Tobacco

One product that is emblematic of the entire consumer culture is tobacco. Grown in the new world, its cultivation was crucial to the building of empires. Already an item of mass consumption in many European countries by the eighteenth century, its price inelasticity has placed it at the heart of the fiscal policies of modern states. Packaged and commodified as the cigarette, tobacco seemed to be at the forefront of the Second Industrial Revolution and all its associated features, including branding, advertising, and salesmanship. Long celebrated in fiction, film, and photography, by the latter half of the twentieth century tobacco's dangerous health effects helped secure the authority of new forms of scientific expertise (epidemiology) while for millions of addicts trying to give up smoking it signified much of people's troubled relationship with both the pleasures and the perils of consumption.

The origins of tobacco use lie in the ceremonial functions it played in Native American culture. Strong, dark, high-nicotine based, and consequently mind-altering, tobacco was crucial to the performance of shamanistic ritual and social ceremony. On its discovery by Europeans, tobacco was held by many to be a global panacea, a new herb that could be incorporated into Western medical traditions and celebrated as an almost universal curative. Nicolas Monardes of Spain in the late-sixteenth century claimed that tobacco alleviated hunger, acted as a relaxant and a painkiller, and was even a cure for cancer. Railing against him were a number of vociferous opponents of tobacco, of whom the most notorious and most quoted in the English-speaking world was James I of England and his Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604). Faced with such obstacles, tobacco's acceptance into Old World culture was assisted by aristocratic and regal patronage, as it was introduced to the courts of Catherine de Medici in 1559 by Jean Nicot and Elizabeth I in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh.

But the real impetus to smoking came from sailors, returning from all over the Americas to various ports throughout Europe. They brought the habit back with them. Tobacco quickly became an item of mass consumption and production. Pipe manufacture consequently spread throughout Europe and, thanks to the culture of the coffee- and alehouse, meant that Dutch towns such as Gouda could support the existence of 350 pipe manufacturers by the [Page 1459]end of the eighteenth century. At the same time, snuff also proliferated, often rivaling smoking as the dominant form of tobacco consumption and producing such fascinating quirks as the oversized pockets of Frederick the Great of Prussia. In southern Europe, the great state-owned tobacco factories of Cadiz and Seville ensured the continued popularity of the cigar, though it was not until the Peninsular Wars (1808–1814) that military officers would begin to popularize it in Britain. Beyond Europe, the hookah spread throughout Persia and into India, eventually reaching China, Southeast Asia, and many parts of Africa by the end of the seventeenth century.

If smoking was not a global phenomenon by the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of the cigarette ensured it soon would be. Originally sold as an expensive, handmade luxury item for the urban elites of Europe, cigarette manufacture was revolutionized by the patenting of the Bonsack machine in 1880 in the United States. It was quickly put into use by the dynamo of the modern cigarette industry, James Buchanan Duke. He was followed in other countries around the world, and the ensuing “tobacco war” between Britain's Imperial Tobacco and Duke's American Tobacco Company gave rise to the modern multinational corporation. As part of a negotiated truce, the British American Tobacco (BAT) Company was formed in 1902 to carve out the world's market for itself. In 1999, although Philip Morris (makers of Marlboro) had marginally overtaken it, BAT nevertheless produced over 800 billion cigarettes per year, making it the world's third largest tobacco company (since the China National Tobacco Corporation still had a firm grip on the biggest national market).

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