Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

Abstract

The globalization of pipes and smoking in the early modern world is often thought of as a linear movement from the Americas to Africa and Eurasia. While this is true of tobacco smoking, other early modern cultures of smoking (such as the use of cannabis pipes) diffused from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, not from the Americas. This article traces the technological, linguistic, and cultural translations of smoking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the Atlantic world. These movements provoked significant new questions. Early modern smokers (and their critics) grappled with the question of how pipes and other “pyric technologies” of elemental transformation interacted with the body and mind—and with debates about racialized theories of health, long-distance travel, the African slave trade, and the translatability of knowledge and habits.