The Metamorphosis of Tobacco: The Tobacco Pipe Makers' Arms

A delftware dish, made in London between approximately 1670 and 1690, depicts the arms of the Worshipful Company of Tobacco Pipe Makers. The three Black women who gaze out from the dish can be viewed as representations of the enslaved women whose agricultural and reproductive labour enabled the transatlantic tobacco trade. The white, male Pipe Makers would have viewed the dish through the symbolic languages of heraldry and racialised and gendered Black and Indigenous figures who populated tobacco advertising and the English racial imagination. This essay examines the dish's entangled material and representational contexts in the late seventeenth century and asks: what do the women on the dish demand from their viewers? And how should twenty-first-century viewers meet their gaze? The coat of arms of the Tobacco Pipe Makers endures amidst present-day struggles with the visual legacies of slavery. Yet this symbol – and the seventeenth-century dish that bears its image – also offers possibilities of liberation.