Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson Read Free Book Online Page B

more controversial was tobacco, introduced by Walter Ralegh and one of the few enduring legacies of the abortive Roanoke settlement in Virginia (see Chapter 2). As with tea, the purveyors of tobacco insisted on its medicinal properties. In 1587 Ralegh’s servant Thomas Heriot reported that the ‘herbe’, when dried and smoked, ‘purgeth superfluous fleame and other grosse humours, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body: by which means the use thereof not onely preserveth the body from obstructions, but also ... in short time breake them: whereby their bodies are notably preserved in health, and know not many grievous diseases, wherewithall we in England are often times afflicted’. One early advertisement proclaimed tobacco’s ability ‘Health to preserve, or to deceive our Pein, / Regale thy Sense, & aid the Lab’ring Brain’. Not everyone was persuaded. To JamesI – aman ahead of his times in many other respects too – the burning weed was ‘loathesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain [and] dangerous to the lungs’. But as the cultivation of tobacco exploded in Virginia and Maryland, there was a dramatic slide in prices (from between 4 and 36 pence per pound in the 1620s and 1630s to around 1 penny per pound from the 1660s onwards) and a corresponding shift towards mass consumption. While in the 1620s only gentlemen had taken tobacco, by the 1690s it was ‘a custom, the fashion, all the mode – so that every plow-man had his pipe’. In 1624 James put aside his scruples and established a royal monopoly: the revenue to be gained as imports soared was clearly worth the ‘hateful’ fumes, though the monopoly proved as unenforceable as a blanket ban.
    The new imports transformed not just the economy but the national lifestyle. As Defoe observed in his Complete English Tradesman : ‘The teatable among the ladies and the coffee house among the men seem to be the places of new invention ...’ What people liked most about these new drugs was that they offered a very different kind of stimulus from the traditional European drug, alcohol. Alcohol is, technically, a depressant. Glucose, caffeine and nicotine, by contrast, were the eighteenth-century equivalent of uppers. Taken together, the new drugs gave English society an almighty hit; the Empire, it might be said, was built on a huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush – a rush nearly everyone could experience.
    At the same time, England, and especially London, became Europe’s emporium for these new stimulants. By the 1770s about 85 per cent of British tobacco imports were in fact re-exported and almost 94 per cent of imported coffee was re-exported, mainly to northern Europe. This was partly a reflection of differential tariffs: heavy import duties restricted domestic coffee consumption to the benefit of the burgeoning tea industry. Like so many national characteristics, the English preference for tea over coffee had its origins in the realm of fiscal policy.
    By selling a portion of their imports from the West and East Indies to continental markets, the British were making enough money to satisfy another long-dormant appetite, for a crucial component of the new consumerism was a sartorial revolution. Writing in 1595, Peter Stubbs remarked that ‘no people in the world are so curious in new fangles as they of England be’. He had in mind the growing appetite of English consumers for new styles of textile, an appetite which by the early 1600s had swept aside a whole genre of legislation: the sumptuary laws that had traditionally regulated what Englishmen and women could wear according to their social rank. Once again Defoe spotted the trend, in his Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business :
    ... plain country Joan is now turned into a fine London madam, can drink tea, take snuff, and carry herself as high as the best. She must have a hoop too, as well as her mistress; and her poor scanty linsey-woolsey petticoat is