tobacco trade history The British Empire Tobacco in History: The Cultures

L., Ballenger M

Like statues of Africans or blackamoors, these enticed customers to enter by relating the commodity to the Atlantic world from where the tobacco came.Footnote 112 Intent on controlling the flow of news during the heated Parliament of 1614, Francis Bacon and other statesmen conveyed discord and malicious rumour as the enemy of a functioning polity.Footnote 113 The Virginia Company used print in its considerable efforts to control the malignity of the false and the ignorant rumor, virulent envy, or impious subtilty that harmed the colonial enterprise, where the abundance of titles promising to offer true or sincere colonial news inveighed against those Letters and Rumours [shown] to have beene false and malicious.Footnote 114 These campaigns, though reflecting wider concerns on the part of policy-makers to manage and control information, only fed the vast flow of information that circulated in the metropolis, mingling with the stories of merchants and sailors and fostered by the punchy depth of tobacco itself

It could be a form of emotional release in situations of distress or part of an attention seeking behaviour

They're all over the city