Normalisation and Ambivalence: Tobacco in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

Abstract

This article questions the normalisation of tobacco use in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. The investigation shows that our present cultural ambivalence towards the intoxicant goes back to tobacco’s early introduction. The integration of tobacco use as an essential element in social rituals was situated on a line from general acceptance to social deviance. Tobacco use was successfully integrated in existing settings of alcohol use. However, because of the origins of tobacco use among specific social groups such as seamen, associations with deviance and marginality remained an inseparable element of the Dutch landscape of tobacco use.