Tobacco: A Cultural History Of How An Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization

Long before the arrival of Columbus, the indigenous peoples of the Americas cultivated and enjoyed tobacco, using it for medicinal, religious, and social purposes. But with the dawn of the age of colonization, tobacco became something else entirely – a cultural touchstone of pleasure and success, a coveted commodity that would transform the world economy, and the cause of (and collateral for) revolutions that would bring forth the birth of nations and the end of empires.
In Tobacco, Iain Gately charts the epic history of humanity’s fascination with our favorite recreational drug, from its obscure beginnings among ancient civilizations, through its rise to global prominence, to its embattled state today. Gately argues that it was the driving force behind the development of global trade, as the foundation of thc Dutch mercantile empire, the fulcrum of the African slave trade, and the financial basis for our victory in the American Revolution. He also traces the global evolution of the plant’s how the sacred calumet of the Plains Indian tribes became adopted by samurai warriors in Japan; how Napoleon’s armies spread the cigarette as they conquered the European continent; and how purveyors developed filter-tips and mentholated cigarettes in the late twentieth century as the detrimental health effects became increasingly known.