Catherine Molineux

Notes and Documents

Pleasures of the Smoke: "Black Virginians" in Georgian London's Tobacco Shops

Bacchus' black servant, negro fine

—Charles Lamb, referring to his pipe (ca. 1805)¹

SOMETIME during the 1750s or 1760s, London grocer George Farr solicited an engraver to produce an advertisement for his tobacco (Figure I). Trade directories list Farr in the grocery business during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, but exactly when this advertisement was commissioned and who produced it are unknown, since it is unsigned and undated. Though the details of the advertisement's production remain frustratingly difficult to ascertain, the imagery with which Farr chose to tempt customers is striking for its effacement of the real origins of tobacco sold in Georgian England. Above the happy little pun "The Finest Tobacco by Farr," the engraver depicted a black prince or king sporting a Native American headdress and sitting on a throne.² The royal black male takes up almost the entire advertisement, replacing the white colonial planter in his mediation between the hogsheads of new tobacco and the ships that have arrived to transport them elsewhere. The thousands of African slaves who worked Georgian tobacco fields in Virginia, Maryland, and other British colonies do not appear; the cherubic child who brings him a tobacco plant is the only other figure associated with the crop. This advertisement connected tobacco with the black male body yet spectacularly failed to acknowledge the existence of the colonial plantation. Instead it envisioned the tobacco trade as an exchange with a black prince or king: a vision perhaps naive, perhaps consciously effacing of the brutal realities of tobacco production, perhaps subtly subversive of plantation power relations, and certainly silent about the role of African women in the cultivation of British tobacco.

Figure I
"The Finest Tobacco by Farr," London, ca. 1750–70, in Heal Collection, 117.48, Prints and Drawings Department, British Museum, London.

The imagined origins of tobacco in tobacco shop advertisements complicate modern historians' understanding of the intersection of race, consumption, and male homosociality in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London.³ Though tobacco has long been considered an important factor shaping the development of New World settlements and colonial practices of slavery, scholars have only begun to analyze the ways in which tobacco, sugar, and other Atlantic and Eastern goods engendered new forms of sociability and new spaces of consumption in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There is still a limited understanding of the cultural meanings that Londoners attached to exotic drugs and how those meanings shaped and were themselves shaped by notions of race, conceptions of slavery, and ideologies of empire.⁴

Farr's provocative advertisement is one of hundreds of Georgian tobacco advertisements that survive primarily in the collections of the British Museum and the New York Public Library. Their wide range of imagery, including patriotic emblems, Masonic symbols of brotherly love, Scottish Highlanders, the Royal Exchange, and city views reflects tobacco's diverse associations in late Restoration and Georgian England. Most advertisements offered remarkably heterogeneous fantasies about the source of tobacco, from black royals, to georgic scenes of plantation labor, to images of trade with or domination over feathered black figures, to scenes of British camaraderie with black heathens (Figures II–XI). Similar advertisements produced for shops in Bristol, Newcastle, Kent, and many other provincial areas suggest the widespread appeal of these scenes of tobacco's origins.⁵

Figure II
"The Finest Tobacco, by Farr," London, ca. 1750–70, in Heal Collection, 117.49.

Figure III
"Sharpe's Best Virginia, Fleet Street, London," in Heal Collection, 117.145.

Figure IV
"Archer's best Virginia, in Peter Street, near Moorfields," in Heal Collection, 117.4. Detail of the "Peter" inscription is available on http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/64.2/molineux.html.

Figure V
"Crofton's, Virginia at the Dagger in Watling Street No 8 near St. Paul's, London Successor to Mr. Richd Ford," in Heal Collection, 117.32.

Figure VI
"Bowlers Best Virginia Old Broadstreet London," in Heal Collection, 117.14.

Figure VII
"Bacchus." Detail from child's broadsheet. Sold wholesale by Lumsden and son, Glasgow. Pressmark HH19, in Prints and Drawings Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, no. P.38-1986. Courtesy, V&A Images/Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Figure VIII
"Bradley Russel Street Covent Garden," in Heal Collection, 117.15.

Figure IX
"Gaitskell's neat Tobacco at Fountain Stairs Rotherhith Wall." Courtesy, Guildhall Library, City of London.

Figure X
"C: Smith takes the King of Paspahegh prisoner, Ao 1609," detail from Robert Vaughan's map in John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles: With the names of the Adventurers, Planters, and Governours from their first beginning An: 1584. to this present 1626 (London, 1627), 84. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure XI
"Baylis at y Tobacco Roll in Barbican London," ca. 1720. Courtesy, Guildhall Library.

Compared with portraits, plays, and novels, which have tended to be the primary sources used for analyses of racial representation in Georgian Britain, these cheap advertisements were in much higher circulation in a broader range of British society. Surviving sources have not shed light on the artists' intentions, the shopkeepers' goals, or the smokers' interpretations, but scholars know that black bodies were being produced as advertisements for colonial goods. The minimal scholarly attention to these advertisements has focused on the hybrid Native American–African ethnicity of the black figures who populate them and not on the imagined relationships between British smokers and black tobacco producers.⁶ The often congenial and always gratifying relationships that these images depict suggest that scholars should reconsider the moment in which Britons began to associate New World goods with the labors of black slaves and Georgian British perceptions of heathenism.

Scholars of the abolitionist movement argue that Britons did not connect slave labor to the goods produced from it until after the 1760s. That early grocers did not choose to advertise other wares, notably sugar and coffee, consistently with black figures suggests these conclusions may yet hold true for such colonial products, though numerous eighteenth-century prints depicted black servants bringing tea, coffee, and chocolate to their white masters and some shopkeepers chose signs that included black boys and sugar loaves.⁷ Late Restoration and Georgian tobacconists, in contrast, frequently enticed customers by capitalizing on the crop's association with exotic peoples. Though the abolitionist movement demonized the consumption of products produced by slaves in new ways, abolitionists were not the first to recognize the connection of these goods to black producers. Tobacconists tempted customers with a variety of imagined encounters—from eroticized representations of British dominion over black people to provocative images of homosocial relationships with black smokers—that resist and complicate any straightforward inscription of the unequal and repressive relationship between colonized and colonizers. The advertisements presented here display the range of racial encounters with which shopkeepers tempted their customers. Unpacking these images and their imagined relationships between British and black smokers requires reconstructing the genre of tobacco advertisements in Georgian Britain, including the emergence of tobacco shops and commercial advertisements, the iconographic traditions with which the engravers worked, and the cultural meanings of tobacco that the tobacconists and engravers manipulated to sell their product. Such an analysis reveals that Georgian tobacco advertisements promoted the experience of this originally Native American drug as a vicarious and often illicit encounter with New World heathenism.

Tobacco shops appeared in London as early as 1605. By the late seventeenth century, they had popped up in neighborhoods across the metropolis. Virginia's sweet-scented tobacco captured the English market by the end of the Stuart era, and supplemental supplies came from the East, the British Caribbean, and South America. From 1736 to 1746, 6 million pounds of tobacco were sold in England for domestic consumption. Tobacco remained the second most important colonial crop (after sugar) to Britain's economy throughout the eighteenth century. In 1765 Robert Rogers remarked that "the annual revenue arising to the crown from tobacco only, is very considerable; and several hundred thousands are employed in, and supported by, raising and manufacturing it." Several hundred thousand African slaves worked in colonial tobacco fields. Slaving boomed after 1713 when the Treaty of Utrecht granted Britain broad trading rights with Spanish colonies. At the same time, plantation agriculture took off on the mainland as planters reorganized their plantations around slavery. Throughout the Georgian era, ships brought loads of tobacco into London and hogsheads were disbursed to various shops through the Royal Exchange. Historians know little about what went on inside tobacco shops, though parodies of "Clowdie Tobacco-shops" indicate that consumption occurred on the premises. Tobacco shops formed a crucial link between the production and consumption of tobacco, connecting metropolitan consumers of American goods to an English, and then British, empire.⁸

Though English colonies began to produce tobacco for European markets quite early in the seventeenth century, it took at least half a century for English plantations to emerge in London tobacco imagery. The earliest tobacco literature borrowed representations from Continental iconography, which illustrated Nicotiana's association with sociability by depicting a group of white men sitting at a table with their pipes, pots, and glasses or emblematized its derivation from New World societies with inert black Indians, antecedents to the modern Indian figures that still stand sentry at tobacco shops today. Single broadsheets, such as "The Armes of the Tobachonists" (1630), were among the first forms of tobacco imagery in London that responded to these Continental borrowings; they focused primarily on the social disruption caused by the spread of tobacco smoking (Figure XII). This early street ballad described the selling and smoking of tobacco as an illicit and sensual experience, assigning the tobacconists' arms to the "Herraldry from hell." A commoner shown "reuerst proper improperly" stands, according to the explanatory poem, for men who "doate to much vpon this heathen weed" in "hells blacke pit, Whereas the Diuells in smoake and darknes sit." The poem also offered a common myth of tobacco's origins: "The Moores head shewes, that cursed Pagans did, Devise this stinke, long time from Christians hid." In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, popular tobacco advertisements acquired images of plantations and exotic trade, yet the sensual encounter with the stink of cursed pagans remained a central part of the attraction and repulsion toward this particular drug.⁹

Figure XII
"The Armes of the Tobachonists," London, 1630. Courtesy, The British Library, London.

By the late Stuart era, the spread of print and the increase in literacy rates had significantly changed the strategies that shops adopted to advertise their goods. Tobacconists and other tradespeople began commissioning local artisans to engrave or etch trade cards, billheads, and what the British Museum characterizes as tobacco papers, or wrappers. Trade cards tended to be smaller than tobacco papers and were distributed on the street, door-to-door, or at sales. Tobacco papers bear smaller engravings with larger borders and were used to wrap parcels of tobacco, the stains of which often still remain. Shopkeepers furnished these papers along with billheads (receipts) to remind customers of the shop and its location. Trade cards and tobacco papers included the shop sign, usually set off in a cartouche or medallion, which was essential to locating shops in London before street numbers were put into practice in the middle of the eighteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, many of these shop signs included racial imagery, with black boys, blackamoors' heads, Turks' heads, Indian queens, and Indian kings joining more traditional symbols, such as beehives, saints, and crosses (Figure XIII). As place markers these signs migrated onto trade cards and tobacco papers, but they did not necessarily have an intended connection to the advertised goods because new shop owners often retained the sign previously associated with the shop. Tobacco papers, generally in contrast to trade cards, included imagery specifically related to the product in addition to the shop sign. Whereas George Farr's trade card illustrated only his shop sign, "the Bee-hive and Three Sugar Loaves," his tobacco papers featured racial imagery with the traditional shop symbols displayed at the top (Figure XIV; see Figures I–II).¹⁰

Figure XIII
"Watercolor sketch for a Black Boy Shop Sign," ca. 1750, pressmark MD19, box 2, no. P38–1986. Courtesy, V&A Images/Victoria & Albert Museum, London. A color version is available on http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/64.2/molineux.html.

Figure XIV
"George Farr Grocer ... ," trade card, 1753, in Heal Collection, 68.99.

Georgian tobacco papers reflect three main marketing strategies: first, they stressed the quality of the product (the "best" or "finest"). Second, they emphasized direct access to the source of tobacco. The titles of the tobacco papers, such as "Sharpe's Best Virginia," often employed Virginia as a metonym for tobacco (see Figure III). The associated images of New World people and colonial plantations in "Archer's best Virginia" and other papers effectively implicated Londoners in the pleasures and responsibilities of owning not only the scenes but also the people depicted (see Figure IV). Most advertisements reinforced this claim by superimposing the shop sign onto their New World scenes or alternatively, in the case of Farr's tobacco papers, by juxtaposing the shop sign with the black prince (see Figures I–II, XIV). Third, some of these advertisements included visual puns and puzzles, which undoubtedly encouraged consumers to spend time looking at these tobacco papers. In "Archer's best Virginia," for instance, inscriptions of "PE" and "ER" in patches of grass in the center foreground prompted the viewer to go searching for the missing "T" to complete "Peter" for Peter Street (the shop's location); a black laborer in the center background uses the "T" to bang shut a hogshead (see Figure IV).¹¹ The writing of Peter Street into the plantation landscape also marginalized the colonist and reduced the distance to the plantation. Because shops printed such advertisements on tobacco packages, colonial images, themselves amalgamations of different exotic regions and British desires for dominion, figuratively formed part of the experience of smoking. The use of place markers, as in "Archer's best Virginia" and Farr's shop sign, brought the tobacco shop to Virginia and imported the best of Virginia into the metropole, often within a set of British arms.

Tobacconists banked on the appeal of exoticism when they used images of New World peoples and colonial plantations in their advertisements. In so doing they drew on iconographic traditions dating back to the late medieval and Renaissance eras. Though the primary source for these black bodies was probably the shop sign, since tobacco advertisements were largely an extension of this popular imagery, engravers also inherited their hybrid Native American–African figures from maps, travelogues, plays, and other colonial imagery in Georgian Britain. Roxann Wheeler's analysis of "Inkle and Yarico" and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe offers several reasons why Native American and African bodies could be interchanged, including the generic use of the term "black" to describe both groups, the generic use of the term "Indian" to describe any so-called savage, and the fact that both Africans and Indians were enslaved.¹² The tobacco papers' hybrid figures also specifically reflect the association of Africans and Native Americans with the tobacco trade and with smoking.

What do these advertisements say about how Londoners imagined their relationship to the producers of this crop? A definite chronology of these advertisements might reveal something about metropolitan consciousness of the expansion of slavery, but ordering them is difficult because most have no engraved dates. The British Museum's generalized dates locate them from 1740 to 1770, though several have engraved dates from the 1720s. Engraving styles suggest that the advertisements range from the 1700s to the 1780s. And some of the simple rectangular cartouches are from the late seventeenth century.¹³ Even without a definite chronology, these advertisements furnish invaluable insights into the imagery of tobacco's origins with which tobacconists tempted their customers. Like modern American advertisements that stress, for instance, bread's origin in wholesome Midwestern wheat fields, tobacco shop owners commissioned local artists to engrave images of the origins of tobacco in imagined Virginias where black royalty, feathered black tradesmen, fellow black smokers, or relaxed black laborers appeared to live. All these images suggest a complex interaction among ideologies of empire, the social experience of smoking, and the cultural meanings of tobacco in late Restoration and Georgian London.

Tobacco's mixed reception in England reflects a society trying to come to grips with a foreign drug that, along with other colonial goods, had helped to transform urban social life. Richard Kroll has traced the contention between those who argued consumption was virtuous and patriotic because it kept the trade system afloat and those who believed consumption subverted morality, that sensual gratification signified sin. From King James I's 1604 attempt to ban tobacco through the late eighteenth century, natural histories, travelogues, trade pamphlets, poems, and many other written accounts debated the virtues and vices of tobacco smoking.¹⁴ Tobacco advertisements pandered to and parodied both sides by associating the origins of tobacco with scenes of British domination over the New World on the one hand while stressing British smokers' affiliation with heathen tobacco producers on the other.

"Gaitskell's neat Tobacco" is a striking example of a tobacco paper that located the origins of tobacco in English domination. The inscription around the cartouche identifies the image: "Capt Smith the first Englishman who went ashore in Virginia taking the King of Paspahegh Prisoner" (see Figure IX). Gaitskell's engraver simply adapted Robert Vaughan's engraving of Smith's capture of the King of Paspahegh, which accompanied an edition of Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia (see Figure X). Vaughan's image, in turn, was a reworking of Theodore de Bry's "A weroan or great Lorde of Virginia," which was based on John White's sixteenth-century studies of Roanoke Indians. "Gaitskell's neat Tobacco" particularly demonstrates how engravers borrowed and altered earlier iconographies of the colonial Chesapeake when reimagining this region as the origin of this exotic plant.

Gaitskell's engraver made a number of suggestive changes to this staple image of English imperialism. Vaughan's empty landscape in the upper right background, beneath a scene depicting Smith's battle with and capture by the "Pamaunkee" Indians, has been replaced with a depiction of a mission. Tobacconists rarely used Christian imagery in their advertisements, but this mission most likely alluded to the commonly articulated notion that British colonization was a means to the salvation of African and Native American souls. Another substitution associated this religious undertaking with trade: a ship has appeared between the Indian king's legs. There are other, subtle changes: Smith's hand, once grasping a lock of the king's hair, now clinches his throat, and the king looks outward at the viewer instead of upward, seemingly toward another Smith engaged in slaying native Virginians. Perhaps the greatest alteration is in the form of the Indian king's body. His muscular Indian frame has been exchanged for a heavyset black body dressed in a skirt of leaves or feathers. The two prominent feathers in his headdress have sagged and now look hornlike. Horns may have invoked demonic associations with the savage and connections to the Christian mission. Alternatively, Winthrop D. Jordan has shown how written accounts emasculated Native American males as they declared English dominion. These horns may also symbolize the emasculation of the cuckold's horns and thus help to characterize Smith's act of domination. The engraver also altered Smith's dress so that he resembles a common Georgian Briton rather than an early-seventeenth-century English conquistador. Gaitskell's engraver transformed an Indian lord into an amalgamated African–Native American figure in the process of locating the source of Gaitskell's tobacco in Britain's Protestant and commercial conquest of the New World.¹⁵

As British merchants became increasingly powerful participants in the Atlantic slave trade, journal articles, sermons, and other literature promoting colonization linked the acquisition of slaves to England's (and then Britain's) ability to challenge Catholic European countries and maintain a favorable balance of imperial power. Literary representations of English dominion over black producers of tobacco had emerged by 1659, when tales about the origins of tobacco and how Englishmen had procured the plant became entwined with ideological explanations for slave labor. Panacea (a tale like "Inkle and Yarico" that Britons "persistently" told themselves) relayed that the English had outwitted the devil, the Spanish, and the French, recruiting the heathen tobacco producers by introducing them to the true form of Christianity. In 1714, the year in which the end of the War of Spanish Succession lessened the threat of Franco-Spanish alliance, a broadside issued by tobacco merchants insisted that tobacco exportation, the branch of trade that made England "formidable abroad," depended on sustaining the "Sale and Consumption of our Plantation Tobacco." Tobacco sales, several authors argued, kept tobacco production going, plantations expanding, and England busy conquering France. Christopher Smart defended the public utility of smoking by having the pipe itself speak in 1752. A personified "black Tobacco-Pipe" responded to a "Bag-wig" who called it odious:

Know, puppy, I'm an English pipe,
Deem'd worthy of each Briton's gripe,
Who, with my cloud-compelling aid,
Help our plantations and our trade.

Metropolitan folklore about tobacco promoted colonial plantations, trade, and domestic consumption as part of a larger battle with European rivals for trade profits.¹⁶ "Gaitskell's neat Tobacco" visually translated the conquest of a trade good into the conquest of a black man as it offered this scene of English imperialism to entice and amuse customers.

Gaitskell invited London smokers to connect the pleasures of his product to mainstream beliefs about the religious and commercial virtues of British colonization. Yet even this relatively straightforward marketing ploy contained potentially parodic elements, especially when located within the context of discussions in London about tobacco's effects on British masculinity. No doubt it would be anachronistic to interpret Gaitskell's tobacco paper as an Englishman's wishful answer to the question of whether size matters, but the challenge that the diminutive Smith faces in overcoming his much-larger enemy introduces comic elements into this colonization narrative that could either aggrandize Smith's heroism or raise humorous questions about the success of this famously short and self-admiring man's attempts at conquest. Though Londoners widely perceived tobacco to be a necessary stimulant for soldiers, literary representations of smokers often made fun of the "smoakie gallant" whose armory and artillery consisted of tobacco paraphernalia. In 1699, for instance, William King's mock-heroic poem The Furmetary remarked,

'Tis break of Day, thy Sooty Broth prepare
And all thy other Liquors for a War,
Rouse up Tobacco, whose delicious sight,
Illuminated round with Beams of Light,
To my Impatient Mind will Cause Delight

King proceeded to send the weed to conquer other "Nostrils."¹⁷ The frequency with which authors burlesqued the conquests of smoky gallants suggests that the relationship of tobacco smoking to British authority lent itself to satire.

Physical contrasts also complicate the hierarchy of the white male smoker over the black male producer in "Fawkners Best Virginia," though in this case the disparity produces more erotic than comic undertones (Figure XV). The Briton dominates the black man in certain respects: his full dress highlights the black man's partial nudity and evokes a comparison of civility and savagery.¹⁸ The Briton also sits looking out of the image, whereas the black man stands, looking at him. Yet the structure of the gazes that leads viewers to the Briton is again complicated by the black man's dominant physical presence. The intentionality of his gaze and the suggestive placement of his loincloth along with his height and strength endow the black man with more influence than one might expect in an image of a master-slave relationship. His sexualized, classicized body suggests that the pleasures of tobacco, beyond smoking the product itself, had something to do with imagining this exotic black figure in one's company. Indeed the specific brand of tobacco that the white man presumably smokes is represented as almost an extension of the black man's body: his loincloth drapes over and connects him to Fawkner's shop sign.

Figure XV
"Fawkners Best Virginia, Token-House Yard," in Heal Collection, 117.50.

Perhaps this advertisement implied that the "heauenly dreames" experienced by some British smokers included a fantasy about the black male producer; perhaps by purchasing Fawkner's tobacco, it suggested, one also bought a seductive vision of imperial authority figured in terms of the availability of this powerful black male body. Fawkner certainly sought to sell his product by constructing a particular experience of Virginia as one in which his shop, as represented by the sign, served as a medium through which the British smoker and the virile, black figure were brought together. "Gaitskell's neat Tobacco" and "Fawkners Best Virginia" are two of the most striking advertisements that enticed potential customers with fantasies about domination, yet even these examples contain contrasts between European and heathen masculinity that complicate these depictions of British authority.¹⁹

Only a few written accounts of tobacco hinted at the physical domination of Atlantic peoples in England's tobacco plantations. A 1716 poem on tobacco linked Bacchus's discovery and consumption of tobacco to his ability to subdue the Indians:

Unknown, Tobacco, useless, grac'd the field;
till Bacchus, first, its ample leaf reveal'd:
when, by its strength refresht, the fainting God
subdu'd the Indians, and its virtue show'd.
by Bacchus taught, the wondring world grows wise;
and all mankind the usefull herbage prize.

Tobacco's utility lay in its ability to rouse fortitude, to stimulate the stamina needed to subdue the Indians through Bacchanalian conversion.²⁰ Descriptions of British domination over black tobacco producers, however, remained relatively rare; far more common were accounts and images that depicted the source of British tobacco in transatlantic trade.

"Bathurst's Best Virginia" and "Bradley" located the origins of tobacco in images of fraternal trade rather than outright conquest, though these two tobacco papers also projected a complex combination of British authority over and identification with black producers of tobacco (Figure XVI; see Figure VIII). "Bathurst's Best Virginia" assigned the pleasure of smoking to an idea of colonialism as trade. A Briton and a black man stand looking at each other from either side of the cartouche. Above the Briton flies a flag imprinted with crossed tobacco pipes (the crossed pipes were most likely the arms assigned to all tobacco traders, including Bathurst); over the black man flies a flag embossed with a raw tobacco roll. The two different flags suggest the Briton's allegiance to consumption and the black Virginian's allegiance to production or, in effect, a country of consumers versus a country of producers. The two figures are linked by their smoking of identical pipes. Most Georgian tobacco papers have galleons in the background, a conversation between a Briton and a black person, or a direct image of trade. These tobacco papers marketed the experience of this drug as an interracial, transatlantic encounter individually experienced but, as "Bathurst's Best Virginia" suggests, mutually enjoyed.²¹

Figure XVI
"Bathurst's Best Virginia, at ye Angell & Still ye Corner of Lovelane Billingsgate, Distiller," in Heal Collection, 117.6.

If the projection of a black man who physically dominates the white smoker complicated images of British conquest, scenes of trade also contained more traditional connotations of hierarchy. "Bradley" offered a direct picture of the moment of exchange that suggests the persistence of inequality (see Figure VIII). Tobacco brings heathen and Briton to a table set up rather incongruously in a plantation landscape. The black figure with a crown of feathers is perhaps the designated head of the laborers who are represented in the background directly beneath the proffered tobacco plant. The smaller white figure may represent an overseer or simply a consumer, effeminate in comparison to the black producer who is in turn dominated by the merchant or planter. The ships in the background suggest that this exchange is based on trade, as does the elite Briton's inspection of the wares and the black man's assertion that his crop is indeed "sweet Scented." The inspection of wares, an accepted consumer ritual, was as natural to trading negotiations as smoking with the trading partner. Yet playing judge to the products of slave labor or overseeing production were roles that also stood in for political dominion in eighteenth-century tracts. Many Britons presented themselves as merchants rather than conquistadors, benevolent God-fearing people like Robinson Crusoe whose only desire was to profit from mutual trade. As Joseph Addison remarked in 1716, "it is our Business to extend to the utmost our Trade and Navigation. By this means, we reap the Advantages of Conquest, without Violence or Injustice; we not only strengthen ourselves, but gain the Wealth of our Neighbours in an honest Way; and, without any Act of Hostility, lay the several Nations, of the World under a kind of Contribution." In "Bradley" the black man and elite Briton meet for an exchange that is unequal. Oversight and inspection imply hierarchy in tension with the affinity projected by their shared appreciation of tobacco. "Crofton's, Virginia," "Bowlers Best Virginia," and other tobacco papers also depicted a black man asking for a white man to approve his crop or portrayed an overseer or planter smoking while slaves labor in his field (see Figures V–VI).²² These images of tobacco plantations and trade managed to display a sense of reciprocity and a hierarchy of the Briton over the black male producer.

Most tobacco papers depicted the subordination of these African–Native American people as arising from a desire to trade or consume tobacco and not as direct enslavement. In the absence of shackles, whips, or collars, these black figures often appear to be voluntarily trading with Britons in a product they mutually appreciate. Mutual interest in tobacco and trade supplies an alternative explanation for British acquisition of this crop; British authority in the presence of conviviality makes the black people's production of tobacco appear consensual. This relationship, devoid of outright British aggression, fits with the trading relationship set forth by economic tracts and dramatic plays such as George Lillo's extremely popular London Merchant: "by Love and Friendship ... [we] teach them the Advantages of honest Traffick—by taking from them, with their own Consent, their useless Superfluities." Enticing smokers to identify with the merchant or planter who shares a pipe with an exotic native invites vicarious participation in the contact with and authority over this producer of tobacco, a figure whose own sovereignty over the tobacco fields maintains the illusion that these figures are trading partners rather than forced laborers. Tobacconists may have deliberately distorted the facts when they offered these benign visions of British imperial authority, they may have critiqued the brutal realities of tobacco production in Virginia, or they may simply have absorbed the commonly articulated idea that British colonies, in contrast to those of the French and Spanish, extended the benefits of trade and civilization to "reap the Advantages of Conquest, without Violence or Injustice."²³

With the exception of the Gaitskell example, these tobacco papers and trade cards notably lack symbolism of religious conversion, which remained one of the most powerful explanations for British authority over Africans and Native Americans in the Georgian era. Early journals justified questions about the legality of slavery by pointing to Britons' gift of eternal salvation to heathen Africans and Native Americans. Over time the failure of British efforts to proselytize began to undermine this particular argument for colonization, though it was never fully overturned. Most tobacco papers lack conversion iconography despite popular imperial propaganda that explained England's domination of the tobacco trade by its introduction of heathens to the "true" form of Christianity. It seems unlikely that the candle in "Bradley" carries its traditional symbolism of salvation unless it is alluding, tongue-in-cheek, to the "supernaturall reuelations" that some English smokers felt when they consumed tobacco (see Figure VIII). In fact a few of these tobacco papers contain visual puns that may parody the salvation that smokers claimed to experience. "Boulton's Virginia," for example, offers up for sale an image of a woman whose facial features and long hair draw clearly on English conceptions of Native American bodies (Figure XVII). She points toward the bust on the cartouche, drawing attention to the bust's eyes, which glance sideways, directly at a thin cluster of leaves that conceals her genitalia. She partially covers her bare breasts, a gesture that derives from classical and Christian representations of temperance or chastity. The phoenix atop the cartouche associates the experience of this Native American woman of tobacco with salvation. In "Crofton's Virginia" the engraver parodied old Christian iconography of Noah emerging from the ark, which prefigured the resurrection of Christ (and thus the salvation of man), by placing a plantation slave in a hogshead in exactly the same pose (see Figure V). What salvation these tobacco papers allude to seems to be primarily about smoking and not, unless satirically, about the conversions that British imperialism was supposed to bring about for African and Native American slaves. These tobacco papers instead highlighted the shared experience among heathen and British smokers of the more secular pleasures of tobacco.²⁴

Figure XVII
"Boulton's Virginia," in Heal Collection, 117.12. Detail of bust's eyes available on http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/64.2/molineux.html.

The tension in these images arises from the iconographic silence toward slavery itself in the construction of British authority. Circulating images of colonial tobacco production along with tobacco would have reinforced imperial relationships by marking the metropole as the "destination of rural production," yet the fanciful explanations of Britain's acquisition of this product—from conquest to fraternal trade with royal blacks to happy little plantation scenes—only underscores the degree to which engravers willfully or ignorantly reconstructed the origins of tobacco. Tobacconists may have expected their customers to think arrogantly that black tobacco producers would naturally "bend before" them, as Alexander Pope envisioned Native Americans bowing to the glory of London. But the smoker's partnership with the heathen, especially in advertising that centralized trade, interferes with the iconographic establishment of authority. Communal smoking does not fill the void but complicates it. Though the printing of slaves and plantation scenes on tobacco papers reflects British smokers' engagement with empire, that engagement also extended the London smoking fraternity to include black heathens. The cross-racial sociability depicted in "Baylis" and other tobacco papers with similar scenes is an important precedent for claims that became increasingly powerful in the second half of the eighteenth century for the brotherhood of all people regardless of skin color (see Figure XI).²⁵ These early representations of fraternity rooted the affiliation of white and black smokers in their shared and mildly transgressive indulgence in this American drug.

Written accounts about tobacco sometimes displaced the physical domination of Atlantic peoples in Britain's tobacco plantations onto a different conception of bondage. Travelogues and colonial histories also used the drug's sensuality to elide British agency in the subordination of New World peoples. Some Britons believed Native American and African slave producers of tobacco were obsessed with the plant and, paradoxically, dependent on the English to supply it. Robert Beverley, the first creole historian of Virginia, noted that Native Americans had grown dependent "chiefly upon the English" for the weed. In 1750 Thomas Short expressed the addicting effect of this drug as a factor in enslavement: "Multitudes have sold one another into perpetual Slavery for a Trifle of it [tobacco]; and these not only Strangers or Captives, but their own Countrymen, yea their own Relations; Princes have not only sold their Subjects, but Prisoners unjustly accused of Crimes; and Masters for it and Spirits, dispose of their Servants and Slaves." Tobacco, as a demonic fume, was said to be the God of Native Americans, an idea that Olaudah Equiano transferred to Africans by describing a pipe-smoking God worshipped in his (at least literary) Igbo homeland. According to these tracts, addiction to the heathen weed and enslavement to the pipe shackled blacks to the tobacco fields. The comforting idea that Africans' enslavement arose from something other than British aggression may have been a variant of the frequently articulated idea that Africans were already slaves in their own countries before being brought under British supervision. The notion that black heathens were enslaved to tobacco derived from conventional descriptions of exotic pagan societies that revolved around sensual pleasures and from the common rhetorical use of enslavement to express the passions' claim on the body. The problem, however, was that consuming tobacco, as Short noted, also enslaved the British.²⁶

Tobacco's association with heathenism and sensual pleasure made British consumption of it problematic. Originally described as the preferred drug among Native Americans, tobacco had long been associated with magic, visions, witchcraft, shrines, and evil spirits, all sources of power tapped by exotic healers. The perception of Indian sorcerers and witches using tobacco to foretell the future and become intoxicated and wild was well entrenched. Reports of smoking in Eastern and African societies reinforced these associations. English travelogues publicized the controversy over tobacco in the Ottoman Empire, highlighting rich, sultry women who spent their days sitting on cushions, smoking pipes. Writers implicitly or explicitly connected indulgences in tobacco to the paganism or devil worshipping of exotic smokers as well as to the sensuality of the Turkish seraglio or the African court. James I's pointed query continued to worry many Britons well into the eighteenth century. "What honour or policie," he wrote, "can mooue vs to imitate the barbarous and beastly maners of the wilde, godlesse, and slauish Indians, especially in so vile and stinking a custome? ... Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe? in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do? Yea why do we not denie God and adore the Deuill as they doe?"²⁷

English consternation about tobacco arose from the belief that it was heathenish and seemed to induce states similar to those described in the exotic smoker; at the same time, many of the effects of nicotine—trances, sleeplessness, euphoria—fit those ascribed to demonic possession in English folklore. Some took the angle that it had been brought by the devil, and some called it the witch, though others considered it a divine, holy, sacred, or sovereign herb. Most writers assumed these mental states to be inspired by something other than the Christian God. In 1623 John Taylor ruefully remarked that "mischiefe or mischances seldome come alone, and it is a doubtful question, whether the deuill brought Tobacco into England in a Coach, or else brought a Coach in a fogge or mist of Tobacco." More than a century later, a 1733 satirical poem railed similarly against the "Fiends and Devils" and the "Dmon" of tobacco smoking while blessing "untainted Air" for "Deliverance." Several pious writers damned the "heauenly dreames, visions, oracles, and supernaturall reuelations" going on in the minds of those who inhaled tobacco's demonic fumes. William Vaughan exhorted that "the Diuell, the Schoole-master of all lewdnesse, appears no where more forcibly then in the very midst of these [smokers] ... perhaps his spirituall poyson or poysonous spirit is exhaled and exhausted with their Tobacco and draughts of drinke into their mustie mindes." Some approached tobacco as one danger in the Christian's daily struggle: in 1703 A Looking-Glass For Smoakers related an ongoing battle against the habit in terms of a fight with Satan, comparing "pipe-puffers" with the "sinning Israelites of old." Dutchman Richard Rowlands echoed this line of argument in 1735 when he described the smoker as the man who "Sits and looks like the rich miser in hell. He is put together of fire, smoke and stench, from which it would seem that he pretends to have a concession for passing back and forth from the world into hell without a passport."²⁸

Tobacco's demonic connotations did not mean that the "foreign Weed" was shunned, especially after the profits of the tobacco trade won converts among those who initially believed that the crop turned gold into smoke. Probably the most enduring idea of tobacco was its value as a prophylactic. The uses of the "Indian weed" in quack medicines multiplied as it became a cure-all for hunger, stomach trouble, headaches, and other ailments. Doctors consistently catalogued and advertised its health benefits and many recommended daily use of the plant to sustain life. During the crisis about the 1733 Excise Bill, oppositional tracts argued that tobacco was not a luxury but rather a necessary staple among the poor. Even Crusoe managed to salvage tobacco from his wrecked ship. Richard Steele, a devoted smoker, sang the "Virtues of the Health-Restoring Plant," a gift of "Cures" as numerous as the maladies contained in Pandora's box. Many considered the plant "Divine," as it gave "ease, To all our Pain and Miseries."²⁹

Tobacco advertisements conflated the pleasures of ideas about contact with New World peoples with the deeply desired and slightly transgressive pleasures of an American drug. Despite, or perhaps because of, growing fears of tobacco and its addictiveness, by far the most consistent theme in these tobacco papers is pleasure: the upward gaze of the black men in "Chance's Best Virginia," the relaxed slaves of plantation scenes, and the joy of the black and white smokers in "Bathurst's Best Virginia" (Figure XVIII; see Figure XVI). In "Bradley" the central black producer tempts the Briton with the sweet scent of his tobacco; in "Bowlers Best Virginia," the squat blacks sitting on hogsheads of tobacco are black versions of the emblem of Bacchus found in a late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century child's broadsheet (see Figures VI–VIII). Poetry describing tobacco's "earthly pleasure" was popular in London, with many poems appearing in several editions and others being translated into English. On the flip side of the witchcraft coin was the "belching" god Bacchus. Steele's poem, which praised the curative properties of tobacco, also celebrated tobacco as "Bacchus his Herb." In 1736 A Pipe of Tobacco cried, "Happy Mortal! he who knows / Pleasure which a Pipe bestows." Most London smokers found the practice relaxing and meditative.³⁰ Common enjoyment of the sensuality of smoking draws the Briton and the black figure together in these tobacco papers. The sources of enjoyment lay in varied cultural associations with tobacco—its health benefits, links to witchcraft, and sensuality—as well as its seminal role in socializing and its value to British trade and empire. Part of its appeal was the imagination of contact with black heathens and their incorporation into the London smoking scene.

Figure XVIII
"Chance's Best Virginia, Fetter Lane, London," in Heal Collection, 117.22.

When engravers imported New World people into the conventions of sensuality that had governed early-seventeenth-century tobacco imagery, they invited British smokers to compare their own indulgences in tobacco with those of cursed pagans. Some Britons found this comparison deeply troubling: authors derided Englishmen for smoking "like Moores," called smoking a conversation with an "Indian whore," or compared the smoker's skin color to the black man's. Yet tobacconists made a particular contribution to the debate over tobacco, using the illicit aspects of tobacco consumption to tempt their customers. For metropolitan Britons well acquainted with the extensive popular debate over tobacco's vices and virtues, the table in "Bradley," with candle, pipe, bottle, and glass, may well have been in a London tavern; the relaxed and sensual elite white male may be a colonial counterpart to the smokers that early-eighteenth-century satirist Ned Ward parodied for sitting about "puffing" in their nightgowns (see Figure VIII). William Hogarth engraved Richard Lee's shop card with a version of his Midnight Modern Conversation that played on the association of white smokers and black bodies (Figure XIX). Hogarth's prints were well known for depicting artwork above the heads of Londoners whose behaviors were often subversively characterized by the art's content. In this image, which several tobacconists borrowed or adapted for their own shops, a painting of a black boy on the back wall hangs above a group of rowdy white men who are smoking and drinking around a table. These associations of the English smoker with the black Indian or African hint at the pleasures and anxieties involved in contemplating themselves alongside feathered, seminude black men sharing the experience of a plant thought to be both demonic and divine.³¹

Figure XIX
William Hogarth, "Richard Lee at ye Golden Tobacco Roll in Panton Street near Leicester Fields," ca. 1720–65, in Heal Collection, 117.108.

Some tobacco papers made light of this affiliation by making it explicit. If "Bradley" took an English smoker to the tobacco fields of Virginia, "Baylis" instead transported the exotic New World figure to a London table (see Figures VIII, XI). The engraver may have drawn on earlier satirical depictions of Atlantic figures in tavern crowds. In 1631, for instance, Richard Brathwaite joked about ballad mongers and their song makers: "Now you shall see them ... droppe into some blinde Alehouse, where these two naked Virginians will call for a great potte, a toast [a woman], and a pipe." The knowledge that foreigners attached meanings of friendship to tobacco probably encouraged the extension of brotherhood to encompass the black smoker. According to M. Corneille le Bruyn, when the Turks "pay Visits one to another, immediately Tobacco and Coffee is brought forth, and afterwards they Smoke and discourse the Point very Gravely, without rising from their Divans, unless it be for their Necessities." Similarly, the Native American peace pipe became a symbol of friendship to the English, akin to the English "Flag of friendship." Even simple tobacco papers such as "Chance's Best Virginia" depicted two slaves smoking together, one on either side of the coat of arms (see Figure XVIII). Each smokes a long pipe, a typical representation of those used throughout England. Though as mirror images the two figures serve to balance the arms, they also suggest that smoking was a communal, male activity. Sarah Greenland's advertisement for her tobacco pipes showed two white, feathered figures on either side of a banner inscribed "Let Brotherly love Continue."³² "Bathurst's Best Virginia" and other advertisements balanced the arms with a black and a Briton, suggesting that smoking with natives, an accepted ritual of colonial negotiations, emblematized English trade (see Figure XVI).

These depictions of genial relations with "black Virginians" as well as the comical male physiques lessened the threat of paganism in ways appropriate to mock-heroic conquest. Engravers had imported a reassuring but worrying image of heathen addiction to corporeal (and thus sinful) pleasures. Representations of black bondage to tobacco helped to displace British imperial aggression yet also expressed an implied fear of Britons' own bondage to sensual pleasures. Numerous Georgian poems and pamphlets bemoaned Britons' enslavement to the pipe. As Short remarked, "the greatest Inconvenience arising from habitual Smoaking is, that the Herb is of such an infatuating Nature, that those accustomed to it cannot leave it off without the greatest Mortification, and a kind of Violence or Force done to their Inclination." Tobacco advertisements and promotional literature for tobacco responded by emphasizing tobacco's benefits to individual health and Britain's imperial interests: tobacco papers and cards displayed patriotic banners announcing that tobacco was "Pro Patria" and "For Our Country"; they associated tobacco plants with Britannia, the English lion, and knights holding shields inscribed "omnes vinco," or "I conquer everyone."³³ Tobacconists suggested that blacks and whites enjoyed the pleasures of tobacco, but for the Briton smoking was also a conscious investment in the public utility of the tobacco trade, whereas such sensual pleasures bound blacks to the New World plantation with its promise of civilizing improvement or at least a continual supply of the weed.

Viewed within the broader context of British discussions about tobacco, these tobacco papers incorporated black smokers and Britons' own illicit attraction to heathen sensuality into multiple patriotic and parodic narratives about Britain's largely harmonious relationship to its imperial subjects. "Edward's Best Virginia," for instance, depicted a feathered white figure on horseback with his lance pointing down toward a fleur-de-lis. A banner inscribed "For Our Country" appears alongside Britannia and the English lion. These imagined relationships between British smokers and feathered heathens made light of Britain's anti-Catholic war by turning it into a deployment of heathens under the British Protestant banner that recalls the popular themes of Panacea. One wonders what witty, racially conscious, and often patriotic black Londoner Ignatius Sancho had in mind when he had two tobacco papers made in 1779 for the tobacco that he sold in his Westminster grocery, one of which used black cherubs to stress the sensual pleasures of his Trinidadian brand; the other, titled "The Wish," depicted a white man holding hands with a Native American–African figure standing on a fleur-de-lis (Figures XX–XXI).³⁴

Figure XX
"Sancho's best Trinidado," London, 1779, in Banks Collection, 117.150–1, Prints and Drawings Department, British Museum, London.

Figure XXI
"No 19 Sancho's Best Trinidado Charles Street, Westminster, The Wish," in Banks Collection, 117.150.

The tobacco papers' georgic plantation scenes reflect the rising importance of what Karen O'Brien calls the "imperial georgic," a mode that offered "a model of social self-understanding which allowed them [British readers] to comprehend the country and the city as separate yet integrated spheres of activity within an expanding British Empire." O'Brien suggests that slavery could not be "digested" by georgic poetry because it ruptured the association between productive labor and civic virtue that was characteristic of this literary mode.³⁵ These tobacco papers effected a similar erasure of the brutal relationships between British colonists and black slaves by offering a range of ways in which smokers could fantasize about the origins of this foreign weed that had brought tobacco shops, smoking clubs, and smoking inns to urban life, whether in Britons' conquest of large black men, trade with black royals, or the convivial experience of smoking with black heathens. Though occasionally depicting blacks laboring in plantation fields, tobacco papers maintained the relationship between virtue and labor by constructing the subordination of "black Virginians" largely in terms of their mutual interest in the production and trade of tobacco.

These fantasies of "black Virginians" circulated in coffeehouses, tobacco shops, and taverns, which were already renowned for various forms of illicit consumption. The pleasure of tobacco was tied to British conquest. It was also frequently equated with the pleasures of a woman and associated with and interpreted through the conviviality of a coffeehouse culture centered on male homosociality. Tobacco brotherhoods developed alongside the expansion of colonial production in the seventeenth century as a branch of a distinctly male subculture in English inns. Foreign visitors and graphic artists recorded the maleness of smoking crowds. A few tobacco papers directly represented imperial relationships, depicting a group of white, male British smokers sitting at a table as black men pour them drinks or labor in tobacco fields in the background. Many more images blurred the lines between white male smokers and the feathered black figures who supposedly produced the crop. As tobacconists suggested that white and black smokers shared these indulgences, they parodied narratives of British degeneration into the heathen other. On the one hand, as scholars have argued, the engravers, like many professional painters, conflated classical, Turkish, African, and Native American imagery to create rather generic figures who were sold to Londoners as "black Virginians" or colonial tobacco producers and used to promote consumption of imperial produce. On the other hand, the blackness of these generic bodies may have had more to do with notions of tobacco's effects than any intrinsic quality of the bodies themselves. Other than the reality that British slaves were typically black, there was a good reason for the tobacco producer to be black. Thomas Nash, one of the earliest writers on tobacco, happily asserted that it was a "divine drugge" and pointed out that the blackness of the prince of darkness's face is likely because "you haue been a great ... Tobacco-taker in your youth, which causeth it to come so to passe: but Dame Nature your nurse was partly in fault, else she might haue remedied it ... The deuill [is] a great Tobacca taker." A 1733 satirical poem insinuated that the filthiness of the smoker's face reflected what had happened to black Indians: "One known to you will this Assertion back, / That Fiends and Devils smoak'd the Indians black." Earlier James Duport related that tobacco "seems black in the pipe / But stains the white." Limited bathing probably meant that this relation was true. Other pamphlets on smoking, notably Richard Brathwaite's The Smoaking Age, included a line from Ovid that described how the raven was not white because his malicious activities had blackened him. Meanwhile antismoking pamphlets debased smokers by calling them "chimny-sweepers."³⁶ Tobacco could turn anyone black: the devil, Native Americans, Africans, even Englishmen.

Taken as a whole, Georgian tobacco papers emphasized the Briton's affiliation with the black male to a greater degree than did high art that incorporated black subjects. Rather than portraying relations with blacks in terms of their submissive gratitude as portraits and tracts on the slave trade often did, they depicted relations as arising largely from a shared delight in the pleasures of this plant. The overwhelming presence of white and black men on these tobacco papers suggests that these experiences of smoking were rooted in the homosocial bonds that were central to colonialism and the formation of the early modern coffeehouse, smoking club, and tobacco shop. In visual and literary representations of British imperialism as well as in eyewitness accounts, Britons figured the pursuit of empire as a masculine endeavor centered on the exploitation of a New World that was often rendered female in allegories and descriptive prose. Wheeler has suggested that the "enterprising male figure" was the "dominant preoccupation" of the 1720s and 1730s: "European and African men engaged in trade emerge more fully than their female counterparts in early representations of imperial contact and in conceptions of human difference."³⁷ Georgian tobacco papers made an intriguing contribution to this discourse: imagining black heathens indulging heavily in Nicotiana allowed Britons to create fantasies about their domination over and their fraternity with black men, a homosocial narrative of empire that arose from a sense of shared pleasure in a drug that (along with sugar) had enabled Britons to challenge Iberian and Dutch control over this Atlantic commerce.

These advertisements also reflect how participants in the developing subcultures of tobacco shops and coffeehouses could understand their movement away from familial, domestic spaces in terms of their contribution to a nationalistic, masculine, and imperial enterprise. James I's attempt to ban tobacco in the early seventeenth century utterly failed, yet fears of tobacco's ability to disrupt social bonds and familial life persisted. Some Londoners criticized smokers for exchanging their familial hearths for tobacco clubs where prostitution and other forms of deviant social behavior were reputed to be the norm. Numerous tracts represented smoking as an alternative form of sexual gratification. Some authors burlesqued tobacco by showing how it led men to fulfill desires for foreign drugs instead of for their wives. Other writers allied tobacco with freedom from the domestic realm while equating the coffeehouse with the "Citizens Academy." An advice pamphlet to newly married husbands encouraged them to resume the "Pipe and wonted Freedom" and consider exchanging an unsatisfactory wife at Bristol for "two hogsheads of Best Virginia tobacco." In response to women who blamed coffee, tobacco, and other drugs for distracting, bankrupting, and emasculating their husbands, The Mens Answer tied their participation in the social experience of coffeehouses to a satirical vision of the imperial enterprise: "so many of the little Houses, with the Turkish Woman straddling on their Signs, are but Emblems of what is to be done within for your Conveniences, meer Nursuries to promote the petulant Trade, and breed up a stock of hopeful Plants for the future service of the Republique, in the most thriving Mysteries of Debauchery."³⁸

Empire, colonial drugs, and exotic bodies figuratively lured men to tobacco shops and coffeehouses. In effect the wrapping of these papers around imported tobacco conferred a body to the weed. Smokers consumed the "Indian whore," "King of Trinidado," or "the strange Indian": personifications of tobacco that Londoners took from the Indian's devil. Such personifications perhaps explain why Charles Lamb referred to his pipe as "Bacchus' black servant, negro fine."³⁹ Tobacco leaves, often satirically substituted in these advertisements for the traditional Native American feathers, created these imagined encounters, which were transformed into commodities in and of themselves.

The foundation of New World colonies and the development of slave-based plantation agriculture fueled a consumer revolution in late Restoration and early Georgian England, and tobacco shops, like coffeehouses, lay at the center of a cosmopolitan culture increasingly shaped by Britain's place at the peripheries of contact with the New World, the East, and West Africa.⁴⁰ Imperialism had encouraged a fascination with novelty, and New World peoples, events, and products inspired plays, novellas, broadsides, ballads, satires, and journal articles. At their simplest Georgian tobacco papers, which were part of the mundane experience of urban life, offered smokers visual aids to imagine themselves as colonists or merchants without ever leaving a chair. Ever since King James I asked in 1604 whether Britons would debase themselves by imitating heathen behaviors, the consumption of tobacco remained a contentious issue in London. Debates about the virtues and vices of this plant suggest that it became a particular site at which anxieties about British degeneration were expressed because it evoked fears of the sins of luxury and concerns that contact with heathens corrupted the British self.

But instead of responding to doubts about tobacco consumption by erecting essentialist notions of racial difference or by simply ignoring its heathen associations, London tobacconists used a range of marketing tactics that combined the polyvalent meanings of tobacco, empire, and homosociality. Advertisements depicted pleasures of the smoke as at once the idea of contact with and authority over black producers of tobacco, the fantasy of extending the London smoking fraternity to include exotic black friends, and the transgressive experience of consuming a potentially demonic plant and entering into homosocial communities in London. In so doing the designers of tobacco papers drew on an established relationship of the black body to British imperialism and cultural perceptions of the racial other as a figure of deviance. By associating tobacco with patriotic visions of empire, these images echoed many other forms of promotional literature on colonialism, but they made a particular contribution in that they linked the physical euphoria of nicotine to the pleasures of these imperial myths.

Engravers appropriated a representation of deviant social behavior in the black heathen to legitimate deviant behaviors among British smokers themselves; use of the royal black male in the tobacco papers promoted and sanctioned tobacco consumption as well as the consumer's entry into illicit relations with black heathens. Whether willful or ignorant reconstructions of British authority, these images were part of the construction of myths about Britain's greater imperial benevolence and at times even insinuated a sexual or commercial partnership between the Briton and black heathen that furthered Britain's political challenge to France.

Tobacco papers such as "Baylis," which offered carnivalesque representations of black and white smokers coming together to delight in this weed, constructed a myth of interracial sociability that reflected the plant's symbolic significance in some Atlantic interactions as a medium for establishing fraternal relationships.⁴¹ Though tobacconists constructed the pleasures of their product in terms of the power differential between Britons and "black Virginians," their advertisements stressed the encounter itself, meaning that the pleasures of Nicotiana remained associated with heathen behavior despite its value to trade and empire. This innovative iconographic strand supported conventional views of British colonial benevolence, but more importantly it created space for imagining a fraternal relationship between colonial oppressors and their victims. The tension implicit between these different messages came to the fore later in the eighteenth century, when the image of the benevolent British colonial became a staple of proslavery ideology, whereas interracial fraternity, however imperfect and hierarchical it remained, became central to antislavery thought. Meanwhile these advertisements show that categories of belonging and excluding could be mediated during the late Restoration and Georgian eras in ways that unmoored the binary opposition of black and white and the association of that opposition with vice and virtue from lines of self and other.

Tobacconists enticed smokers by breaking down rather than reifying the distance between the metropole and the colonies even as the fanciful representations of British relationships to black producers inscribed the very real distance between them. In these tobacco papers, engaging with blackness became a lighthearted, often late-night encounter, a pleasurable experience largely unrelated to ideas of eternal damnation, which has been cast in a mock-heroic discourse of consumption and a parody of the sinful pleasures that some Britons attributed to tobacco. Late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tobacconists, especially those who used explicit acts of domination in their advertisements, believed that they could draw customers by associating their product with the racial boundaries and imperial hierarchies that sustained imperialism. But as the engravers centralized the imperial encounter to the experience of this plant, they created images that integrated the metropole and colony in ways that pushed local imaginations of interracial contact toward a recognition of Briton's affiliation with black heathens and perhaps even a recognition, albeit satirical, of the heathen in themselves.

Catherine Molineux is an assistant professor in the History Department at Vanderbilt University. This article was given in various forms at several conferences and seminars. The author would like to offer general thanks to those who heard and commented on this work. For their insightful comments and advice on earlier drafts of this article, she is especially indebted to Christopher L. Brown, Sylvia Frey, Jack P. Greene, Kay Dian Kriz, Katherine Moran, Philip D. Morgan, Ronald Paulson, James Sidbury, Daniel Usner, Marcus Wood, and the anonymous readers for the William and Mary Quarterly as well as members of the Johns Hopkins History Seminar and the Pre-Modern Others: Race and Sexuality Seminar at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. She thanks Mary Guyatt and the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Prints and Drawings Department, Sheila O'Connell and the staff of the British Museum, John Fisher, Michael Melia, and Jeremy Smith at the Guildhall Library, and Richard Ring and the staff of the John Carter Brown Library for their considerable help with research.

Notes

¹ Charles Lamb, "Farewell to Tobacco" (ca. 1805), in Sarah Augusta Dickson, Tobacco: A Catalogue of the Books, Manuscripts and Engravings, Acquired since 1942 in the Arents Tobacco Collection at the New York Public Library from 1507 to the Present (New York, 1943), 4: 206 (catalog no. 1,158).

² The trade directory The Intelligencer; Or, Merchants Assistant (London, 1738) lists George Farr in the grocery business.

³ This essay builds on scholarship that has stressed the contingency of representations of blacks and the fluidity of British notions of race. See esp. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, N.C., 1999); Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C., 1999); Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000); Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2003); Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, eds., An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester, Eng., 2003). For British perceptions of Africans, see Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, Wis., 1964); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); Anthony J. Barker, The African Link: British Attitudes to the Negro in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807 (London, 1978); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995). For studies of English racism and black slaves in England, see James Walvin, The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro in England, 1555–1860 (New York, 1971); Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (Chicago, 1972); Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British (New York, 1973); Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555–1945 (London, 1973); F. O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London, 1974); Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984); David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Surrey, Eng., 1985); Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London, 1993).

⁴ I am following Kathleen Wilson's definition of British imperialism as the "ideologies, values and practices supporting Britain's push for establishing and consolidating an empire" being "historically embedded, an amalgam of practices, values and attitudes that bore cultural and political meanings and generated tropes of representation specific to the period" (Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 [Cambridge, 1998], 23). For the colonial history of the Atlantic tobacco trade, see Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (New York, 1947); Jacob M. Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973), 1: 509–671; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985); Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986). For tobacco and consumption, see Sarah Augusta Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane: Tobacco in Sixteenth Century Literature (New York, 1954); Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, Eng., 1989); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London, 1993); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York, 1994); Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds., Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology (London, 1995); John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997); Richard Kroll, "Pope and Drugs: The Pharmacology of The Rape of the Lock," English Literary History 67, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 99–141; Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford, Calif., 2000).

⁵ The Heal and Banks collections in the British Museum together contain about fifteen thousand items. Tobacco advertisements amount to more than four hundred items, of which about two hundred include black figures. Similar advertisements can be found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Guildhall Library, and the Samuel Pepys Collection at Cambridge University. I have selected examples of prominent iconographic themes for reproduction (see Figures I–VI, VIII–IX, XI). For further examples of black princes and kings, see "Brice's Best Virginia," in Heal Collection, 117.16; "Martin's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.114; "Wilson's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.164. For further scenes of plantation labor, see "Bullock's Best York-River Mild Tobacco," ibid., 117.19; "Hyland's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.83; "Simper's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.147; "Wood's Best Virginia," London, before 1703, ibid., 117.168; "John Walker's Best Virginia," in Banks Collection, 117.174, Prints and Drawings Department, British Museum; "Watkinson's Best Virginia," 1781, ibid., 117.177. For further images of trade, see "Newman's Best Virginia," in Heal Collection, 117.121; "Robt Smith's Best Virginia," in Banks Collection, 117.165. For further images of camaraderie, see "Sweet-Scented Virginia," in Heal Collection, 117.178; "Richardson's Best Virginia," in Banks Collection, 117.141; "Ring's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.142. For examples of prints that associated tobacco with Sir Walter Ralegh, who was erroneously famous for introducing tobacco into England, see "W. Bacon," in Heal Collection, 117.5; "Richardson's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.173. For prints with David Garrick in the role of Abel Drugger, the simple-minded tobacconist in Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist, see "Borrow's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.11. For prints with Scottish Highlanders, which alluded to the notable involvement of Scottish merchants in the tobacco trade, see "Beatty's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.7; "John Cochrane," ibid., 117.26; "Nathl Grant," ibid., 117.68; "John Little," ibid., 117.109. For prints with Masonic symbols of brotherly love, which reflect the growing importance of tobacco within London fraternities, see "Cooke's Best Tobacco," ibid., 117.28; "Sarah Greenland Tobacco Pipe Maker," ibid., 117.69; "T. Withers's Best Fine York Tobacco," ibid., 117.167. For scenes of English fraternities, see "Bennetts Fumigations," ibid., 117.9; "F. Griszell's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.71; "Kingston's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.93; "Knightly's Mild Virginia," ibid., 117.96; "La Croix's," ibid., 117.97. For prints with tobacco processing, see "Abraham Delvalle," 1761, ibid., 117.35, 117.36, 117.37. For prints with the Royal Exchange and other city views, see "Dighton," ibid., 117.40; "W. Grimstone," ibid., 117.70; "London's Virginia," ibid., 117.110. For prints with patriotic imagery, see "Edward's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.44; "Harper's Best Virginia," ibid., 117.79. One card depicts a Virginia planter: "Eccleston's Virginia," ibid., 117.43. The 530 items with similar imagery in the Arents Collection at the New York Public Library are briefly catalogued in Dickson, Tobacco, 4: 194–201 (catalog no. 1145); Ambrose Heal, The Signboards of Old London Shops: A Review of the Shop Signs Employed by the London Tradesmen during the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. Compiled from the Author's Collection of Contemporary Trade-Cards and Billheads (1947; repr., New York, 1972).

⁶ The exception to this statement is Elizabeth Kim's article, which sees a distinction between Native Americans and Africans in tobacco advertisements and argues for a broader racialized hierarchy in advertisements as a whole (Kim, "Race Sells: Racialized Trade Cards in 18th-Century Britain," Journal of Material Culture 7, no. 2 [July 2002]: 137–65). I am more convinced by arguments for their hybridity. For Native American–African hybridity, see esp. Benjamin Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1925); Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1942); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), 10–13; Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York, 1975), 21; Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, From the Early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery," pt. 2, Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World (Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century), trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 2, The Image of the Black in Western Art (New York, 1979); Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London, 1986); Margaret W. Ferguson, "Feathers and Flies: Aphra Behn and the Seventeenth-Century Trade in Exotica," in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge, 1996), 235–59; Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans; Frank Felsenstein, ed., English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World: An Inkle and Yarico Reader (Baltimore, 1999); Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, chap. 1; Stephanie Pratt, "From Cannassatego to Outalissi: Making Sense of the Native American in Eighteenth-Century Culture," in Quilley and Kriz, Economy of Colour, 60–82; Roxann Wheeler, "Colonial Exchanges: Visualizing Racial Ideology and Labour in Britain and the West Indies," ibid., 36–59; David Bindman, ed., "Black Gold: Representing Africans in the Age of the Enlightenment," unpubl. ms. I thank Bindman for generously loaning this work.

⁷ David Bindman, "'A Voluptuous Alliance between Africa and Europe': Hogarth's Africans," in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, ed. Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton, N.J., 2001), 261. Materials for grocers and tea dealers make up more than six hundred items in the Heal and Banks collections. These advertisements sometimes include black, feathered figures, usually with a pipe or a tobacco plant, to signify the sale of tobacco in their shops. Occasionally, black boys are associated with sugar loaves. But the iconography does not extend beyond the shop sign or simple representations of black, feathered figures. Tea was generally characterized by oriental imagery, which was clearly associated with a form of politeness that Britons believed they shared with Chinese men and women. Advertisements that relate to chocolate and cocoa amount to ten items, which do not appear to have had imagery other than cocoa trees and the occasional association with Sir Hans Sloane's milk chocolate. Nineteenth-century advertisements for coffee used the iconography of the four continents, but I have not located any packaging material that includes images of plantations. For an account of the use of race to market goods, see Kim, Journal of Material Culture 7. For examples of black servants bringing tea, coffee, or chocolate, see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 3d ed. (London, 1989).

⁸ Robert Rogers, A Concise Account of North America: Containing a Description of the Several British Colonies on that Continent ... (London, 1765), 122 (quotation); Patrick Richardson, ed., Empire and Slavery (New York, 1968), 3–8. For an early reference to a tobacco shop, see George Chapman, Al Fooles: A Comody, Presented at the Black Fryers, And lately before his Maiestie (London, 1605). For "Clowdie Tobacco-shops," see [Thomas Tomkis], Albumazar. A Comedy presented before the Kings Maiestie at Cambridge, the ninth of March, 1614. By the Gentlemen of Trinitie Colledge (London, 1615), fol. L2r. I originally located much of the primary literature that I use in this piece in Dickson, Tobacco. For contemporary views of the tobacco trade, see John Nicoll, The Advantage of Great Britain Consider'd in the Tobacco Trade. With Reasons for Destroying the Tobacco Stalks, Home Consumption; Is most Humbly Offered to the Parliament of Great Britain (London, 1727); John Lacy, Observations on the Nature, Use and Trade of Tobacco (1733), in Dickson, Tobacco, 3: 250–51 (catalog no. 699). For the tobacco store, see T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and Their Trading Activities, c. 1740–90 (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1975). T. H. Breen argues that American buyers of British goods sought to display their links to British culture (see Breen, "An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776," Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 [October 1986]: 467–99; Breen, "'Baubles of Britain': The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, no. 119 [May 1988]: 73–104). I am suggesting that the links also worked in the opposite direction.

⁹ My thanks to Jonathan Goldberg for pointing out "The Armes of the Tobachonists," London, 1630. For further early accounts of tobacco's social disruption, see [Thomas Lodge], VVits Miserie, and the VVorlds Madnesse: Discovering the Devils Incarnat of this Age (London, 1596); Thomas Nash, Haue vvith you to Saffron vvalden; Or, Gabriell Harueys Hunt is vp (1596), in Dickson, Tobacco, pt. 3: 107 (catalog no. 103); Philaretes [pseudonym of L. or J. H.], Work for Chimny-sweeper; Or, A warning for Tabacconists ... (London, 1602); [James I], A Covnterblaste to Tobacco (London, 1604); [Samuel Rowlands], Hvmors Antiqve Faces. Drawne in proportion to his seuverall Antique ilestures (London, 1605); [Rowlands], The Knave of Clubbes (London, 1609); [Joshua Sylvester], Tobacco Battered (1616–17), in Dickson, Tobacco, 2: 31–36 (catalog no. 128); [James I], The Peace-Maker; Or, Great Brittaines Blessing (London, 1619); [John Taylor], The World Runnes on VVheeles; Or, Oddes, betwixt Carts and Coaches (London, 1623); [John Hancock], The Touchstone; Or, Trial of Tobacco (London, 1676).

¹⁰ See the discussion of shop signs, esp. the black boy shop sign, in Catherine A. J. Molineux, "The Peripheries Within: Race, Slavery, and Empire in Early Modern England" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2005). See also Kim, Journal of Material Culture 7. Many of the tobacco papers have been shorn of their packaging borders, making it difficult to distinguish between them and trade cards. In most cases I have used Ambrose Heal's identification of tobacco papers (see Index of Trades and Products represented in the Heal and Banks collections of Tradecards, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum).

¹¹ For other examples of puzzles, see "I. Michalski," in Heal Collection, 117.117; "J. Steward," 1836, ibid., 117.151; Sheila O'Connell, The British Museum: London (London, 2004).

¹² For the medieval and Renaissance origins of these hybrid figures, see for example Honour, New Golden Land; Devisse and Mollat, From the Early Christian Era; Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, eds., Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2000); T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe, eds., Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2005). The Native American–African hybrid figure has been discussed by several scholars. See footnote 6; Wheeler, "Colonial Exchanges," 36–59. For the relationship of these tobacco advertisements to the broader context of race representation in Georgian England, see Molineux, "Peripheries Within."