ABSTRACT
Cigarettes transculturated well, like other tobacco products before them. Many people forget that the history of machine-made cigarettes is so recent. They are easy to use and easy to share. So normal and unremarkable did they quickly become that soon it was hard to remember life without them. How humble, in Miller’s terms, how ill-apparent and peripheral, yet so strongly determinant of action and identity. This chapter describes the increasingly global assemblages this transculturation made possible – the rise of the tobacco corporations and the resistance they engendered from both small tobacco farmers in the USA and the growing tobacco temperance movement. The ubiquity of the cigarette and the invention of the cigarette lighter reinstated “the intimate connexion between war and tobacco”. The cigarette, until then “a popular, if marginal, product”, really came into its own during the time of the First World War, offering several practical advantages over pipe smoking in the diabolical conditions of trench warfare.
