Artist: Charles-Michel Geoffroy
Publisher: J.J. Grandville
Framed Dimensions: 13 7/8" x 10 1/4"
Inside the Mat Dimensions: 8 3/4" x 6"

Of the four plants of the Americas that spread to the rest of the world in the Columbian Exchange—potato, maize, tomato, and tobacco—the last is the only one used in every country. Greek and Roman accounts exist of smoking hemp seeds, and a Spanish poem c. 1276 mentions the energetic effects of lavender smoke, but tobacco was completely unfamiliar to Europeans before the discovery of the New World. Las Casas vividly described how the first scouts sent by Columbus into the interior of Cuba found

    "men with half-burned wood in their hands and certain herbs to take their smokes, which are some dry herbs put in a certain leaf, also dry, like those the boys make on the day of the Passover of the Holy Ghost; and having lighted one part of it, by the other they suck, absorb, or receive that smoke inside with the breath, by which they become benumbed and almost drunk, and so it is said they do not feel fatigue. These, muskets as we will call them, they call tabacos. I knew Spaniards on this island of Española who were accustomed to take it, and being reprimanded for it, by telling them it was a vice, they replied they were unable to cease using it. I do not know what relish or benefit they found in it."

Following the arrival of Europeans, tobacco became one of the primary products fueling colonization, and also became a driving factor in the incorporation of African slave labor. The Spanish introduced tobacco to Europeans in about 1528, and by 1533, Diego Columbus mentioned a tobacco merchant of Lisbon in his will, showing how quickly the traffic had sprung up. Jean Nicot, French ambassador in Lisbon, sent samples to Paris in 1559. The French, Spanish, and Portuguese initially referred to the plant as the "sacred herb" because of its valuable medicinal properties.

Nicot sent leaves and seeds to Francis I and his mother Catherine of Medici, with instructions to use tobacco as snuff. The king's recurring headaches (perhaps sinus trouble) were reportedly "marvellously cured" by snuff. French cultivation of herbe de la Reine (the queen's herb) began in 1560. By 1570 botanists referred to tobacco as Nicotiana, although Andre Thevet claimed that he, not Nicot, had introduced tobacco to France; historians believe that this is unlikely to be true, but Thevet was the first Frenchman to write about it.

Swiss doctor Conrad Gesner in 1563 reported that chewing or smoking a tobacco leaf "has a wonderful power of producing a kind of peaceful drunkenness". In 1571, Spanish doctor Nicolas Monardes wrote a book about the history of medicinal plants of the new world. In this he claimed that tobacco could cure 36 health problems, and reported that the plant was first brought to Spain for its flowers, but "Now we use it to a greater extent for the sake of its virtues than for its beauty".

John Hawkins was the first to bring tobacco seeds to England. William Harrison's English Chronology mentions tobacco smoking in the country as of 1573, before Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first "Virginia" tobacco to Europe from the Roanoke Colony, referring to it as tobah as early as 1578. In 1595 Anthony Chute published Tabaco, which repeated earlier arguments about the benefits of the plant and emphasised the health-giving properties of pipe-smoking.

The importation of tobacco into England was not without resistance and controversy. Stuart King James I wrote a famous polemic titled A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, in which the king denounced tobacco use as "[a] custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." That year, an English statute was enacted that placed a heavy protective tariff on tobacco imports. The duty rose from 2p per pound to 6s 10p, an increase of 4,000%, but English demand remained strong despite the high price; Barnabee Rych reported that 7,000 stores in London sold tobacco and calculated that at least 319,375 pound sterling were spent on tobacco annually. Because the Virginia and Bermuda colonies' economies were affected by the high duty, James in 1624 instead created a royal monopoly. No tobacco could be imported except from Virginia, and a royal license that cost 15 pounds per year was required to sell it. To help the colonies Charles II banned tobacco cultivation in England, but allowed herb gardens because doctors said it had medicinal purposes.

Tobacco was introduced elsewhere in continental Europe more easily. Iberia exported "ropes" of dry leaves in baskets to the Netherlands and southern Germany; for a while tobacco was in Spanish called canaster after the word for basket, canastro, and influenced the German Knaster. In Italy, Prospero Santacroce in 1561 and Nicolo Torbabuoni in 1570 introduced it to gardens after seeing the plant on diplomatic missions. Cardinal Crescenzio introduced smoking to the country in about 1610 after learning about it in England. The Roman Catholic Church did not condemn tobacco as James I did, but Pope Urban VIII threatened excommunication to anyone smoking in a church.

In Russia, tobacco use was banned in 1634 except for foreigners in Moscow. Peter the Great—who in England had learned of smoking and the royal monopoly—became the monarch in 1689, however. Revoking all bans, he licensed an English company to import 1.5 million pounds of tobacco per year, the monarchy receiving 28,000 pound sterling annually.

The Japanese were introduced to tobacco by Portuguese sailors from 1542.

Tobacco first arrived in the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th century, where it attracted the attention of doctors and became a commonly prescribed medicine for many ailments. Although tobacco was initially prescribed as medicine, further study led to claims that smoking caused dizziness, fatigue, dulling of the senses, and a foul taste/odour in the mouth.

Sultan Murad IV banned smoking in the Ottoman Empire in 1633. When the ban was lifted by his successor, Ibrahim the Mad, it was instead taxed. In 1682, Damascene jurist Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi declared: "Tobacco has now become extremely famous in all the countries of Islam ... People of all kinds have used it and devoted themselves to it ... I have even seen young children of about five years applying themselves to it." In 1750, a Damascene townsmen observed "a number of women greater than the men, sitting along the bank of the Barada River. They were eating and drinking, and drinking coffee and smoking tobacco just as the men were doing."

Although Nicotiana suaveolens is native to Australia, tobacco smoking first reached that continent shores when it was introduced to northern-dwelling Indigenous communities by visiting Indonesian fishermen in the early 18th century. British patterns of tobacco use were transported to Australia along with the new settlers in 1788; and in the years following colonisation, British smoking behaviour was rapidly adopted by Indigenous people as well. By the early 19th century tobacco was an essential commodity routinely issued to servants, prisoners and ticket-of-leave men (conditionally released convicts) as an inducement to work, or conversely, withheld as a means of punishment.