Introduction: Tobacco’s Second Globalisation

We advance the concept of tobacco’s ‘second globalisation’ to frame the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries as a new period in tobacco’s global history, the study of which has hitherto been fragmented and lacking a clear ‘meta-narrative’. While the Atlantic was key in tobacco’s ‘first globalisation’ from the sixteenth century, Western European imperial expansion spawned a second globalisation on a far larger scale across the world, as in Africa and Asia, and Europe itself, in the context of both free trade and new monopolising forces. It takes a glocal approach, combining local studies in a global perspective, to map dominant players, new technology and technocrats, marketing, and subaltern agency and consumption in diverse areas, evidencing resilience and struggle. By the 1960s, amidst growing world health concerns, a ‘third globalisation’ was under way—one that is beyond our scope here and calls out for further study.