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Reviewed by:
  • Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2010
  • David A. Bello
Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2010. By Carol Benedict (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011) 334 pp. 49.95

Like many recent histories of Chinese commodities that span several periods of different social and political orders, Golden Silk Smoke is informed by the cultural anthropology of Appadurai, especially his essay, “Commodities and the Politics of Value.”1 This strategy is appropriate for exploring the “biography” of articles of international trade and commerce in states that came under imperialist pressures from the last half of the nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century—in this case, that of tobacco in China. Part of the larger discussion about the precise nature of commodities centers on the degree to which the organizational and technical conditions of their production are exclusively Western innovations either imposed on colonialized states or simply copied by them. Benedict’s history, which devotes roughly half of its space to fads, factories, female smoking, and nationalistically tinged literature between 1840 and 1949, clearly asserts that although the Chinese experience with tobacco was certainly subject to globalizing forces and foreign influences, the “drug food” had already been domesticated in China by the early seventeenth century. Hence, most of the book’s coverage of the period prior to 1840 is devoted to detailing tobacco’s early international transmission and its subsequent Chinese-style production and consumption, including its equivocal role in traditional medicine and its distinctive role as a social lubricant.

In the process of employing historical, anthropological, social, economic, and literary forms of analysis, Benedict demonstrates the strengths of producing commodity history from a non-Western perspective. Such strengths are particularly apparent in her analyses of how tobacco consumption was differentiated by class and gender. One exemplary class division concerns the technology of tobacco consumption. The poor puffed away on cheap pipes until after 1949 while the wealthy snorted costly early modern snuff and later sported pricey modern machine-rolled cigarettes. From a global perspective, Benedict notes that [End Page 158] these distinctions resemble those prevalent in other countries “subject to external political and economic interference,” like Egypt, rather than the more developed, and presumably more interfering, states of Western Europe and North America (11).

Benedict’s longest chapter, which is about female consumption of tobacco from 1900 to 1976, makes a similar point—this time about the divergent trajectories of gendered smoking in China and the West. Nineteenth-century Chinese women were free to blow smoke, figuratively speaking, in the faces of their Western sisters, who were effectively banned from tobacco use by Victorian and Edwardian mores. By the twentieth century, however, this situation had reversed itself, with various sorts of Western “flappers” assertively lighting up, as it were, in the faces of patriotic Chinese women of the Republican period, who succumbed to nationalist exhortations to reject the “foreign” miasmas of tobacco and opium (though both were deeply rooted domestic cultivars by this time).

These examples are representative of the corrective methods that the author uses as part of her general approach to recount “the history of Chinese consumption as it actually occurred over many centuries” rather than simply tracking it along “an idealized path leading to a homogenized ‘consumer society’ modeled on” the industrially developed Western world (3–4). Non-linear, non-Western experiences are valuable for a more critical interrogation of terms like modernity, and even globalization, the import of which is often taken as teleologically given in commodity accounts closer to the homes of these concepts. Although it is debatable whether Benedict has been able to portray the nearly 500-year history of Chinese tobacco as it “actually” happened in only 254 pages, she has provided an appropriately “globalized” and augmented overview of the considerable literature on the subject.

David A. Bello
Washington and Lee University

Footnotes

1. Arjun Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in idem (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York, 1986), 3–63.

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