By the beginning of the seventeenth century, tobacco had become a global commodity. Emerging from the New World in the sixteenth century, fi rst Spain, Portugal, and then England cultivated this productive cash crop in their colonies and sold it throughout Europe. Following tobacco’s introduction to the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, initial resistance to the new product quickly gave way to domestic cultivation and the potential of new taxes and trade. No country in the seventeenth century was resistant to the lure of tobacco profi ts, with one notable exception-Muscovite Russia.1