History, it seems, is an ever widening concept. Social histories ─ those more interested in the everyday than sacred dates and great men ─ have taken on a new prominence. Their rise was secured by path-breaking studies of gender and oppression; but now modern historians are giving the idea of everyday history new meaning. Some see volumes such as Michel Pastoreau's Blue: The History of a Colour as evidence of a discipline in crisis and wax nostalgic for the rigours of convention.

But Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, Marcy Norton's excellent new book, is proof that, in the right hands, even a seemingly narrow study can provide significant insight. Her history of tobacco and chocolate tells us much about those commodities and the broader intersection of culture, consumption and statecraft.

Before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, tobacco and chocolate were completely alien to Europeans. The first Spanish explorers participated in Indian smoking rituals and learnt their significance in consecrating social bonds. Conquistadors sailing south in later years would conquer a "Chocolate Zone" stretching from Mexico to Nicaragua where cacao beans were so integral to daily life they functioned as currency (in early 15th Century prices ten beans would buy one rabbit or a "run" with a prostitute).

The importance of tobacco and chocolate to indigenous religious rites saw the Church brand them as symbols of devil-worshipping paganism. Both became subjects of the Inquisition in the 16th Century. However, by the turn of the 17th Century tobacco and chocolate had a strong foothold in Spanish society and were widely traded commodities – a position from which neither has since fallen. How did Europeans, convinced of the barbarism of Amerindian culture, become such enthusiastic consumers of its symbols? This question lies at the heart of Norton's study.

She convincingly sketches the slow, trans-Atlantic journey of tobacco and chocolate as one driven by individuals ─ colonial officials, merchants and mariners ─ who encountered Amerindian traditions and brought them back to Europe. Their explosion in popularity was not in spite of their pagan roots, Norton says, but because of them. Europeans regarded both substances as enchanted. Chocolate was the luxurious wine of a fallen civilisation, whilst smoking was the habit of the noble savage and therefore one with a rebellious, transgressive quality. All of which sounds strangely familiar, of course.

Norton's is a very scientific history and she makes use of myriad primary sources to plot the diffuse process of cultural exchange in concrete terms. At times, the rigour is overdone; Norton writes of 'vessels of olfactory and kinesthetic pleasure', better known as pipes.

The book's final chapter on politics is a vivid demonstration of the value in cultural analysis. In 1626, Hapsburg Spain was near bankrupt and proposed new taxes on foodstuffs had caused rioting. Chocolate and tobacco, however, occupied a new place in Spanish society; they were prevalent but condemned by the church. "Vices" was the label the government chose, which justified a raft of special taxes that revived the treasury and became more valuable than gold bullion by 1800. It was because of their cultural position that the state could justify these exorbitant taxes in paternalistic terms. A profitable exploitation that, as any nicotine slave will attest, still endures.

Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World by Marcy Norton
Cornell University Press

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