Tobacco was long used by various indigenous groups that lived in the Americas. The Columbian exchange introduced tobacco to the Europeans, and it became an addictive, lucrative and heavily traded commodity. Following the Industrial Revolution, cigarettes became hugely popular worldwide. In the mid-20th century, medical research demonstrated severe negative health effects of tobacco smoking such as lung cancer, which led to governments adopting policies to force a sharp decline in tobacco use.
Early history
Pre-Columbian Americas
The tobacco plant, first used by the native people of the Americas, later came into use in Europe and in the rest of the world. Archaeological finds indicate that humans in the Americas began using tobacco as far back as 12,300 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously documented.
Tobacco had already long been used in the Americas by the time European visitors arrived and took the practice across the Atlantic, where it became popular. Eastern North American tribes have historically carried tobacco in pouches as a readily accepted trade item, as well as smoking it in pipe ceremonies, whether for sacred ceremonies or those to seal a treaty or agreement.e.g. Heckewelder, History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania, pp. 149 ff."They smoke with excessive eagerness ... men, women, girls and boys, all find their keenest pleasure in this way." – Dièreville describing the use of tobacco by the Mi'kmaq people, c. 1699 in Port Royal.
In addition to use in spiritual and religious ceremonies, tobacco is also used in indigenous traditional-medicine systems for the treatment of physical conditions. As a pain killer it has been used for earache and toothache and occasionally as a poultice. Some indigenous peoples in California have used tobacco as the base ingredient in smoking mixtures used for treating colds; usually it is mixed with other traditional medicinals such as Salvia dorrii or Lomatium dissectum (the addition of which was thought to be particularly good for asthma and tuberculosis).California Natural History Guides: 10. Early Uses of California Plant, By Edward K. Balls University of California Press, 1962 University of California Press. Tobacco was also heavily cultivated in the Chesapeake Colonies area from the 1620s on, where it was sometimes used as a form of currency.
According to Iroquois mythology, tobacco first grew out of Atahensic's head after she died giving birth to her twin sons, Sapling and Flint.
Religious use of tobacco is still common to this day amongst many indigenous peoples, particularly in the Americas. Among the Cree and Ojibwe of Canada and the north-central United States, it is offered to the Creator, with prayers, and is used in sweat lodges and pipe ceremonies, and presented as a gift. A gift of tobacco is traditional when asking an Ojibwe elder a question of a spiritual nature.
European usage
Tobacco was completely unfamiliar to Europeans before the discovery of the New World. Bartolomé de las Casas described how the first scouts sent by Christopher Columbus into the interior of Cuba found:
Following the arrival of Europeans, tobacco became one of the primary products fueling colonization, and also became a driving factor in the introduction of African slave labour. The Spanish introduced tobacco to Europeans in about 1528, and by 1533, Diego Columbus mentioned a tobacco merchant of Lisbon in his will, showing how quickly the traffic had sprung up. The French, Spanish, and Portuguese initially referred to the plant as the "sacred herb" because of perceived valuable medicinal properties.
Jean Nicot, French ambassador in Lisbon, sent samples to Paris in 1559. Nicot sent leaves and seeds to Francis II and the King's mother, Catherine of Medici, with instructions to use tobacco as snuff. The king's recurring headaches (perhaps caused by frequent sinus infections) were reportedly "marvellously cured" by snuff. (Francis II nevertheless died at sixteen years of age on 5 December 1560, after a reign of less than two years). Despite this setback, French cultivation of herbe de la Reine (the queen's herb) began in 1560. By 1570 botanists referred to tobacco as Nicotiana, although André Thevet claimed that he, not Nicot, had introduced tobacco to France; historians believe this unlikely, but that Thevet was the first Frenchman to write about the drug.
Swiss doctor Conrad Gesner in 1563 reported that chewing or smoking a tobacco leaf "has a wonderful power of producing a kind of peaceful drunkenness". In 1571, Spanish doctor Nicolas Monardes wrote a textbook about herbalism. In this work, he claimed that tobacco could cure 36 health problems, and reported that the plant was first brought to Spain for its flowers, but "Now we use it to a greater extent for the sake of its virtues than for its beauty".
John Hawkins was the first to bring tobacco seeds to England. William Harrison's English Chronology mentions tobacco smoking in the country as of 1573, before Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first "Virginia" tobacco to Europe from the Roanoke Colony, referring to it as tobah as early as 1578. In 1595 Anthony Chute published Tabaco, which emphasised the purported healthfulness of the plant. A popular song of the early 1600s by Tobias Hume proclaimed that "Tobacco is Like Love".
The importation of tobacco into England was not without resistance and controversy. Stuart King James I wrote a famous polemic titled A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, in which the king denounced tobacco use as "[a] custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." That year, an English statute was enacted that placed a heavy protective tariff on tobacco imports. The duty rose from 2p per pound to 6s 10p, a 40-fold increase, but English demand remained strong despite the high price; Barnabee Rych reported that 7,000 stores in London sold tobacco and calculated that at least 319,375 pounds sterling were spent on tobacco annually. Because the Virginia and Bermuda colonies' economies were affected by the high duty, James in 1624 instead created a royal monopoly. No tobacco could be imported except from Virginia, and a royal license that cost 15 pounds per year was required to sell it (). To help the colonies, Charles II banned tobacco cultivation in England, but allowed it to be grown in herb gardens for medicinal purposes.
Tobacco was introduced elsewhere in continental Europe more easily. Iberia exported "ropes" of dry leaves in baskets to the Netherlands and southern Germany; for a while tobacco was in Spanish called canaster after the word for basket (canastro), and influenced the German Knaster. In Italy, Prospero Santacroce in 1561 and Nicolo Torbabuoni in 1570 introduced it to gardens after seeing the plant on diplomatic missions. Cardinal Crescenzio introduced smoking to the country in about 1610 after learning about it in England. The Roman Catholic Church did not condemn tobacco as James I did, but Pope Urban VIII threatened excommunication for anyone caught smoking in a church.
In Russia, tobacco use was banned in 1634 except for foreigners in Moscow. Peter the Great—who in England had learned of smoking and the royal monopoly—became the monarch in 1689, however. Revoking all bans, he licensed the Muscovy Company to import of tobacco per year, with the Russian Crown receiving 28,000 pounds sterling annually.
Asia The Japanese were introduced to tobacco by Portuguese sailors in 1542. Tobacco first arrived in the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th century by the Spanish,Grehan, p. 1 where it attracted the attention of doctorsGrehan, p. 2 and became a commonly prescribed medicine for many ailments. Although tobacco was initially prescribed as medicine, further study led to claims that smoking caused dizziness, fatigue, dulling of the senses, and a foul taste/odour in the mouth.Grehan, p. 7
Sultan Murad IV banned smoking in the Ottoman Empire in 1633. When the ban was lifted by his successor, Ibrahim the Mad, it was instead taxed. In 1682, Damascene jurist Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi declared: "Tobacco has now become extremely famous in all the countries of Islam ... People of all kinds have used it and devoted themselves to it ... I have even seen young children of about five years applying themselves to it." In 1750, a Damascene townsmen observed "a number of women greater than the men, sitting along the bank of the Barada River. They were eating and drinking, and drinking coffee and smoking tobacco just as the men were doing."Grehan, p. 3
Australia Although Nicotiana suaveolens is native to Australia, tobacco smoking first reached that continent's shores when it was introduced to northern-dwelling Indigenous communities by visiting Indonesian fishermen in the early 18th century. British patterns of tobacco use were transported to Australia along with the new settlers in 1788; and in the years following colonisation, British smoking behaviour was rapidly adopted by Indigenous people as well. By the early 19th century tobacco was an essential commodity routinely issued to servants, prisoners and ticket-of-leave men (conditionally released convicts) as an inducement to work, or conversely, withheld as a means of punishment.
America In colonial Brazil, especially in the Captaincy of Bahia, tobacco became established as a commodity transported in the Atlantic trade between the 17th and 18th centuries, circulating in networks that connected the colony to Africa and Europe. Its commercialization was directly associated with the Atlantic slave trade of enslaved Africans, being widely used as a commodity in trade relations between captaincies such as Bahia and Pernambuco and Costa da Mina in West Africa, where tobacco, in addition to gold and other enslaved people, constituted one of the central elements of these exchanges. Thus, tobacco production, like other agricultural activities outside of export, was predominantly based on enslaved African labor and was part of the set of strategic products of the colonial economy, subject to control and oversight mechanisms by the Portuguese administration.
In Spanish America, tobacco also circulated through formal and illicit trade networks, notably the exchange between Hispaniola, Tierra Firme, and other points in the Caribbean and Spanish America under strict imperial trade regulations.
Economic history in the American colonies In the Thirteen Colonies, where gold and silver were scarce, tobacco was used as a currency to trade with Native Americans, and sometimes for official purposes such as paying fines, taxes, and even marriage license fees.
The demand and profitability of tobacco led to the shift in the colonies to a slave-based labor force, fueling the Atlantic slave trade. Tobacco is a labor-intensive crop, requiring much work for its cultivation, harvest, and curing. With the profitability of the land rapidly increasing, it was no longer economically viable to bring in indentured servants with the promise of land benefits at the end of their tenure. By bringing African slaves instead, plantation owners acquired workers for long hours in the hot sun without paying them, providing only a bare subsistence.
The uncultivated Virginia soil was reportedly too rich for traditional European crops, especially barley. Tobacco "broke down the fields and made food crops more productive" by depleting the soil of nutrients.
Tobacco's impact on early American history