Tobacco

Before the European discovery of America, tobacco and smoking were known to Native Americans in many areas of North and South America. The Spaniards became acquainted with the leaf fairly early on the north coast of South America. Their pleasure in this product led to the development of market-oriented production in a zone embracing the present Venezuelan province of Barinas and adjacent areas to the east of Lake Maracaibo. As the Spanish merchant purchasers and later monopolists did not offer a price sufficiently attractive to the cultivators, an illicit trade developed for smuggling this tobacco out of the Spanish Main to the nearby Dutch island of Curaçao. From there, merchants shipped the tobacco home, where it became a regular item traded in the Amsterdam market and a re-export to many countries including France and Britain. The English referred to it as Verinas tobacco; to the French it was tabac de Vérine.

Another market-oriented production developed in Brazil in the modern provinces of Bahia and Maranhao (Marignan in French). This Brazilian tobacco supplied Portugal and the Portuguese slave trade on the west coast of Africa. So preferred was this variety in Africa that Dutch, English, and French traders had to purchase supplies from the Brazilians for their own slave trade there. The Spanish, French, and English also introduced market-oriented tobacco cultivation into their islands in the West Indies. The Spanish in Cuba created a major production of tobacco of recognized superior quality. For the French and English, tobacco was only briefly important in the early days of their Antilles colonies until the local economies turned to sugar. Much more important was the introduction by the English of a West Indian variety of tobacco (nicotiana tabacum) into the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, replacing the less desirable indigenous variety (nicotiana rustica). Its cultivation and trade grew rapidly in the seventeenth century so that by the century's end, shipments from the Chesapeake to Europe exceeded those from all other transatlantic colonies combined. So substantial were these shipments that at the end of the seventeenth century, two-thirds of English imports could be re-exported to Ireland and the continent; by the early 1770s, fully 85 percent of Britain's tobacco imports was re-exported.

In Europe, the demand for tobacco at first came from sailors and the more raffish elements in the urban male population. It was also sought by soldiers to assuage the rigors of campaigning. During the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the movement of armies would have introduced it into new areas. Its use was at first prohibited in some jurisdictions but these bans were soon lifted as tobacco's availability for taxation became evident. The last major jurisdiction prohibiting it was Russia, but Peter the Great, at the time of his visit to the West in 1697, authorized tobacco consumption in his realm and granted an import monopoly to an influential English syndicate. In practice, the monopoly could not be enforced because the leaf was soon being cultivated in the Ukraine and elsewhere in Peter's realm. Even so, monopoly became a preferred fiscal strategy in many jurisdictions, including France, Spain, and Sweden. Because imported tobacco was more efficiently taxed than home-grown, internal cultivation was banned in Britain, France, Spain, and other Europeans states, but tolerated in the Netherlands, parts of the Rhineland, and Alsace. A significant production also developed in the Ottoman Empire with the trade centered at Thessaloniki.

In the Caribbean, tobacco was processed by spinning or twisting into ropes preserved in molasses and wound into rolls for shipment. Tobacconists or consumers could chop up lengths of this roll tobacco for smoking. More often, tobacconists pressed the spun tobacco into briques suitable for chewing or carottes wrapped in cord (tabac ficelé) suitable for conversion into snuff. In the Chesapeake, however, tobacco leaf was dried in sheds and then pressed tightly (prized) into hogsheads of ever-increasing weight, reaching about 1,000 pounds by 1775. Because staves were cheaper in well-wooded North America, hogsheads were economical in the Chesapeake, and its leaf appealed to snuff makers in much of Europe. Whereas the French processed leaf tobacco into carottes before conversion into snuff, the British and Dutch used water mills and windmills to grind leaf directly into snuff. This ground product was then sold to retail snuffmen who added distinctive perfumes. Snuff could be taken by ladies in polite society, and was the socially preferred mode of consumption in the eighteenth century, though it is likely that less fashionable smoking accounted for a greater weight consumed.

Tobacco in the Chesapeake was cultivated on both small and large holdings. In the seventeenth century most was grown by free labor. However, from the end of that century and continuing in the eighteenth, production became concentrated increasingly on larger holdings staffed by slaves. About 60 to 70 percent of tobacco grown in the Chesapeake around 1770 was sold by planters to local "stores" from which they obtained their needed supplies; most of the remainder was consigned by larger planters to commission merchants in England. A store could be operated by a local trader or a factor for a Glasgow or other British firm. In Britain the great Glasgow firms and others who imported tobacco on their own account were free to sell scores of hogsheads at a time at a uniform price to the French monopoly and other large-scale buyers. Commission merchants who received smaller shipments from numerous consigners in the Chesapeake were expected to sell each hogshead separately for a price reflecting its quality. Sometimes, though, they were forced by market pressures to make multi-hogshead sales at a flat price. In such cases, the more conscientious merchants engaged a tobacco broker to evaluate each hogs-head sold and adjust the sale price reported to reflect the quality differences. These London tobacco brokers, frequently Dutch Jews, provided an important technical service between sellers and buyers who themselves may not have been sufficiently expert in tobacco.

The Chesapeake-British tobacco trade was at a secular peak on the eve of the American Revolution. The war disrupted it severely as much was destroyed and only limited quantities exported to help pay for the American war effort. (The French monopoly had to look to the Ukraine for possible alternative supplies.) After the war American exports lagged below their prewar level, reflecting the wartime depletion of the labor force by slaves escaping or being carried away by British ships. Then, too, in the postwar decades some of the planters migrated with their slaves to the Deep South and turned to producing cotton. It was not until the late 1830s that U.S. leaf tobacco exports re-attained the level of the early 1770s. By then the major zone of production had shifted from the Chesapeake southward to North Carolina and westward to the Ohio Valley. In the nineteenth century, of course, the growth of population in the United States made the domestic market increasingly important for tobacco growers. In the same century, the process of tobacco cultivation was brought by colonists into Rhodesia. Less is known about the introduction of its cultivation into India, China, Japan, and Korea.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries government regulation of the tobacco trade was directed in great part by a desire to maximize tobacco's tax yields: 3.6 percent of British state revenues in the 1790s; 7.3 percent for France in 1789; and up to 25 percent for Spain in the 1760s. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries government tobacco revenues soared owing to the rise in population and per capita consumption. At the end of the eighteenth century tax-paying tobacco consumption was about 1.3 pounds per head per annum in Britain and 1 pound in France. Only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did British consumption rise significantly, reaching 2 pounds per head per annum in 1919, and 4 pounds in 1938. Recent data show consumption of 3pounds per head per annum in France, 4.5 to 6 pounds for the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Canada, and 7.5 pounds for the United States.

This surge in consumption is associated with the decline in snuff usage and the increasing demand for cigars and cigarettes. Snuff continued to be used by special populations: for example employees not permitted to strike matches in their workplace and Orthodox Jews who could not strike a match on the Sabbath. Legend has it that cigars were made fashionable in England by army officers returning from the Iberia Peninsula Campaign. Cigarettes are reported to have been used first in Eastern Europe and introduced into the United States by immigrants. Their great breakthrough came from the development of a cigarette-making machine in 1872. Such machinery facilitated the growth of very large tobacco manufacturing companies (including the much expanded French tobacco monopoly) that were able to spend millions on advertising. Cigarettes by the 1920s had also become as acceptable for women as snuff had been in the eighteenth century—a development which by itself can explain much of the growth in per capita consumption reported above.

The twentieth century, however, saw a shift in public attitudes toward tobacco. In the first half of the century, tobacco continued to be accepted as a normal part of everyday life. Thus, during World War II, tax-free cigarettes were sold to members of the United States armed forces for as little as 5 cents for a pack of twenty. Attitudes changed in the second half of the century when public authorities, particularly in North America and Europe, started propaganda campaigns against tobacco and in the United States initiated lawsuits against tobacco companies for endangering public health. At present, it can only be said that tobacco consumption has reached something of a plateau.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Disease and Pestilence; Empire, British; Ethnic Group, Scots; Glasgow;Ships and Shipping;United Kingdom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goodman, Jordan; Lovejoy, Paul E.; and Andrew Sherratt. Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Gray, Lewis Cecil. History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. New York: Peter Smith, 1941.

McNeill, John Robert. Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana 1700–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Price, Jacob M. France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades, 2 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973.

Price, Jacob M. Tobacco in Atlantic Trade: The Chesapeake, London, and Glasgow, 1675–1775. Aldershot, U.K. and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1995.

Rogozinski, Jan. Smokeless Tobacco in the Western World, 1550–1950. New York: Praeger, 1990.

Jacob M. Price