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 the book, which examines the domestication of Amerindian tobacco in the late imperial period, is particularly satisfying. Tobacco entered initially through maritime trade zones and spread inland through China's empire-wide marketing system. Small family farms in the uplands of the Yangzi River valley quickly adapted tobacco as a commercial crop. Diversification of production and regional specialization followed, as did the rise of a sophisticated consumer culture. Smoking practices first moved through borderlands, and Qing bannermen introduced the ingestion of tobacco to the Han elite. By the mid-eighteenth century, tobacco use—especially in the form of pipe smoking—was ubiquitous, crossing gender, class, and ethnic lines. A complex culture of taste arose that dictated which form of regional or imported tobacco and which style of tobacco (e.g., snuff versus pipe-smoking) was suitable for whom, as well as the manner in which certain people were to consume tobacco (e.g., women were to smoke at home). Though one might question Benedict's use of poetry to document social practice, one of her strongest points here is that this late imperial adaptation of tobacco was unburdened by any association with imperialism and characterized instead by anxiety about its class-crossing nature. Tobacco's spread was facilitated not only by its connotation of leisurely socialization, but also by its characterization as an ingestible item that was beneficial to health when taken in moderation.
The book's second half shifts to the late Qing and early Republican period. Benedict deconstructs the perception that the machine-rolled cigarette was a mass commodity by the early twentieth century (massification did not occur until after 1949, she argues), and she sheds light on the limited reach of the machine-manufactured form and the hybridity of early twentieth-century tobacco culture. The water pipe persisted among rural denizens; hand-rolled cigarettes, produced in artisan workshops, emerged along with the manufactured cigarette; and deep anxiety surrounded the cigarette as an icon of Westernized modernity.
The study suffers at times from its ambitious scope, and the logic behind what is discussed and what is left out is not always evident. Why, for example, does the first half include a chapter on the medical discourse of tobacco, while no mention is made of modern biomedical views of tobacco? In its eagerness to make overarching arguments, the study moreover seems to misconstrue some of its meticulously collected evidence, as well as sacrifice analytical subtlety. Benedict's review of gendered commentaries on smoking over time seeks to establish an unambiguous shift from a relatively unproblematic late imperial view of female smoking to unprecedented modern-age anxiety about women and tobacco. However, in making this point, Benedict seems to underplay Qing moral condemnation (which she acknowledges, but interprets as mild in nature given its sole concern over where women smoked), and to overstate twentieth-century reformist discourses against women smoking, even though her evidence—especially commercial advertisements—suggests a more contested discourse.
Although Benedict claims to present a thesis of “continuity and change” (p. 9), her longue durée approach risks overdetermining “continuity,” overlooking significant changes between and within purported temporal units, and creating an impression of teleology. For example, the point is well taken that local adaptations shaped tobacco consumption both prior to and during the early twentieth century. But by repeatedly emphasizing continuity in order to debunk the assumption that the manufactured cigarette is the key story of tobacco in China (somewhat of a strawman here), her overall characterization obscures how historical contingency and new contexts made turn-of-the-century adaptations considerably different from earlier ones. Among these new contexts are some that Benedict touches upon herself, including imperialism, industrial production, treaty port cultures, intrusive states, and global as well as domestic reformist agendas.
The presentation also blurs the possible disjunctures within each time period. In her epilogue on the post-1949 era, Benedict argues that the massification of cigarettes that stemmed in large part from penetrative People's Republic of China state policies nonetheless owed its foundations to the early twentieth century. Yet, by characterizing the whole of the twentieth century as a single era, the study fails to appreciate how the massification of cigarettes might have constituted a radical break. Similarly, it seems to overinterpret the significance of turn-of-the-century reformist discourses against female smoking, which it anachronistically emphasizes to explain the decline of female smoking in the post-1949 era.
Despite these issues, Golden-Silk Smoke is an important book. Wide-ranging in scope, it is a contribution to not only the field of Chinese history, but also global history, providing a wonderful case study of how global commodities were locally adapted through time in China.
