Abstract
This essay investigates the circulation of the trope of the Black body in visual and textual representations of tobacco consumption, both smoked and taken as snuff. I look at the ways in which tobacco advertising depicting the type of snuff for sale or representing enslaved Africans working on plantations articulated notions of race and coloniality. I then show that snuffboxes can be seen as material counterparts in the dissemination of racist ideology in the eighteenth century. The gender-defining practice of taking snuff is studied in relation to colonial politics using a selection of texts and a material corpus of rare extant “Blackamoor” snuffboxes (depicting the black body and face) that have not yet received scholarly attention. I argue that through female agency, the use of Blackamoor snuffboxes normalised slavery by integrating it in the cultural rituals of British sociability through a process of material aestheticisation.
Highlights
The rise of transatlantic colonial exchanges in the eighteenth century led to an increase in tobacco consumption, either smoked or taken as snuff—the pleasures of the pipe and of the nose spread rapidly among aristocratic and middle-class circles.1 Whilst smoking was a masculine activity, taking snuff was shared by women and men alike
The colonial origin of tobacco and its association with indentured labour connected these fashionable practices with imperial politics, and material culture was a powerful site for the display of this relation
The first section of this paper focuses on the mercantile materialisation of race in printed advertising, to show that the consumption of advertisements as much as that of tobacco contributed to shaping racial ideology
Summary
The rise of transatlantic colonial exchanges in the eighteenth century led to an increase in tobacco consumption, either smoked or taken as snuff—the pleasures of the pipe and of the nose spread rapidly among aristocratic and middle-class circles. Whilst smoking was a masculine activity, taking snuff was shared by women and men alike. I wish to unearth the ways in which the economic and colonial implications of taking snuff or buying tobacco were fashioned into an aesthetic of blackness deployed in decorative artefacts, advertising print culture and fiction. I contend that the fashion for snuff allowed for an erasure of the inhumanity of colonial politics, as it subsumed and incorporated slavery in the cultural rituals of British sociability through a process of aestheticisation and commodification: customers could buy the ornamental. The material corpus of eighteenth-century European and British snuffboxes is vast, as is the body of texts dealing with tobacco consumption. 208) and that the Victorian period saw the rise of commodity-driven economies, I contend that imperial exchanges were materialised in “things” that were consumed as early as the eighteenth century, and that tobacco advertising and the manufacture of snuffboxes can be seen as early manifestations of “commodity racism”, The last section attempts to interpret the rare (and hitherto unexplored) material archives of Blackamoor snuffboxes in light of the connection between race, coloniality and female agency in the consumption of snuff
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