Women, although they did smoke in private, were not publicly represented as smokers in art, unless it was to indicate their licentiousness and sexual availability. Odalisque paintings produced during the 19th-century orientalist craze almost invariably depicted a naked woman smoking in a harem. The gypsy in Prosper Merimee's Carmen also fits this mould.

With the mass-production of cigarettes in the early 20th century, attitudes to women smoking changed. While suffragettes could still be lampooned as mannish-looking smokers, the advertising revolution that heralded the start of the consumer age transformed the negative stereotype utterly. Cigarettes became fashionable - a sign of the modern, liberated woman. Cigarette manufacturers made a fortune from this new source of consumers.

The story of smoking as it stands today is well-known. Tobacco advertising has been banned almost everywhere since the '70s as a reaction to epidemiological statistics that strongly link smoking to a variety of ailments. Health warnings are likewise endemic - although in Japan, whose tobacco monopoly remains under government control, they're more relaxed and comfortable about them. Your typical Japanese soft-pack reads: "There are fears that smoking too much may be bad for your health, so be careful of smoking too much."

The essays collected in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking cover a diverse range of subject matter, from 19th-century opium dens to the crack-houses of today, from the therapeutic uses of smoking in Ayurvedic medicine to the increasingly vocal contemporary anti-smoking lobby, from ancient Mayan art to Weimar cinema.

More often than not, this book is intriguing and intelligently written. However, not all of the contributions are compelling: Zhou Xun's essay on smoking in modern China contains basic inaccuracies; Robyn L. Schiffman's Toward a Queer History of Smoking is tendentious in the extreme; the article on Ganja in Jamaica reads as if it were written under the influence of its subject matter.

The fact that the book places a massive emphasis on the exotic will doubtless incur the displeasure of anti-smoking Nazis. But it's much more fun to read about African tribes who roll tobacco into "hippo shit", or the servant who, upon seeing Sir Francis Drake smoking a pipe for the first time, threw a bucket of water over him, than it is to sit through health warnings and death stats.

Besides, smoking has always been associated with mystery, even if the only mystery in the age of the non-smoker is why a substantial minority should continue - in full knowledge of the risks - to puff away.