Smoke: A Global History of Smoking

This remarkable collection of over 30 essays makes its first impact for two reasons. Firstly, it is beautifully produced and profusely illustrated, while being marketed at a reasonable price. The publishers deserve praise for this increasingly rare event in hardback publishing. Secondly—and one must take this to be an editorial decision—the focus of the collection is the history, not of tobacco or opium, but of smoke and smoking. This simple manoeuvre opens up what can only be called a cultural universe, one with its origins in the earliest known history of humankind and which takes us right up to current debates about very modern objects and their uses: the cigarette and its alleged dangers or the recent fashion for smoking rocks of cocaine, now of course called “crack.”

Figure 1.

Eds Sander L Gilman, Zhou Xun

Reaktion, £29/$38, pp 408 ISBN 1 86189 200 4 www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

Rating: ★★★★

As a result, the central importance of smoking in all cultures and the highly complex and differing practices and meanings behind smoking are wonderfully displayed. Smoking as religious ritual; smoking as a possible source of medical healing in early modern Europe; smoking as pleasure, espe-cially in groups—all receive attention. And this is where the illustrations and the photographs play such a vital part, providing amazing examples of artefacts (pipes, above all), places (the opium den, the cocktail bar), and icons who almost are their cigarettes or their cigars (Bogart, Dietrich, Castro). Text and illustrations blend perfectly.

Thanks to Herodotus we are told of ancient Scythians howling with pleasure after throwing hemp seeds on hot stones and inhaling. We note that “the ancient Mayas were passionate smokers and so were their gods.” We are educated in the varying and important history of women and smoking, especially of cigarettes. These were a sign of emancipation, often sexual, and a sign of suffrage in late nineteenth century Europe but on the other hand were a sign of domestic enslavement in modernising China, a practice to be ended for a healthy future. At least in theory: Chinese men, especially under Communism, were actively encouraged to smoke, and eventually sex barriers collapsed and now everyone in China smokes. As one of the coeditors, Zhou Xun, puts it in her essay on the topic, “Smoking is a necessary part of being professional, since business can rarely be carried out without an exchange of cigarettes.”

Figure 3.

The variety of topics covered in this volume and the number of contributors make it difficult to single out particular contributors. Suffice it to say that it augurs well when both editors contribute excellent pieces. As well as Zhou Xun's essay, that by Sander Gilman on Jews and smoking looks at the historical association between Jews and the tobacco industry as well as the growth of racist accounts of “Eastern” Jewish susceptibility to tobacco poisoning and nervous illness. We also get, of course, Freud and his (probably fatal) cigar. Gilman has a light touch in highlighting the phallic aspects of the cigar and Freud: “Without it, he ceased to be a complete human being.” But all contributors find their individual voice, happily housed within sections concentrating on history, artistic and literary representations, gender, ethnicity, and—the big modern dilemma—the burning issue of why it is so hard to stop.

Figure 2.

Tar quality: smoking icon Humphrey Bogart, and (top right) an advertisement for the Lucky Strike “purifying process”

Clay pipes or expensive silver pipes; smoking as a pleasure for the elite but not one to be extended to the labouring masses without careful consideration; smoking and advertising and billions of dollars (and some fine advertisements); the post-coital cigarette; smoking and death (the work of Richard Doll and successors): it is all here, with much else besides.

It is a real pleasure to recommend a book of true anthropological range and seriousness, conjuring, like the perfect smoke ring, the history of a universal human practice at a time when the issues raised (discussed in the final chapters) are at the forefront of current world-wide debates on health policy and social safety.