From Oroonoko Tobacco to Blackamoor Snuffboxes: Race, Gender and the Consumption of Snuff in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

This essay investigates the circulation of the trope of the Black body in visual and textual representations of tobacco consumption, both smoked and taken as snuff. I look at the ways in which tobacco advertising depicting the type of snuff for sale or representing enslaved Africans working on plantations articulated notions of race and coloniality. I then show that snuffboxes can be seen as material counterparts in the dissemination of racist ideology in the eighteenth century. The gender-defining practice of taking snuff is studied in relation to colonial politics using a selection of texts and a material corpus of rare extant “Blackamoor” snuffboxes (depicting the black body and face) that have not yet received scholarly attention. I argue that through female agency, the use of Blackamoor snuffboxes normalised slavery by integrating it in the cultural rituals of British sociability through a process of material aestheticisation.

Tobacco for the flower garden: Plant collecting and plantation crops in nineteenth‐century Britain

“…British tobacconists, for example, had long marketed their snuff and cigars with racialized trade cards, many of which featured images of enslaved Africans either working in tobacco fields or smoking pipes. As Elizabeth Kim (2002), Catherine Molineux (2007), and Vanessa Alayrac‐Fielding (2021) have shown, these advertisements normalized the racial violence of plantation agriculture while also dulling its edges for white consumers. Although this marketing strategy reached its apex during the eighteenth century, it lingered within the print culture of Victorian Britain, as can be seen from a trade card printed around 1843 by the London‐based tobacco manufacturer John Lloyd (Figure 1).…”