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

Nan Enstad's Cigarettes, Inc. debunks several capitalist fables about the tobacco industry but also corporate history as a whole. One of these myths poses J. B. Duke as a risktaking innovator—a "bold entrepreneur"—who used the cigarette-making machine to revolutionize the tobacco industry. This myth has been repeated even in histories critical of the tobacco industry (275n10). It was created, Enstad reveals, by mid-twentieth-century business historians to support Joseph Schumpeter's theory of "creative destruction." In contrast, Enstad shows that Duke's success was a result not of innovation but, rather, of evading state regulation. Duke was involved in merging the five largest tobacco companies into the American Tobacco Company (ATC), with the aim of controlling the Bonsack cigarette-making machine in foreign markets. The ATC started with a different president—Lewis Ginter, "the first to develop the mass-produced bright leaf cigarette, and the first to market it overseas"—but Duke eventually wrangled control over the ATC (7). By moving to New Jersey, the state with the most permissive regulations, the ATC won a corporate charter in 1890 with many entitlements and few limits. In response to antimonopoly agitation and legal challenges, the ATC fought in court for a new interpretation of the 14th Amendment—the "Reconstruction Amendment" initially intended to empower formerly enslaved African Americans—that twisted its meaning to empower corporations as "legal persons" with new rights and protections (76–78).

This story is part of a broader mythos of modernity. Enstad punctures another element of this mythos by challenging the story, repeated in many corporate histories, of US companies as active Western agents, bringing modern commodities and technologies to the passive East (8). Against portrayals of modernization and globalization as one-directional flows, Enstad complicates the binaries, including assumptions of Chinese "primitivism" and Western "modernity," that give these stories their appearance of rationality (18). She reveals exchanges between East and West of cigarettes, brand imagery, tobacco, knowledge, and so forth. Further, she historicizes this modernist myth, contextualizing its emergence in an era of rising nationalism and imperialism. Cigarettes shaped people's imaginations of distant lands and were themselves framed by imperialist fantasies and events. Enstad emphasizes the intimate character of this imperialism, such as how the "Egyptian cigarette" (e.g., Camel) was branded with Orientalist, imperial, exoticizing tropes that played on the "sexual privilege of the Ottoman man" (19, 33–36). Likewise, the bright-leaf cigarette in China became known as the "Western cigarette" partly by the reliance of British American Tobacco (BAT) on Chinese courtesans to promote their products in Chinese business culture (46). Cigarettes also became associated with the "modern" trend of jazz music and dance through tobacco corporations' sponsorship of radio shows, making jazz part of cigarettes' branding by taking on jazz's racialized cool. Meanwhile, the radio shows staved off the stigma of blackness by excluding black bands (196–201). Yet, Enstad highlights the contradictory dynamics at play in the jazz-cigarette nexus. For example, African Americans in the segregated South held jazz dances, where they smoked cigarettes and created "themselves as modern subjects" (219). Through this "intimate history of corporate imperialism," Enstad shows how "corporations were made by people through daily encounters" (263).

A third kind of myth that Enstad takes on is the melodramatic morality tale of "good" public health advocates against "evil" tobacco corporations personified by their leaders (xii). Enstad uses the "bright leaf network," a white male hiring network that excluded women and African Americans from white-collar jobs, as a theoretical tool for understanding the nuanced struggles within corporations, workplaces, workers' homes, and sites of leisure (2, 10). The bright-leaf network served as a means of "corporate imperialism," "replicating segregation's hierarchies with domestic and international expansion" (12). In BAT's expansion to China, the bright-leaf network reproduced racialized and gendered hierarchies in workplaces and homes. For example, white BAT...