Sander L Gilman and Zhou Xun (eds), Smoke: a global history of smoking

Eugene Umberger, in his chapter in this book on lady nicotine, points to a fifty-year explosion of publication on tobacco and smoking. There is a stream of tobacco literature and one can hardly imagine that there is room for much more. This book, edited by Sander Gilman and the Chinese historian Zhou Xun, nevertheless adds a distinctive visual and cultural dimension. Thirty-five topic specific chapters on smoking are written by an eclectic range of contributors from museum curators, to anthropologists, art historians, collectors and social historians. The book is divided into four broad sections dealing with smoking in history and culture; smoking in art and literature; smoking, gender, ethnicity and culture; and, finally, smoking as a “burning issue”, the health dimensions. Each section is followed by an inserted grouping of illustrations on related topics. Gilman and Xun's introduction surveys the cultural positioning of smoking over time, with the transition of tobacco from the New World to the Old and its consumption as an elite activity. Pipe smoke was a “gentleman-like” smell for Europeans and smoking proliferated because of its perceived healing power. In China smoking tobacco paved the way for the later smoking of opium. Smoking was fashionable and a sign of modernity in the seventeenth century. The advent of the cigar was one of the many examples of tobacco reinventing itself—the cigarette and mass production was to be another, later nineteenth-century development. Rituals—in the gentlemen's clubs and smoking rooms—helped define the cultural positioning of tobacco use. An extensive paraphernalia of smoking was linked to these rituals, a forgotten world of cigar cutters and piercers, ashtrays, lighting up, parlour sets of matches and other equipment. All are testimony to a time when smoking was part of a mannered society. There is a cornucopia of cultural information. Smoking fitted into early modern humoral medicine in England, its benefits being in drying the body to a state of manly vigour. In Iran, tobacco smoking preceded opium smoking, opium being eaten and not smoked before the nineteenth century. In Ayurvedic medicine, smoking was essential in the daily regime for healthy living, but was not seen as a relief from stress. In Muslim and Indian worlds, crossing substances was common and smokers would move between tobacco, khat, and marijuana/hashish. As with all such compilations the quality of the chapters is variable. Not all present new material, and there is some repetition of well known themes such as the “myth of the opium den” and the late-nineteenth-century role of cocaine. The chapters on cultural history and those on art and literature are generally the most valuable, in part because such material on the cultural positioning of smoking is relatively rare. Bruno Tempel's survey of smoking in art since the seventeenth century is a useful resume of the changing artistic role of smoking from the Dutch Golden Age paintings through to 1960s pop art or the proletarian supermarket shopper of more recent times. The sections which deal specifically with gender, ethnicity and smoking, and the health dimensions of smoking are the weaker sections of the book.This is in part because some of the earlier chapters have touched on similar ground, in particular the rise of women's smoking.These chapters also have suggestive material on the cultural connotations of the new hostility to tobacco that emerged from the 1950s. Matthew Hilton, in his chapter on smoking and sociability, delineates an alternative sociability which emerged from the 1970s as smokers formed new groups which associated through trying to give up. There are some useful cross national case studies. Communist China took the opposite route to the decadent West. In the decades when western nations were imposing restrictions on smoking and mandating health warnings, China was encouraging smoking as a mass commodity. In Japan, meanwhile, the government tobacco monopoly saw high levels of smoking in the country but the health campaign after the 1970s was tied to specifically Japanese notions with an emphasis on self control and politeness. “Good smoking” was the aim, rather than elimination of tobacco. Such cultural norms and their modification are too little discussed. The book's introductory chapter is also weak on the recent health concerns, so this issue is not taken up by the editors. The book also strangely ignores issues of collective smoke: of industrial pollution and the symbolic significance of other forms of smoke, like fog. It does not question its own cultural focus on individual smoking. Its great strength lies in its wonderful illustrations, which range from Mayan art through to Lucky Strike advertisements and the Bogart/Bacall film stills. For these alone, the book is worth having on your coffee table—although, of course, there will not be a box of cigarettes and an ashtray alongside it.