Americas Indigenous Americans began smoking and using tobacco enemas during circa 1 BCE. Archeological studies suggest the use of tobacco in around first century BC, when Maya people of Central America used tobacco leaves for smoking, in sacred and religious ceremonies. It then later started spreading as far as high up to the Mississippi Valley with the Maya community migrating from down south of America, between 470 and 630 AD.
The first Europeans to smoke were members of Columbus’ crew when they reached Cuba in 1492. In the same year, Christopher Columbus and his crew returned to Europe from the Americas with the first tobacco leaves and seeds ever seen on the continent. Within 150 years of Columbus’s finding “strange leaves” in the New World, tobacco was being used around the globe.
The British first obtained their tobacco by plundering Spanish ships en route back from America. Sir Francis Drake brought tobacco back from his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580 while some tobacco may have been brought back from the Caribbean in the 1560s. Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco back from his first Virginian expedition in 1586.
In the early 1500s Middle East Tobacco introduced when the Turks took it to Egypt.
In United Kingdom in 1833 the phosphorus friction matches introduced on a commercial scale, making smoking more convenient.
Manufactured cigarettes, made by a combination of hand and machine and later by machine alone, were first marketed in England in the 1850s. Their convenience, especially in the trenches in the First World War has resulted in them being the most popular nicotine delivery devices ever since.
In 1913 the Birth of the “modern” cigarette: RJ Reynolds introduced the Camel brand in USA.
Tobacco in many countries is sometimes adopted as a cash crop by the farmers and government treasuries (excise, taxes, etc.), and is also grown for local consumption.
History of Tobacco
