Inhaling the Alien: Race and Tobacco in Early Modern England

Abstract

In a surprising double reversal of the proverb “You Can’t Wash an Ethiop White,” the frontispiece to Richard Brathwait’s The smoaking age (1617) exclaims, “How much changed from white are these Englishmen transformed into Ethiopians” (figure 8.1).1 Countering the well-known proverb’s declaration that differences between kinds are natural and inalterable, Brathwait proclaims that racial transformation is indeed possible. In Brathwait’s engraving, the sign of racial difference is not visible on the surface of the body, but rather is located in the pipe that introduces tobacco into it and in the smoke that wafts out. This suggests, on one hand, that these are ephemeral transformations and that the smokers have become Ethiopians only in the sense that they are imitating an “Ethiopian” habit, demonstrated by the trade figure with whom they are juxtaposed: “A Black-more upon the Stall, with rolls of Tobacco Drinking his Petoune, according to the nature and guize of that Country.”2 Yet, on the other hand, the tobacco smoke’s highly visible entrance into the body, along with its even more striking exit from it, suggests that we are witnessing not simply the imitation of a foreign habit, but an incorporation of the alien into the English body.3