ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates some of the resistances, rocks, and eddies impeding tobacco’s flow across the emergent supply chains that, with relative peace between European nations, were starting to span the globe at the beginning of the 17th century. Tobacco as panacea and, more importantly, as part of the vast cornucopia of materials unleashed by the ‘discovery’ and subsequent colonization of the peoples and worlds of South and North America, were important tropes in tobacco’s early European indigenization. Apart from theological allusions to Hell, one of the arguments against smoking in the Counterblaste to Tobacco is “The Deceivable Appearance of Reason”. Tobacco, it had been argued, was “dry and hote” and hence good for the brain, which is “colde and wet”. It is important to see the Counterblaste in the historical context of James I’s kingship.
