Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism by Nan Enstad (review)

Nan Enstad, the cultural historian whose Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1999) dexterously untangled the complex relationship between gender, consumer culture, and political activism in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States, has made a bold transnational turn. In her innovative and meticulously researched new book Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism, Enstad ventures away from American shores to tell a story of, among other things, the spectacular growth in the popular appeal of cigarettes in China during the nation’s turbulent late-Chi’ng and Republican eras. While focusing on the production, marketing, and consumption of cigarettes in the United States and China, her gaze pierces other key nodes in the global commodity chain, among them Egypt, Turkey, and Japan. She professes an ambition for her work of cultural history to speak to the field of the United States and the world. It does indeed do so, and then some.

Enstad skillfully weaves together layers of structural forces in world history and dense interplays of individual actors who traversed national boundaries, portraying the cigarette trade as a series of transactions that are not simply economic but also social and cultural. The cast of characters mobilized for her tale of globalization runs the gamut from entrepreneurs of various nationalities, American farmers, and factory workers—both black and white—in the Jim Crow U.S. South, to foreign expatriates and their corporate wives recreating a home away from home in China, to cultural intermediaries, including Chinese courtesans in Shanghai during the Jazz Age.

Enstad upends the vaunted notion of modernity as a historical formation flowing inexorably from west to east. There were multiple sites where entrepreneurship was contemporaneously invented and executed. Various racialized and gendered tools of labor management and corporate hierarchies were devised by American and Chinese capital to control and discipline what Enstad astutely constructs as a global labor force corralled by a commodity. Local variations were the norm in modes of marketing and consuming cigarettes, not to mention the symbolic associations derived from them and the political use to which they were put. In China, cigarettes morphed into the very embodiment of the West in ways presaging Coca-Cola as an icon of American corporate capitalism, a phenomenon Amanda Ciafone has illustrated in her recent book Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation (Oakland, Calif., 2019). Accordingly, American brands of cigarettes became a principal target of China’s nationalist boycott campaign in 1905.

Among the many iconoclastic conclusions Enstad reaches and historical conventions she debunks is the mystique built around James B. Duke of the American Tobacco Company (ATC) as the quintessential Schumpeterian “creative destructor” (p. 6). Instead, Enstad portrays the tobacco tycoon as one of many entrepreneurs who shrewdly capitalized on the transformation of American law that created new entitlements for corporations, neutralizing certain state regulatory functions and enabling new forms of monopolistic practice. Cigarette companies like the ATC rallied to turn those new opportunities into profits at home and abroad. In Enstad’s telling, multilateral corporations like the ATC emerge as an integral arm of American imperialism by the dawn of the twentieth century, aided by the system of extraterritoriality set up in Asia and elsewhere in the non-Western world. The story Enstad constructs through the single product of cigarettes is a powerful reinterpretation of American capitalism and corporate power itself.

Besides contributing to U.S. and world historiography, Enstad aspires to write a new business history, one in which labor and corporate histories are not distinct but mutually constitutive. In her school of history, integral parts are played not just by corporate leaders, boards of directors, and stockholders but also by those who toiled and labored under the corporation’s...