Jarrett Rudy argues that while people smoked for highly personal reasons, their smoking rituals were embedded in social relations and shaped by dominant norms of taste and etiquette. The Freedom to Smoke examines the role of the tobacco industry, health experts, churches, farmers, newspapers, the military, the state, and smokers themselves. A pioneering city-based study, it weaves Western understandings of respectable smoking through Montreal's diverse social and cultural fabric. Rudy argues that etiquette gave smoking a political role, reflecting and serving to legitimize beliefs about inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy that were at the core of a transforming liberal order.

Jarrett Rudy is assistant professor, Department of History, McGill University.

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"This text is representative of the best kind of social history: one which combines in-depth historical research with the insights of sociology and cultural studies." Ruth Waterhouse, Sociology of Health & Illness, Staffordshire University
"Histories of tobacco consumption tend to have a strong cultural flavour. Jarrett Rudy's fluidly written, gracefully organized monograph on the history of smoking in Montreal represents no exception. [Rudy] deftly avoids the pitfall of repetition while managing to frame his entertaining anecdotes with serious analysis. The Freedom to Smoke offers a wealth of material for historians of liberalism." Barbara Hahn, Business History Review
"A sophisticated book that illuminates how smoking, an unremarkable practice of everyday life, became the battleground for defending and contesting hierarchies of class, ethnicity/race, and gender." Keith Walden, history, Trent University