Tobacco appeared in the Old World as part of an invasion of novel mood-altering imported ‘soft drugs’. Coffee, cocoa and tea all converged on Europe from east and west as global exploration opened up new trade routes. Like tobacco, all arrived with extravagant medical claims and counter-claims, alternately hailed as health-giving elixirs and condemned as pernicious and enervating luxuries. Each was subject to local or national bans before a regime of taxes and licences settled around them; and each was gradually adapted to suit the European market.
The Spanish conquistadors found that the most highly esteemed drink among the Aztecs was chocolate, made fTom fermented cocoa seeds, which contain the stimulant theobromine. Moctezuma reportedly consumed nothing else, and cocoa beans were even used as currency by his people. Chocolate rapidly became a favourite luxury of the Spanish court, and colonists began cultivating the tree in the Caribbean, as depicted in Phillipe Sylvestre Dufour’s Traitez nouveaux et curieux du cafe, du the et du chocolate, published in Lyon in 1688. (Wellcome Library, London)
The European desire for these exotic novelties was not entirely unprecedented. The courts of medieval Europe had developed a passion for spices, which were believed to originate in Paradise itself. They were sold on the luxury market for huge profit and consumed in prodigious quantities; indeed, the discovery of the New World had been an accidental byproduct of attempts to expand the spice trade. But the market for the new ‘soft drugs’ encompassed a far larger class of consumers, and appealed to the new ethic of individualism. The ideas of the Reformation were elaborating forms of private life where citizens expressed their personal preferences through consumption and by frequenting new forms of public space such as the coffee house. In a culture poor in native stimulants and euphoriants, the new drugs offered alternatives to alcohol that were more congenial to the values of sobriety, decency and productivity. They generated new forms of trade and profit, not merely in the drugs themselves, but in the cups, pipes, pots, jars, spoons and snuff boxes produced by manufactories across the continent in distinctive local styles.
A German coffee house in the eighteenth century. Germany adopted the coffee habit later than its Atlantic neighbours, and the beans remained a costly import. Coffee was highly taxed to discourage its use; some states even prohibited it, and others launched patriotic drives to substitute ‘coffee’ made from chicory, which was grown by local farmers rather than being imported fTom abroad.
00
Ro
The new ‘soft drugs’ were regarded as enervating and unhealthy by some doctors and religious figures. These tea-drinkers, illustrated in a tract on the abuse of the new hot beverages published in Leipzig in 1707, are described as ‘drinking themselves to death’ in their mindless pursuit of fashion. (Wellcome Library, London)
Where tobacco was the universal accompaniment to the drugs of the New World, all these ‘soft drugs’ rose to popularity in conjunction with another new psychoactive substance or ‘drug food’: refined sugar. Originally produced in New Guinea and Indonesia, sugar had, like coffee been patched into the global economy by the Arab trade network and had ‘followed the Koran’ to Spain, from where Columbus had introduced it to the Caribbean on his second voyage. Sugar plantations in British, French and Spanish colonies such as Jamaica and Santo Domingo, initially cleared and worked by natives and indentured convicts, had become massive enterprises driven by European capital and African slave labour, and the Atlantic trade was now supplying it in industrial quantities to Europe, where it had previously been a rarity.
Like the other New World drugs, sugar arrived as a medicine. Its concentrated calories gave it miraculous powers of energy and nutrition for babies, invalids and the elderly, but it was not long before the wider population demonstrated the untapped potential of the European sweet tooth, which thus far had been limited to fruit and honey. The sugar buzz was addictive: doses that initially produced nausea quickly became tolerated, and produced cravings for more. It became a condiment, a medicine and a preservative; it was added to meat to make it richer, and to beer to make it stronger. In particular, it transformed the new soft drugs into more appealing forms. Amerindian cultures and palates had a predilection for concentrated, black and bitter liquids; in Europe, New World drugs were acculturated to local tastes by being sweetened, creamed and spiced. Tobacco ropes were cured with molasses; a cup of sugared tea or coffee was a calorie-rich substitute for a meal; sweetened chocolate bonbons and pastilles represented the height of luxury and refinement. The westward voyages of discovery might have failed to open a new route for the spice trade, but they had brought back substances more valuable still.
African slaves working on a Caribbean sugar plantation, in an illustration from 1595. Over the next century, booming European demand would fuel an intensive system of mass production that demanded slave labour on an unprecedented scale. (Wellcome Library, London)
In these Victorian tableaux, tobacco and sugar plants are portrayed as beneficent crops that have united all corners of the British empire in profitable cycles of production, trade and consumption. (Wellcome Library, London)
Here, at the birth of the global drug trade, can be discerned the origins
Of what has been called the ‘psychoactive revolution’: the trend towards the consumption of more types of drug, in ever more powerful forms, that has come to characterize the modern West and, increasingly, the entire modern world. The industrial production and mass consumption that made it so profitable to ship Jamaican sugar and Virginia tobacco around the world has replicated itself again and again in the intervening centuries, and in the process has accelerated humanity from a patchwork of self-contained cultures, each with its own indigenous drug, towards a monoculture where local habits are displaced by global commodities, themselves displaced in turn by ever stronger variants.
Although this process was driven by a universal and seemingly insatiable demand, it was also resisted vigorously from the start. One of the most frequent arguments against tobacco in the seventeenth century was that each race was naturally adapted to its own drug: smoking might suit the Native American constitution but be harmful to the European. This line of reasoning gained much credence from the reaction of the New World peoples to Europe’s native drug: alcohol. From around 1650 the rum trade began to penetrate the interior of America, with hunters and trappers using it as a tool in negotiations with the local tribes. The stereotype was quickly formed: Indians were unable to cope with strong drink. Once the bottle was produced, they would be powerless to resist finishing it; trappers would deceive them while they were under the influence; they would become consumed by drunken rages, leading to violence, inter-tribal vendettas and mourning ceremonies where more alcohol would beget more violence, feeding a vicious spiral of decline and extinction. The Columbian exchange of diseases was mirrored by its exchange of drugs: profitable for Europe, tragic for America.
It was not so much the Native American constitution, however, as Native American culture that underlay the apparent inability to handle alcohol. Like smoking to Europeans, it was an entirely new practice, and new words needed to be coined to describe it and the state that it produced. For Native Americans its closest analogy was the intoxicants used for vision quests, and like them it was seen as a powerful medicine that needed to be taken to purgative excess: if a group of friends were given a bottle of rum, they would nominate one to drink it all rather than share it. At the same time, much of the damage attributed to it by European observers had in truth already been done by epidemic diseases, military defeat and tribal breakdown, of which drunkenness was more a symptom than a cause. Yet the stereotype was not without foundation: among many tribes alcohol brought with it a damaging licence to break taboos, especially around sex and violence, that hastened social collapse. Many tribal leaders forbade it to no avail, and the trail of destruction to which it bore witness would soon extend far beyond the Americas to the Pacific and Australia.
The cultural exchange of drugs was hugely profitable, but it was equally clear from the start that it brought risks that could not be fully grasped until it was too late. Nor were the dangers of strong alcohol confined to ‘primitive races’, as the mass availability of cheap distilled spirits in Europe - gin in England, absinthe in France, aquavit in Sweden - would soon make abundantly clear.
The global trade in tobacco generated distinct local styles of pipe such as the Indian ‘hubble-bubble’ or hookah, seen here in an engraving from 1773. Indian tobacco was often mixed with sugar and rosewater, producing a mild, water-cooled and perfumed smoke. (Wellcome Library, London)
World History
