Tobacco-Taking and Identity-Making in Early Modern Britain and North America

Angela Mcshane

doi:10.1017/s0018246x21000273

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the praxis of transatlantic snuff- and tobacco-taking and its importance to personal and national identity-making over the long eighteenth century. It focuses in particular on the role of snuff- and tobacco boxes, which uniquely provided white middling-sorts on both sides of the Atlantic with a socialized canvas upon which significant statements of status, personality, and sensibility could be made. However, a closer study of these objects during America's revolutionary period reveals stark contrasts in the social, political, and gendered meanings ascribed to tobacco-taking between Britain and America. The material evidence, it is argued, suggests that for men, and especially for women in revolutionary America, snuff- and tobacco-taking became almost synonymous with loyalty to the republic.

Highlights

This article tracks shifts in tobacco-taking practices from the 1650s, when the tobacco habits of colonial America closely mirrored British and European manners, taste, and style, through to the American Revolution and its aftermath, when tobacco-taking was seen to frame the national identity of white, newly independent Americans
This article explores the praxis of transatlantic snuff- and tobacco-taking and its importance to personal and national identity-making over the long eighteenth century
Fundamental to this analysis is the evidence provided by tobacco boxes that were made, owned, and used by mostly ‘middling-sort’ people in Britain and North America from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth

Summary

Introduction

This article tracks shifts in tobacco-taking practices from the 1650s, when the tobacco habits of colonial America closely mirrored British and European manners, taste, and style, through to the American Revolution and its aftermath, when tobacco-taking was seen to frame the national identity of white, newly independent Americans.

Results

Conclusion