Description:Image: A Tobacco, Cigar and Snuff Dealer. Trade Card (date unknown)
Illustrated industrial artifacts such as the above advert for a Birmingham tobacco dealer can often reveal underlying attitudes toward trade, industry, empire, race and slavery. From this image, we can see how the use of 'native' labour and slaves shown on the left, was usually simply accepted as part of the 'natural' order of the trading world endorsed by the 'civilised' consumers shown on the right.
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