ABSTRACT
Before the nineteenth century snuff was the tobacco product that carried the characteristics of later forms of tobacco consumption. Both its manufacture and distribution can clearly be viewed as ‘modern’. That is to say, snuff alone, of all tobacco products, can be considered in that class of goods that historians have identified as belonging to the first stirrings of modern consumerism in the eighteenth century (McKendrick et al. 1982). Even so, in general, tobacco remained a pre-modern consumer commodity, much more connected to the commercial, rather than the burgeoning industrial, system. As we shall see in Chapter 9, one of the ironies of tobacco was that, despite the fact that it was probably the first mass-consumed food-like substance, it was one of the last products to be mass-produced.
