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Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe
Peter C. Mancall
| THERE IS PERHAPS no plant more thoroughly studied than tobacco. Historians, economists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and botanists have all offered assessments of the plant and its history.1 They have focused on its initial spread from the Western Hemisphere to the rest of the world—often noting persistent beliefs that the plant was a panacea, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Europeans became obsessed with it. Some have explored the political debates that the plant engendered. Others have considered its role in indigenous practices in the Americas, including detailed accounts of the pipes used to smoke it. Some have linked its use to the spread of other psychoactive substances. One enterprising early twentieth-century bibliophile filled five enormous volumes with references to the plant's history.2 Though other plants have attracted much attention—including sugar, potatoes, corn, cacao, and tulips—no other plant has played such a public (and publicly debated) role in the history of the world in the past five hundred years.3 |
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Despite the wealth of material about tobacco, however, scholars have not adequately explored the process by which tobacco became a commodity and thus part of world history. The spread of tobacco was part of a larger migration of plants that attended European exploration and settlement in the Western Hemisphere. But scholars have neglected a key facilitator of that migration—the rise of printed books. The rapid expansion of print was perfectly timed to allow early modern authors to spread news about the benefits of particular plants, as the authors of early modern herbals knew when they provided listings of medical afflictions and then sent readers to the plants that could help alleviate suffering.4 The rapid dissemination of books across the continent also proved crucial for tobacco's quick integration into European societies. |
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Because the arrival of tobacco and other American plants in Europe coincided with the vast expansion of print, newly arriving flora were able to enter into European cultures through the circulation of printed books. Within months of Columbus's return from the Western Hemisphere, his report had reached far-flung audiences, with ten separate editions printed in 1493 alone. By 1497, publishers in Barcelona, Rome, Antwerp, Paris, Basel, Strasburg, and Valladolid had circulated editions in Spanish, Latin, and German.5 While not all European travelers to the Western Hemisphere wrote about their journeys, a surprising number did. Many of these reports spread initially in the traveler's own society and language. But as the history of Columbus's first report demonstrates, enterprising printers saw a market in translations of practically every account that provided details about the Americas. The best of those reports included pictures as well as text, thereby giving readers a visual sense of what American flora looked like. |
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The appearance of tobacco in such works did not mean that it would be automatically accepted by Europeans or that it would necessarily become part of the process that Alfred Crosby has elegantly labeled the "Columbian Exchange." Many Europeans who saw tobacco used by Native Americans in the sixteenth century associated the plant with heathen rituals, though many also observed indigenous peoples employing tobacco in less obviously threatening ways as well. |
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