in United States 90–3
snuff boxes 70–4
Stella, Benedetto 75
sugar cultivation, in Brazil 129;
see also English West Indies, French
West Indies
Surgeon General of the United States
125
Sweden:
tobacco cultivation in 139;
as tobacco market 152
tabagies 64
Talbot, Charles 39
Tanzania, tobacco cultivation in 200
Tatham, William 170
tenancy, in tobacco culture 192–7
Teniers, David 59
Thevet, André 44–6
Thomas, James 234
tobacco:
in Africa 51;
and Asian medical philosophies 52–
4;
at the Aztec court 29–2;
and betel 53;
in China 50–2;
and the church 74–8;
circumnavigation 35;
and coffee 53;
commercial history in England 145–
50;
debates 74, 115;
diffusion to Asia 50–2;
diffusion to Near East 51;
exports from Virginia 132;
and humours 73–7;
import duties in England 147;
introduction in India 52–4;
in Manila 50;
in Maya culture 29;
myths of origin 23–6, 30–3;
and Near Eastern medicine 53;
and the papacy 75–9;
in Paris 46–8;
and the plague 73;
sighted by Europeans 35;
social assimilation in Europe 46;
studies on toxicology 120;
tax revenues from 10, 125;
and tumours 121–4
tobacco in Amerindian life 48;
used as analgesic 27;
ceremonial use of 28–2;
chewing of 33;
smoking of 32–5;
cultivation of 22;
use of in divination 29;
healing therapy of 25–28;
magico-religious use of 25;
offerings of 24–7;
as preventative medicine 28;
as ritual enemas 33;
social functions 31,
see also calumet
tobacco boxes 63
tobacco chewing:
in Asia 87;
in Indonesia 87;
see also tobacco consumption
tobacco consumption 10, 56–60;
in Africa 94;
and alcohol 69–3;
in Asia 83–9;
in Austria 57;
in Britain 159;
comparative data 91–4;
in England 56, 68–2;
in Europe 70;
in France 57;
in Holland 56–1;
medical debates 73–82;
in North America 60;
in Norway 70;
in Oceania 94;
and opium 93;
INDEX 277
in Portugal 57;
prevalence of 12;
as recreation 83;
and tea, coffee and chocolate 80
tobacco cultivation:
ban on domestic 214;
chemicals in 196;
economic advantages of 8–9, 138;
as European 166;
and fallow system 170;
growing cycle in Chesapeake 168–
2;
labour demands in Chesapeake 170–
3, 173;
mechanization of 198;
in New World 141–6;
profits of in England 139
tobacco curing 133–7
tobacco imports, into England 56, 61,
149
tobacco manufacturing:
advertising expenditure 97, 112;
branding in 97–99;
cost reduction in 109;
use of reconstituted sheet 110;
in United States 223–9
tobacco monopolies 212–17;
in Portugal 213, 216–20;
in Spain 213;
see also French tobacco monopoly
tobacco output:
global distribution 201–5, 207–11;
in United States 192
tobacco plant: chemistry of 3;
global distribution of 6–6;
labour demands of 6–8
tobacco prices: in Chesapeake 173;
in England 61, 144;
in North America 61;
in United States 194
tobacco processing 219–4
tobacco smoke, chemistry of 4–6
tobacco smoking: difficulties of 82;
expectoration and 81
tobacco smuggling and contraband
133, 214, 217–2
tobacco types, in Chesapeake 172
tobacco yields 195–9
topping and suckering 169, 196
Tornabuoni, Bishop Niccoló 47
Trinidad:
tobacco cultivation 132–6
tuberculosis 118, 121
Ukraine 152
United States:
distribution of tobacco cultivation
202–6;
exports of unmanufactured tobacco
206;
share in tobacco output and exports
199, 202, 207–11
urban development, in Chesapeake
172–5
Venezuela, tobacco cultivation in 132–6
Vigée-Lebrun, Madame 59–3
Virginia:
immigration into 131;
population of 131, 167;
see also Chesapeake
Virginia Company 131, 133, 141, 146,
148
Virginia piedmont:
emigration to 176;
tobacco culture in 176
Virginia Slims cigarettes 110
Von Gernet, Alexander 82
Wafer, Lionel 32
Warao Indians 69
West Africa, consumption of tobacco
160;
see also Mina Coast
Yao Lü 52
Zambia, tobacco cultivation in 211
Zimbabwe, tobacco cultivation in 211
278 INDEX