Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (review)

Alfred Crosby’s seminal history of globalization, The Columbian Exchange, told a forceful story of conquest—diseases slaughtering millions of Indians, and Spaniards imposing their crops and livestock on the abandoned fields—but with one curious exception. He narrated the return passages of American plants as a seemingly neutral account of demographic change without explaining why potatoes, peanuts, maize, and manioc spread across Europe, Africa, and Asia. In the past decade, historians have begun to fill this gap and examine more carefully the social conditions under which novel foods gained acceptance, with special attention to farmers and cooks instead of the more usual explorers and merchants. Marcy Norton’s book makes a significant addition to this literature by arguing that chocolate and tobacco were conquistadors in reverse, carrying American cultural practices back to the European imperial metropolis.

The remarkable popularity of these two substances has often been attributed to the inherently addictive properties of nicotine and theobromine, a relative of caffeine found in cacao. Even those who eschew biological determinism have generally argued that Europeans domesticated the New World products, adding sugar to sweeten the bitter native brew and incorporating tobacco into Galenic pharma-copeia. Norton rightly challenges both interpretations, noting that far from natural resources, tobacco and chocolate were products of indigenous culture, and required specialized knowledge to process and consume them, practices that Europeans adopted wholesale.

In documenting the reception of chocolate and tobacco among Europeans, Norton gives particular emphasis to the social nature of consumption. Both products were intimately tied with indigenous rituals, although tobacco came to be viewed in a more negative light as diabolically inspired, while chocolate, the drink of indigenous lords, was associated with the emerging image of the noble savage. And it was through social interactions that Europeans acquired these cultural practices, notwithstanding their pagan connotations. Sailors apparently carried the tobacco habit across the Atlantic, reinforcing its lower class image. Conquistadors meanwhile learned to appreciate chocolate from seductive concubines and through palaver with indigenous rulers. Norton argues convincingly that although Euro-pean physicians claimed to place the two substances strictly within established systems of humoral medicine, they nevertheless relied heavily on indigenous knowledge for their diagnoses. She likewise seeks to show that Spanish aristocrats consciously adopted the chocolate consumption practices of Mexica nobles, but these claims are somewhat less convincing. While insisting that parallels between indigenous codices and Enlightenment court paintings were not accidental, she does not provide examples of Castilian dandies making those connections in their own words.

In addition to examining the practices of consumption, Norton also describes the growth of supply chains for tobacco and chocolate in the early modern world. TransAtlantic shipments began on a small scale, largely for personal usage, until significant demand began to emerge at the end of the sixteenth century. Pre-Hispanic commerce in cacao was already well established throughout Mesoamerica, and colonists simply took over and extended existing sources of supply. Tobacco, by contrast, was first purchased on a large scale from renegade Caribbean Indians, who resisted Span-ish imperial control. Eventually, the addictive weed became far more important for state finances through the seventeenth century establishment of a tobacco monopoly. Norton gives a fascinating account of the largely Portuguese-Jewish merchants who created this system, arguing that they constituted an important foundation for the absolutist state, long before the arrival of Bourbon carpetbaggers.

This volume makes a number of important contributions to early modern historiography. Although the stories of chocolate and tobacco have been told before, viewed together they demonstrate that American cultural practices had a significant influence on imperial Europe.