Lisnagarvey’s Covenant Warning
In January a proclamation enforced Wentworth’s tobacco monopoly. Tobacco was no longer a rare novelty: it had become a widely consumed imported commodity, and therefore an attractive object of state control. The monopoly did not simply regulate what could be sold. It channelled a familiar article of everyday consumption through a licensing and customs system from which the deputy expected both crown revenue and private advantage. Tobacco merchants, retailers and consumers encountered the state not as an abstraction but in prices, permits, seizures and the restricted legal supply of a desired good.