Norton Introduction to Tobacco and Chocolate - 10/1 Class Notes: Asynchronous Day

Introduction: Views on the Inflation of Tobacco and Chocolate

• For some, the infiltration of tobacco and chocolate by the early seventeenth century into Madrid, the seat of the Spanish Empire, defined a new epoch.

• Like its (indigenous) American counterparts, European society was profoundly affected by the new era inaugurated in 1492.

• Chocolate and tobacco were not neutral resources, products of the natural world, devoid of cultural content.

Tobacco: Prior to 1492

• “Tobacco” was much more than a plant; it was manufactured using technologies of cultivation, curing, and processing.

• Smoking, which was a favored Amerindian method of ingesting tobacco, was also a technology, and one that many believe did not exist in Europe prior to 1492.

Tobacco: Expansion

• The speed at which tobacco smoking swept across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia after initial exposure is remarkable in comparison with the time lag between Columbus’s first voyages and tobacco’s systemic diffusion throughout Europe.

• In addition to the push factor of a tobacco-loving mariner subculture, “pull” factor that likely contributed to the rapid adoption of tobacco in many societies was the existence of mainstream traditions of using psychotropic substances, namely betel, cannabis, and opium.

Chocolate: History

“Chocolate” is the consequence of countless breakthroughs in plant domestication, experimental hybridization, cultivation techniques, and fermentation and curing technologies, not to mention a complex set of social rituals surrounding its manufacture, distribution, display, service, and consumption

Chocolate: Expansion

• While the beginnings of tobacco’s diffusion across Europe lay with explorers of diverse nationalities in Spanish and Portuguese America, chocolate flowed through pathways from metropolitan Spain into the rest of Europe.

• That dark, stimulating beverage served as a “gateway” drink for those other ones—coffee and tea.

The Widespread Adoption of Chocolate and Tobacco

-The widespread adoption and tobacco and chocolate cannot be explained by their appeal or by a supposed “Europeanization.”

• Europeans were initially repelled by the substances

• European uses of the goods had their origins in native American technologies, material forms, therapeutic knowledge, and symbolic investments.

-The arrival of tobacco and chocolate into European society was predicated on their social character; demand for the goods flowed from the emergence of trans-Atlantic communities of habituated consumers encompassing elite networks of colonial officials, well-traveled missionaries, and merchants, and plebian networks of mariners.

-By the early seventeenth century, the consumption of tobacco and chocolate permeated Spanish society in both the New and Old Worlds.

In Today’s World…

• The modern cigarette and a Hershey’s kiss are far removed from the tobacco and chocolate profiled in this book. However, some of their cultural associations have endured to the present despite the radical transformations of tobacco and chocolate’s material forms.

• In sharing a cigarette or some chocolate (and its successors, coffee and tea), people declare their affection—or at least cordiality—toward one another.