Smoking and 'Early Modern' Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East
Author(s)
Grehan, James
Abstract
Historians have recently begun to wonder whether they can talk about “early modern” history on a worldwide scale. For some, support for this sort of global periodization is to be found in parallel developments across Eurasia in the realm of political economy. In “Smoking and ‘Early Modern’ Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East,” James Grehan takes a different course and searches for common themes in cultural history. One theme he identifies is the growth of a public culture of entertainment, sustained by a diffusion of new consumer goods – mainly coffee, tea, and tobacco. The last was the most ubiquitous, helping to foster, in the Middle East and elsewhere, more relaxed attitudes toward pleasure and more open and routine forms of entertainment. The status of tobacco and the sociability that grew up around it is particularly important for our understanding of the Middle East, a region that is often mistakenly and simplistically depicted as essentially “Islamic.” It offers a corrective insight into a culture that was hardly as static, rigid, and under the thrall of religious authorities as the label implies. The article shows that ordinary people, as much as religious scholars, played an active role in shaping and redefining cultural norms and religious expectations. Indeed, in the Middle East, the debate over tobacco led, by 1700, to a consensus of tolerance based more on the public acceptance of smoking than on the maneuvers of religious and legal authorities.
