The History of Tobacco

Podcast Transcript

When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, members of his crew observed the native people they met offering them dried leaves as gifts.

They had no clue why, but they soon found out that native people smoked the burning leaves, and when they brought these leaves back to Europe, it became a sensation.

It created a demand for the product, which lasted for centuries and defined entire economies, until research in the 20th century found that it was doing far more harm than good.

Learn more about tobacco and how it shaped the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Before I begin, let me make a disclaimer: I am in no way advocating tobacco use. I have never smoked anything in my life, and I don’t even like being around people while they smoke.

It is a horrible habit, and the best thing you can do is never start.

That being said, we also have to be intellectually honest and recognize the importance this product has had economically and politically over the last five hundred years. That recognition is the purpose of this episode.

That said, let’s start with the plant itself.

Tobacco refers primarily to plants in the genus Nicotiana, a member of the nightshade family, which also includes potatoes and tomatoes. The two most historically significant cultivated species are Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana rustica.

Nicotiana tabacum, the milder and more commercially important species, is native to the Americas and is now grown worldwide.

Tobacco’s significance stems from nicotine, a natural defense mechanism the plant evolved to ward off herbivores.

Nicotine is what makes tobacco unique in human history. It is rapidly absorbed through the lungs, mouth, or nasal membranes and acts on the central nervous system by binding to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.

The result is a combination of stimulation and relaxation, heightened alertness, and, critically, dependence. Few plants are as easily grown, psychoactively potent, and highly addictive.

Archaeological and botanical evidence suggests that tobacco has been used by human beings for at least 8,000 to 10,000 years, and some estimates push that figure considerably higher.

The plant was cultivated and used across an extraordinarily wide swath of the Americas, from the southern reaches of South America to the far north of Canada, and its uses were as varied as the cultures that used it.

For most indigenous peoples, tobacco was not simply a recreational substance but a profoundly sacred plant. It occupied a central role in spiritual, ceremonial, and medicinal life.

Among many nations of the Eastern Woodlands, tobacco was considered a gift from the Creator and served as the primary medium of communication between humans and the spirit world.

When offered in prayer, burned in a sacred fire, or left at a site of spiritual significance, tobacco was believed to carry human intentions upward to the divine.

It was used in pipe ceremonies to seal agreements, form alliances, welcome guests, and mark significant transitions in community life. The shared pipe, often called a “calumet” or “peace pipe” by Europeans, represented a binding covenant; to smoke together was to invoke the sacred as a witness to one’s word.

Tobacco leaves also had medicinal uses, applied topically, chewed, or consumed as infusions to treat pain, parasites, and respiratory conditions.

In South America, shamanic use of tobacco was particularly intense. Among Amazonian peoples, shamans consumed tobacco in concentrated forms, as snuff blown through tubes, as liquid drunk through the nose, or as thick pastes absorbed through the skin, in doses far exceeding anything European smokers would later encounter.

Tobacco in the Amazon was not merely recreational; it was, in the words of anthropologist Johannes Wilbert, the “master plant” around which entire cosmologies were organized.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in October 1492, members of his crew observed the Taíno people offering them dried leaves as gifts.

On November 2nd of that year, two of Columbus’s men, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, became the first Europeans recorded to have witnessed tobacco smoking when they encountered people in Cuba inhaling smoke through a Y-shaped tube called a tabaco.

A word that likely referred to the implement rather than the plant itself and became, through a linguistic migration, the name for the substance.

Rodrigo de Jerez returned to Spain as an enthusiastic smoker, reportedly frightening his neighbors with the smoke issuing from his mouth and nose, and was briefly imprisoned by the Inquisition on the suspicion that only the devil could grant a man the power to exhale smoke.

European attitudes toward tobacco shifted rapidly from curiosity to enthusiasm. The Spanish and Portuguese explorers who followed Columbus brought tobacco seeds and leaves back to Europe in the early sixteenth century, and the plant was initially cultivated in Iberian gardens as a botanical curiosity and, soon, as a medicine.

The French diplomat Jean Nicot, whose name is immortalized in “nicotine” and *Nicotiana, is often credited with popularizing tobacco in France in the 1560s, reportedly sending powdered tobacco to Catherine de Medici as a remedy for her son’s migraines.

By the late sixteenth century, smoking, snuffing, and chewing tobacco had become fashionable across Spain, France, England, and the Ottoman Empire.

Not everyone was pleased. King James I of England and James VI of Scotland, the same person, published his famous treatise A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, a vehement denunciation that described smoking as “a custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs.”

The plant that would transform colonial America was not the indigenous tobacco of eastern North America, which was milder and less commercially appealing, but Nicotiana tabacum, the species found in South America.

The turning point came in 1612, when John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, successfully cultivated a crop of Nicotiana tabacum in the struggling Virginia colony at Jamestown, having obtained seeds from the Spanish Caribbean.

The first commercial shipment of Virginia tobacco reached England in 1614, and the response was enthusiastic. By 1617, Virginia was exporting some 20,000 pounds of tobacco annually. By 1620, that figure had grown to 40,000 pounds, and it continued to grow exponentially.

Tobacco did not merely save the Virginia colony; it defined it. The plant shaped the very landscape and social structure of the Chesapeake region.

Because tobacco exhausts soil rapidly, planters constantly needed new

land, driving an aggressive expansion westward into indigenous territories. Tobacco cultivation was labor-intensive, requiring careful tending throughout the growing season, skilled harvesting, and meticulous curing, all of which demanded a large, reliable workforce.

This demand was initially met by indentured servants from England, Scotland, and Ireland. As the seventeenth century progressed, however, planters increasingly turned to enslaved Africans, whose labor was permanent.

The tobacco economy was thus one of the primary engines driving the expansion of African slavery in British North America.

By the eighteenth century, the great plantation houses of Virginia, the Carters, the Lees, the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, were built on tobacco wealth, and the planter class that emerged from this economy would play a decisive role in shaping American political culture, including the revolution against Britain.

The tobacco trade also created persistent debts among Virginia planters, who purchased luxury goods on credit from British merchants against future harvests, a cycle that generated genuine resentment of the colonial economic system and contributed to revolutionary sentiment.

Even as tobacco was becoming entrenched in North America, it was spreading across the globe at remarkable speed.

The mechanisms of this spread were many: Portuguese and Spanish merchants carried tobacco seeds and the smoking habit to Africa, India, the Middle East, and East Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Ottoman soldiers encountered tobacco and brought it home. Russian traders spread it eastward across Siberia. Japanese merchants received it from the Portuguese in the 1540s or 1550s, and within a generation, it had spread across the archipelago despite repeated prohibitions.

The speed with which tobacco conquered the world was unprecedented among agricultural products in world history. By 1620, a mere 125 years after Columbus’s voyage, tobacco was being grown and smoked in virtually every inhabited region on earth.

Despite the speed at which tobacco spread, it wasn’t consumed like it is today. It was mostly smoked in pipes or via cigars, which were fully rolled tobacco leaves.

The cigarette fundamentally altered tobacco consumption. While hand-rolled cigarettes had long been present in Spain and the Americas, their widespread adoption in the West was significantly spurred by soldiers returning from the Crimean War in the 1850s. These soldiers brought back the Turkish and Egyptian practice of smoking finely cut tobacco wrapped in paper.

The decisive technological development came in 1880 when James Albert Bonsack, a young Virginia inventor, patented a mechanical cigarette-rolling machine capable of producing 120,000 cigarettes per day, effectively replacing 48 hand rollers.

James Buchanan Duke of Durham, North Carolina, recognized the machine’s implications immediately, licensed it, and began an aggressive campaign of price cutting, advertising, and corporate consolidation.

In 1890, he merged several competitors into the American Tobacco Company, a trust that controlled roughly four-fifths of the American tobacco business.

Though the Sherman Antitrust Act forced the trust’s dissolution in 1911, the four successor companies remained enormously powerful and continued to dominate the industry.

The invention of the industrially manufactured cigarette dramatically increased tobacco consumption.

Mechanization slashed production costs, making cigarettes affordable to the working class. The cigarette was portable, quickly consumed, and could be smoked in contexts where the pipe was impractical.

The inhalation of cigarette smoke, which was more easily accomplished than with cigar or pipe smoke due to the milder curing of cigarette tobacco, delivered nicotine to the bloodstream more rapidly and more efficiently, making cigarettes more addictive.

The low costs and industrial production of cigarettes created the chain smoker, which was something that had never really existed before.

The relationship between tobacco and disease had been observed sporadically for centuries. Johann Michael Elasser noted the connection between pipe smoking and lip cancer in 1795, and scattered clinical observations accumulated through the nineteenth century, but the scientific case against tobacco was constructed methodically only in the mid-twentieth century.

The pivotal studies were published in 1950, when Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the United States and Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill in Britain simultaneously published landmark epidemiological research demonstrating a strong statistical link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

The American Surgeon General’s report of January 1964, constituted a turning point in public understanding.

The report, which reviewed more than 7,000 studies, concluded unequivocally that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer in men, was strongly associated with lung cancer in women, caused chronic bronchitis, and was associated with numerous other diseases.

The cultural impact was immediate and profound, though it would take decades for that impact to fully manifest in behavioral changes.

Warning labels appeared on cigarette packages in 1965. Broadcast advertising for cigarettes was banned in the United States in 1971. Restrictions on smoking in public places began to multiply from the 1970s onward.

The legal and regulatory pressure on the tobacco industry escalated dramatically in the final decades of the twentieth century.

In the United States and other high-income countries, the decline of smoking has been substantial. American adult smoking prevalence fell from roughly 42 percent in 1965 to about 12 to 14 percent by the early 2020s. Similar declines were recorded in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and much of Western Europe.

The reduction in smoking over the last several decades has had one of the largest positive impacts on public health in modern history. It is not an exaggeration to say that declines in smoking have saved tens of millions of lives.

Few plants have shaped human history as profoundly as tobacco. It financed the founding of the American Republic while simultaneously supporting the institution of slavery.

It created fortunes that funded universities, museums, and hospitals, and it generated tax revenues that built roads, schools, and welfare states.

And it killed people. Lots of people. By conservative estimates, approximately one hundred million people in the twentieth century alone were killed by tobacco use.

Despite the sharp declines in the West, an estimated 1.2 billion people still use tobacco products around the world today. That is almost 1 in 5 people over the age of 15. Less than what it was 25 years ago, but still a staggering amount.

What started as a plant used ritually by native Americans has become one of the deadliest products in all of human history.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Today’s review comes from brenwhat4 on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write:

Right up my alley

Absolutely love this podcast. Almost addicting. I’m learning so much about things I’ve always wondered about but never researched. It’s all right here with basic bullet points of what happened. I’d give 10 stars if I could! It’s that good. Also the narrator has a great voice

Thanks, Brenwhat! I’ve had a lot of people lately commenting on my voice. The funny thing is, before I started this podcast, no one ever told me that before in my life. I think it is all because of context.

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