Spanning four hundred years, Carol Benedict's highly ambitious Golden-Silk Smoke examines the adaptation of global tobacco in China at two key historical moments: the spread of tobacco use beginning in the sixteenth century, and the importation of the manufactured cigarette at the turn of the twentieth century. Seeking to challenge the narrative of a global homogenization of local cultures of consumption (one that takes the European history of modern capitalism as the standard), the book documents the complexity and contingency of local adaptations of tobacco in China over time, and it demonstrates that the spread of tobacco in any form—snuff, water pipe tobacco, or manufactured cigarette—was never inevitable or natural. Instead, tobacco's spread in China was inextricably linked to domestic production patterns, intricate consumer cultures that were at once stratified and inclusive, the acquired appreciation of smoking practices, and specific cultural meanings associated with the product.
The first half of...
