We live in an era of national No Smoking Days. With reminders to give up tobacco as regular events, it is worth thinking back 400 years, to when Europeans were starting to smoke for the first time. No other intoxicant has done more to shape and define the modern world than “the holy herb”, as its early proponents tended to call it. Without Europeans taking to tobacco, it is difficult to see how the English colonies in Virginia would have first survived and then flourished; whether African slavery would have become the bulwark of trans-Atlantic economies; how western governments would have garnered the revenues they have; and whether people around the globe would socialise, relax, pose—and of course die—the way that they do.

中文翻译：

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吸烟

我们生活在一个国家禁止吸烟日的时代。提醒人们定期戒烟，值得回顾一下400年前，即欧洲人第一次开始吸烟。在塑造和定义现代世界的过程中，没有比“圣药”更能为塑造和定义现代世界做出贡献的了，因为它的早期拥护者倾向于称呼它。如果没有欧洲人吸烟，很难看到弗吉尼亚的英国殖民地将如何生存并繁荣。非洲奴隶制是否将成为跨大西洋经济体系的堡垒；西方政府将如何获得收入；以及全球各地的人们是否会社交，放松，摆姿势（当然会死），就像他们做事一样。