| After the great discovery of geography,the global exchange of species changed the life of Europeans.Tobacco,as a crop originating in the America,was brought to Europe by colonists,and was initially opposed by the upper class,including the Pope and the King.With the fading of Shaman’s coat and the enrichment of "medicinal value",it gradually went down with Europeans,functioning as civilization,commercialization,and entertainment.In Britain,tobacco was endowed with new social values: one point was as a kind of social tool to express status and self-cultivation in the context of British gentleman culture.The second was the role of drugs,in the limited medical knowledge,tobacco was used as a drug to dispel dampness and resisted diseases.Especially after the advocacy and exaggeration of seafarers and some public critics,tobacco became a panacea.During the plague of London,some people even regarded it as a good thing to prevent the plague.However,this social obsession with tobacco was criticized by rationalists who questioned the value of tobacco on the basis of pharmacology and religious culture.After tobacco was popularized in Britain and its colonies,it caused many social problems,which attracted the attention of the government,with a result of controlling tobacco cultivation,import,transportation,retail and smoking.First of all,in the cultivation of tobacco.In the British colonies,the successful attempt of tobacco planting made more and more colonies develop tobacco planting industry,resulting in the formation of a single industrial structure that relied too much on tobacco planting,and the problem of tobacco overproduction began to appear.In Britain,tobacco farming caused a series of problems: food prices were risen.Labor outside tobacco was reduced and tariffs were damaged.To this end,the British government formulated tobacco planting control policies and took a series of actions,including limiting the scale of tobacco planting in the colonies,guiding the diversification of its industry,and punishing the private tobacco growers in Britain.Secondly,in terms of tobacco import and transportation.Spanish tobacco had long dominated the British domestic market and suppressed the British colonial tobacco.Dutch merchants also monopolized the purchase and transportation of British colonial tobacco for a long time,which caused damage to the British tariff and shipping industry.In this regard,the British government fought back through such measures as differential taxation,regulation of import volume and establishment of import commissioners.It was stipulated that colonial tobacco could only be transported by British ships,and must be transported to London for taxation before transshipment to other places.The right to purchase colonial tobacco was handed over to domestic merchants,so as to monopolize Spanish tobacco and suppress Dutch merchants.Thirdly,in terms of tobacco retailing and smoking.In Britain,the tobacco sales market was chaotic,the sellers were mixed,and the phenomenon of adulteration and smuggling emerged one after another,which disrupted the sales market.People who excessively addicted to tobacco would be stuck into idleness,gradually losing family wealth and physical destruction;A large number of people were detained in smoking places,including many troublemakers,which seriously affected public security.In view of this,The British government began to rectify the tobacco market,issue retail patent licenses to retailers,send officials to maintain,restrict the disorderly trade of tobacco,and crack down on smuggling and counterfeiting.At the same time,relevant laws and decrees were promulgated to guide the use of tobacco,persuade people to reduce tobacco smoking,and crack down on excessive smokers by corporal punishment and fines.The above tobacco control measures of the British government bring successful and unsuccessful experience at the same time.The success is that it increased the market share of tobacco in the British colonies,made Spanish tobacco fade out of the British market,made colonial commodities get rid of the dependence on Dutch merchant ships,benefited local businessmen and supported the shipping industry.Most importantly,it basically guarantees the control of the tobacco industry by the British government and creates considerable fiscal and taxation benefits.The failure lies in the fact that the private cultivation of local tobacco was not well restricted,the diversification of colonial industries is not ideal,and the monopoly of patents has been opposed.All these reflect the complexity of the background of tobacco control in Britain,the coherence of principles,the monopoly of forms and the profitability of objectives.The tobacco control policy in Britain was determined by the special historical environment of Britain,which was closely related to mercantilism,the expansion of royal power,finance and taxation,and was the result of the joint efforts of many historical factors.Tobacco control is a typical case of the British government’s control of foreign commodities and emerging industries.We can get a glimpse of the true face of the British government’s incorporation of foreign commodities into the political and economic governance model of modern countries. |
