Confronting the harmful social and environmental legacy of tobacco and its use is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. Yet, this challenge, though contemporary and requiring present interventions calls for holistic and transcendental insights into how the ‘tobacco epidemic’ is part of the globalisation and institutionalisation of cultures of production, cultivation, marketing and consumption of the crop across historical time. The tobacco epidemic is a historically constructed leviathan linking various centres of power and institutions of governance to big tobacco in a grand profit-making scheme, exploitation and plunder of human bodies, ecologies and landscapes for private gain and profit. The stranglehold that the tobacco industry wields today over progressive tobacco-control regimes and attempts to limit tobacco’s harm is a heritage of this complex relationship between the industry, the state and tobacco farmers forged across more than a century from ‘jungle tobacco farms’ in colonial America and colonial Africa to more organised production systems during the mid to late twentieth century.