Commodity histories often deliver less than they promise. We read of spices, tubers and textile fibers that changed the world or ushered in modernity, but are often left wondering if the world would really look all that different without the commodity in question. Carol Benedict makes no extravagant claims for the importance of her subject, but her superbly researched and engagingly written study demonstrates that the history of tobacco and the history of modern China are inextricably linked. Part of the pleasure of reading Golden-Silk Smoke comes from the sheer amount of unexpected, detailed information about Chinese consumer habits, culled from gazetteers, newspapers, medical treatises, poems and literati jottings. Who would have known, for example, that snuff made from Brazilian tobacco was one of the few must-have foreign items at the Qing court, and that large amounts of snuff (“bean snuff … green as the color of a mandarin duck's head,” tabac d'Espagne “perfumed with civet, musk, and cloves”) greased the wheels of international diplomacy in the 17th and 18th century (pp. 115–17)? Or that Protestant missionaries in the early 20th century railed against “swaggering, mannish, suffragette” Chinese women who smoked cigarettes in public?

Details such as these build up to a larger argument about a Chinese consumer culture that unfolded from the late Ming to the present, in constant interaction with the world beyond China's borders. Tobacco smoking reached Ming China in the 1570s, only years after it had reached Spain, Portugal and France. It spread from maritime Southeast Asia to Fujian and almost simultaneously entered Mongol and Jurchen territories from Central Asia. Qing bannermen, already heavy smokers by the time of the conquest, brought the practice to urban China. In the 17th century, the Burmese water pipe (introduced via Yunnan) added a new element of refinement to Chinese smoking. Benedict maps the spread of the tobacco plant, brought to the uplands of central and western China by cash crop farmers who opened up the hills and moved further inland as soon as the soil was exhausted. By the mid-Qing period, China had a differentiated market for pipe and water pipe tobacco, with dozens of well-known regional brands. Whereas the poor smoked unprocessed local leaves in long-stemmed pipes, elites chose from a variety of specialty tobaccos such as Shima and Pucheng from Fujian or “green fine shred tobacco” from Gansu. About five million mu of land were planted in tobacco – taking up about as much land as tea, and half as much as cotton.

As Benedict points out, tobacco consumption in the mid-Qing period was high by international standards, supporting Kenneth Pomeranz's hypothesis of high living standards before 1800. Western observers from the 16th to the early 20th century were struck by the ubiquity of smoking: rich and poor, men and women, children and adults all seemed to enjoy tobacco. They differed, however, in the way they smoked (or otherwise inhaled) tobacco. New incarnations of the drug – the waterpipe, snuff, cigarettes – first gained a foothold in the social and geographic peripheries of China. Smoking habits “trickled in” and “trickled up” from the periphery towards the social and spatial centre, but elites remained conscious of the demotic and class-crossing origins of smoking and tried to differentiate themselves from plebeian users by smoking or sniffing their tobacco in more refined ways.

The central sections of the book are concerned with the meanings of tobacco in Jiangnan literati culture, in the erotic imagination (in China as in Europe, smoking and sex were seen as mutually enhancing pleasures), and in medical discourse (which saw tobacco as a powerful stimulant with positive effects if used with moderation). The last four chapters cover the emergence of a Chinese cigarette industry, the gradual dispersion of cigarettes beyond the treaty ports, and the literary representation of cigarettes and pipes in Republican China. The final chapter details the decline of female smoking in the 20th century – a trend that paradoxically coincides with the use of alluring poster girls in advertisements. Benedict argues that sexualized representations of female smokers, while useful as an advertisement strategy, underscored pre-existing elite views of smoking women as licentious and vulgar. Here, too, Chinese trends are inextricable from global ones: Chinese anti-tobacco activists were inspired by eugenicists and temperance campaigners in the United States and Britain. A brief epilogue surveys the accelerated growth of smoking after 1949 and the public health crisis brought about massive nicotine addiction.

This book should be on the reading list of global historians interested in China and of China historians interested in the country's place in the early modern and modern world. Its greatest contribution lies in the way it quietly dismantles old oppositions of China and the West, tradition and modernity, by placing China in a world that is interconnected from the very start. The book will also appeal to gender historians, especially in its sensitive treatment of gender, smoking, and modernity in chapter nine.