In the hothouse economy of the west, the tobacco habit was constantly reinvented by its consumers’ evolving tastes. By the eighteenth century pipes were ubiquitous, and the restlessly fashionable began to distinguish themselves by taking snuff. Jewellers turned out snuff boxes embellished with ever more fantastic conceits, private tutors set up snuff schools and printers published guides to snuff etiquette. The nineteenth century was the age of the cigar, pioneered in Cuba and imported into Spain: a fragrant, streamlined and pure form of the leaf that, unlike the pipe, consumed itself entirely as the smoker consumed it.
It was only in the twentieth century that the cigarette took hold, spreading with the velocity of the industrial age. Here was a smoke tailored not for the club or private drawing room but for the café, the bar, the factory break and the street corner. Mass media and advertising prised open new markets; mass production decimated the cluttered shelves of the tobacco shop with a standardised and simplified product line. Multinational producers consolidated the global market and the delicate ecology of small growers, specialised tobacconists and connoisseur customers was swallowed up by the mass-consumption monoculture of Big Tobacco. Tobacco became a universal habit, but it has always been an acquired taste. Like alcohol, the first exposure is rarely enjoyable, and even for its habitués it mingles the qualities of pleasure and poison.
From the beginning, it divided western society between those who hailed it as the glory of the modern age and those who saw it as a descent into barbarism. When he returned to Spain as Europe’s first tobacco smoker, Columbus’ crewmate Rodrigo de Jerez was imprisoned by the Inquisition for his diabolic exhalations. By the time he was released many more had taken up the habit, yet its enthusiasts would always be shadowed by its opponents. In his famous Counterblaste to Tobacco of 1604, King James I declared it ‘lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse’. For its advocates, the perfumed smoke of the ‘holy herb’ brought heaven down to earth; for its enemies, it was a weed with its roots in hell.