Tobacco was the most valuable commodity imported into Bristol and other British ports from mainland North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the eve of the American Revolution, tobacco imports into Britain were worth just under £1 million at official prices and almost the same at market prices. This made tobacco at least twice as valuable as coffee and rice, the next most important commodities imported from mainland America. British tobacco imports increased from 38 million lbs. in 1700 to 100 million lbs. in 1771–5. By 1775, Scotland received almost as much tobacco as England (46 million lbs. as opposed to 56 million) and more than four-fifths of the leaf was re-exported, mainly to the European continent. Such growth triggered significant changes in both business operations and the scale of enterprise in the Chesapeake and throughout the Atlantic trading world. The most significant change was the rise of the re-export trade. Demand for tobacco within Britain, by contrast, was relatively inelastic and soon reached a plateau. This was partly because tobacco consumption remained the preserve of adult males, and partly because pipe smoking was associated with the alehouse, which fell into decline in the later eighteenth century. The demand for snuff – an important component of British tobacco consumption – was presumably insufficient to alter these trends. As we shall see, Bristol's tobacco trade, with its emphasis on the domestic market, failed to advance during the eighteenth century as rival British ports gained the upper hand in marketing the crop via the re-export business.

Bristol's declining role in this branch of Atlantic commerce can be traced in the four phases that characterised the tobacco trade before 1800.