Rooms of Smoke: A Global History Tobacco, Smoking Spaces, and Cigar Lounges

Rooms of Smoke follows tobacco through the spaces people created, adapted, shared, guarded, and regulated around it. The journey begins in the ancient Americas, where tobacco appeared in ceremonial settings, councils, gatherings, and other forms of social and sacred life long before commercial smoking rooms existed. From there, the book moves through Atlantic ports, colonial taverns, African courts and markets, Ottoman and Persian coffeehouses, Mughal and Indian hookah culture, Chinese teahouses, Japanese tobacco rooms, European cafés and salons, private clubs and Victorian smoking rooms, military forts and ships, railway compartments, ocean liners, hotels, casinos, sporting institutions, and specialist tobacconists. The final chapters enter the modern cigar lounge, where retail, membership, hospitality, design, ventilation, education, technology, and regulation have created a new generation of smoking spaces. Across centuries and continents, the focus remains the place where smoking happened, the people who controlled that place, the people who were welcomed or excluded, and the social rules that gave smoke its meaning. This is a history of tobacco through rooms, streets, ships, courtyards, clubs, factories, and lounges, tracing how human beings have repeatedly built spaces around an ancient habit.