Europeans discovered tobacco through their encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Americas who used it in barter and trade. Transferred to the new settlements in Virginia and elsewhere and cultivated with the labour of imported slaves from Africa, it became key to the economic success of the settlements and of Britain. Tobacco smoking was a popular pastime for British men who took it as snuff or smoked it in cheap, disposable clay pipes. ‘Ready-rolled’ cigarettes only became widely available in the 1880s.

In Britain tobacco remained strongly associated with black Africans and the apothecaries in which it was sold frequently used a wooden figure of a ‘Blackamoor’ to promote their wares. This tobacco jar, produced in Staffordshire, England, is in the form of a black child who wears an apron and is polishing a boot. In the 18th century it had been considered fashionable in wealthy homes to employ a black servant, especially a young boy, but by the mid 19th century, influenced by slave revolts in the colonies and the British anti-slavery movement, the fashion was less prevalent.