Tobacco tin with a hinged lid, measuring circa 11cm x 8cm x 2.5cm. The graphic states "This mixture is manufactured entirely from Empire Grown Tobaccos." It depicts a white overseer, or manager, on a tobacco plantation while in the background black workers are picking the crop. 

Churchman's was founded by William Churchman in 1790. The original shop, which sold pipe tobacco, was located at Hyde Park Corner in Ipswich. In 1888 William Alfred (later Sir William) and Arthur Charles Churchman, grandsons of the founder, succeeded their father, Henry, in the business. By 1890 the company also produced "white cigarettes", and six years later produced 20,000 cigarettes an hour. 

To counter the aggressive American invasion to the British cigarette market W.D. & H.O. Wills, John Player & Sons, Lambert & Butler, Hignett Brothers (with their associated firms) and Stephen Mitchell & Son, with six other firms, joined forces to found the Imperial Tobacco Company, Ltd., in 1901. Churchman joined the recently formed company the following year. Churchman’s closed in 1992. 

The trade and consumption of tobacco is strongly linked to the transatlantic trade in Africans. By the mid-17th century, tobacco was established as one of the main goods used by the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English to buy enslaved people on the African coast. Tobacco was grown in some North American colonies, mainly in Virginia, Maryland and North Virginia to supply the English market. While initially cultivated by indentured servants, by the second half of the 1600s planters began replacing their workforce with enslaved Africans. 

Now dependent on enslavement in order to be commercially viable, soaring American tobacco exports created a constant demand for more enslaved labour. For those who fell victim to Europe’s transatlantic trade in Africans, life on an American tobacco plantation was one of relentless, back breaking work, brutal punishments, fear, malnutrition, disease, and often, an early death.