Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world you're confronted at once with predictions of

inevitable impotence, disease and death. To smoke we we're told, is to be in danger. But no modern government

health warning can begin to match the verve of the great counterblast to tobacco,

published by James the first in 16, just months after he'd come from Edinburgh to succeed Elizabeth.

The newly arrived king denounced smoking as a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous

to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible

stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.

Smoking with its pleasures and its perils has a long history.

It's one that begins 2,000 years ago in North America.

They are power objects and they're not symbolic. They're actually considered to be alive.

For example, if it's a pipe that's made of the red pipe stone, it's considered to be the blood and bones of buffalo.

In the morning, the first thing I do before I have breakfast is perhaps like my pipe,

and the last thing I do before I go to bed at night is to have a few puffs of my pipe.

It's a great comfort in a friend. I live alone.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. North American Otterpipe made of stone from Mound City, Ohio, 200 BC to 100 AD.

This week I'm looking at the

This week I'm looking at the pleasures that bound people together

around 2,000 years ago in the centuries

following the birth of Christ. In China and America, Europe and Mexico people shared

many of the pleasures and past times, the obsessions and the

intoxications that continued to connect us across the millennia. In the last

program we had alcohol and sex. Today we're with smoking and

...