In the excerpt below, Apperson assembles references to tobacco use from a wide variety of sources, including plays, pamphlets, and novels, to chronicle the varying degrees of acceptance of smoking as a social activity from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

In the following essay, Nash examines the well-organized smuggling operations that were designed to circumvent the high taxes placed on tobacco during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such activities, the critic observes, resulted in an inaccurate historical accounting of the volume and “regional impact” of the tobacco trade in both England and Scotland.

In the following essay, Pagan traces the economic ascendancy established by the Virginia tobacco trade and how it translated into significant political power for the tobacco growers and the London-based tobacco importers.

In the following essay, Best demonstrates how in the seventeenth century “powerful persons and agencies” who had a political and economic stake in the tobacco trade between Europe and America succeeded in transforming tobacco into an acceptable product despite the persistence of social disapproval.

In the following excerpt, Hamilton examines the changing medical and social attitudes to tobacco from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century and claims that tobacco was “the very worst gift of the New World to the Old.”