The politics of tobacco consumption in 17th century England

"The introduction of tobacco into English culture has attracted a fair amount of historical attention. Just as economic and colonial historians have shown that the ‘holy herb’ quite quickly became an important staple of colonial trade, so cultural and literary historians have suggested several reasons for the leaf’s insinuation into the diets of many seventeenth-century men. These included contemporary medical arguments (based on humoural theory) encouraging its consumption as a purgative and drying agent; the patronage of a number of royal houses across Europe; and, in England, tobacco’s rapid assimilation into ‘gallant’ culture (at least insofar as that culture was presented on the stage). Moreover, its adoption was not left to chance: medical treatises and travel literature both proclaimed its virtues as both a substance to consume and (implicitly or explicitly) a commodity in which to invest. Such propaganda was not, of course, without its critics. Indeed, the fact that as eminent a figure as James VI and I should rile against tobacco and its proponents suggests significant and influential antipathy towards its introduction into English (and Scottish) society. This paper considers an aspect of this controversy – and the assimilation of tobacco more generally – that has been, by and large, ignored by economic and cultural historians alike. This is the relationship between tobacco and early-modern conceptions of civility. Its contention is that, while critics like James associated the herb with an image of Amerindian culture as essentially barbarous, a number of its proponents (and practitioners) found in its preparation, trade, and consumption the embodiment of humanist notions of masculine civility, conversation, and company. Such notions were subsequently vital in justifying war against James’ son, Charles; and the fact that they were symbolised by the consumption of tobacco helps explain why, at the Restoration, royalists satirised the ‘smoaking’ of eminent parliamentarians to such a degree. The paper unpacks these barbarous and civil constructions of tobacco-consumption. It also draws on depositional and civic records in order to consider the kind of ‘company’ that, by the later seventeenth-century, smoaking had come to constitute. In so doing, it recovers the complex and contrasting ways in which Europeans at once perceived the manners, commodities, and rituals of the ‘New World’, and appropriated them practice."