Tobacco and the Social Life of Conquest in London, 1580–1625 – ADDENDUM

Abstract

From its origins in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean to its transformation into smoke in a Jacobean chamber, tobacco entered drastically new contexts of use as it travelled from Indigenous America to the social spaces of early seventeenth-century London. This article draws on comparative anthropology and archaeology to explore how early colonization, particularly in Jamestown, influenced the development of smoking among the English political elite. This offers a case study into the ways in which Indigenous commodities and knowledge were integrated into English ritual practices of their own; it also reveals the deliberate choices made by the English to set themselves apart from those they sought to colonize. Placing the material practices and wit poetry of gentlemen within the geopolitics of colonialism raises attention to the acts of erasure or dispossession that accompanied the incorporation of tobacco into urban sociability. Here, the practices of Indigenous peoples were modified and altered, and the pleasures of plantation were expressed as an intoxication as potent as the plant itself. The English founding of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, and the rapid growth of tobacco cultivation that ensued, created a distinct relationship between tobacco and empire, between plantation and London fashions. Although James I detested the plant, the early seventeenth century saw a prolific rise in smoking that only escalated in the decades that followed. While beleaguered planters in the Chesapeake learned how to cultivate tobacco from the Algonquian-speaking Powhatans on the eastern coast of North America, smoking also fuelled the social rituals of the ‘curious, costly, and consuming © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. 1 By the King. A proclamation to restraine the planting of tobacco in England and Wales (London, 1619; STC 8622); Peter Mancall, ‘Tales tobacco told in sixteenth-century Europe’, Environmental History, 9 (2004), pp. 648–78; Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in history: the cultures of dependence (London, 1993); Sandra Bell, ‘The subject of smoke: tobacco and early modern England’, in Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck, eds., The mysterious and the foreign in early modern England (Newark, DE, 2008), pp. 153–69. The Historical Journal (2022), 65, 30–48 doi:10.1017/S0018246X21000261 gallants’ in London. Despite the king’s best efforts to diversify industries in Virginia to discourage tobacco production, the Virginia and Somers Isles/ Bermuda companies secured a monopoly on tobacco imported into England in 1624, solidifying the relationship between tobacco and English colonial aspirations. Drawing on comparative anthropology and the material conditions of tobacco, this article explores the influence of Anglo-Algonquian exchange on the sociability of London gentlemen in this early moment of colonization. The social spaces of the metropolis brought tobacco out of American ecosystems and into drastically new contexts of use. Scholars have demonstrated the ubiquity of tobacco in a range of English discourses about health, medicine, and moral regulation, where men and women of all ages adopted smoking for a variety of reasons. Merchants, sailors, and smugglers served as conduits for the circulation of commodities throughout the Atlantic world and helped diffuse tobacco and other goods in Europe and further east. By the 1630s, tobacco had become imbedded alongside older intoxicants like alcohol in early modern societies and political economies, providing ‘the lubricant of political patronage’ and involving displays of ‘civility, privilege, subordination, and exclusion’. Examining smoking and sociability in England prior to the commodity’s mass consumption offers the opportunity to investigate these elements of politics, civility, and social interaction through the intimacy of cross-cultural encounter. As Marcy Norton pointed out in her study of the assimilation of chocolate into Europe, the adoption of American goods cannot be understood solely through economic essentialism or cultural functionalism. Cultural transmission and borrowing, social networks, and innovations in material practices all contributed to the ways in which non-European goods were integrated into Europeans’ value systems and daily lives. Archaeological and anthropological approaches can provide clues towards how Indigenous ‘things’ were incorporated into the social rituals and masculine rites of English gentlemen, and challenge the idea that ‘ethnographic’ perspectives should be relegated 2 ‘Master Stockhams relation’, in John Smith, The generall historie of Virginia (London, 1624; STC 22790), p. 139. 3 By the King. A proclamation concerning tobacco (London, 1624; STC 8738); Ken MacMillan, The Atlantic imperial constitution: centre and periphery in the English Atlantic world (Basingstoke, 2011). 4 Mancall, ‘Tales tobacco told’; John Cotta, A short discoverie (London, 1612; STC 5833); Eleazar Duncon, The copy of a letter written by E.D Doctour of Physicke (London, 1606; STC 6164). 5 Marcy Norton, Sacred gifts, profane pleasures: a history of tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic world (Ithaca, NY, 2008); Beverly Lemire, Global trade and the transformation of consumer cultures: the material world remade, 1500–1820 (Cambridge, 2018); Alison Games, The web of empire: English cosmopolitans in the age of expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford, 2008). 6 Phil Withington, ‘Introduction: cultures of intoxication’, Past & Present, Suppl. 9 (2014), pp. 3–33, at pp. 10, 14; Phil Withington, ‘Intoxicants and society in early modern England’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), pp. 631–57; Jennifer Richards, ‘Health, intoxication, and civil conversation in Renaissance England’, Past & Present, Suppl. 9 (2014), pp. 168–86, at p. 168. 7 Marcy Norton, ‘Tasting empire: chocolate and the European internalization of Mesoamerican aesthetics’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 660–91, at p. 661. 8 Ibid., p. 670. 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