Sacred Plant: Origins, Indigenous Cultures and Europe's Discovery of Tobacco (The History of Tobacco

Before tobacco became an industrial product, it was a sacred plant, a medicine, a diplomatic instrument and the foundation of an emerging global commodity system.The Origins of Tobacco traces the human history of Nicotiana from Indigenous cultivation and ceremonial use across the Americas through European encounter, colonial expansion, plantation agriculture and international trade.Moving across archaeology, botany, empire, slavery, agriculture, medicine, economics and material culture, Stephen Buss examines how Indigenous knowledge was encountered and transformed by European expansion; how tobacco reshaped Virginia, the Caribbean and Atlantic commerce; and how governments learned to regulate, monopolise and tax a commodity they had repeatedly attempted to suppress.The book explores cultivation and curing, pipes and cigars, snuff and chewing tobacco, royal monopolies, smuggling networks, early medical claims, archaeological evidence and the social worlds built around tobacco long before the manufactured cigarette.Richly illustrated and extensively referenced, Volume I explains how a culturally specific American plant became one of the world's great international commodities and created the agricultural, commercial and political foundations inherited by the cigarette age.