In 1999, Nan Enstad published Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, a significant contribution to the turn from social to cultural history. That book linked working women's consumerism—their tastes for clothes and commodities—to their political and labor activism, and it rapidly became a classic of cultural labor history. Enstad's second book likewise opens new frontiers in the history of racial capitalism. She takes as her lens the “few hundred white men from the segregated U.S. South who traveled to China to build the cigarette industry for the British American Tobacco Company (BAT)-China between 1905 and 1937” (p. x). Her sophisticated narrative runs as follows.
After the Civil War, American tobacconists began wrapping Virginia's bright tobacco in paper to compete with Turkish cigarettes made in Egypt. These Richmond Gems sold best in London and China and tied the racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South to a consumer good that circulated internationally and carried cultural associations of “the West” in China, and “the East” (Egypt, Turkey) in London and the United States. By 1905, the American Tobacco Company (ATC) had expanded into the British market, at first competing but then contracting with British tobacconists, forming the BAT to segment the world market. This “multinational imperialism” combined British empire with typically southern Bright Leaf business networks (p. 83). The role of American southerners in developing cultivation, grading, purchasing, and manufacturing methods in China meant the spread of southern ideas about race, gender, work, food, and cleanliness too (chap. 3). In chapter 4, the southern social worldview also motivates the corporate and labor structures by which BAT organized production in China. In the 1910s and 1920s, cigarette consumption finally spiked in both China and the United States, and chapter 5 details how BAT learned the power of brands such as Camels and Ruby Queens. Finally, chapter 6 argues that it was jazz music, and not soldiers issued cigarette rations in World War I, that was responsible for the spread of cigarette smoking. Smoke-filled clubs sold cigarettes and sophistication and carried American racial hierarchies around the world and into China's treaty ports. However, jazz in the American South was, it seems, an African American entertainment, barely known to white society (p. 217).
Throughout, Enstad offers surprising revelations. The formation of the ATC rested on peculiarities in New Jersey corporation law, she finds—and she argues that the role of the famous Bonsack cigarette-rolling machine has been overstated. She repeatedly declares the novelty of this discovery, arguing that historians “speak as if with one voice on the myth of Duke's expansion” (p. 8n14). She finds that “the fable has circulated … in virtually every history of tobacco or cigarettes” since Alfred Chandler's Visible Hand (1977) and “no one has reassessed the early industry for over a half century” (pp. 6–7, 85). This reviewer once spent a decade countering that myth, providing alternative explanations in tax law and technology. But despite Enstad's heartfelt emphasis on correcting fables of innovation and entrepreneurship, she has read little in the history of technology or business history, where her citations begin with Joseph Schumpeter and end with Chandler.
These reading gaps mean that Enstad's efforts to correct the record instead sometimes reproduce elements already falsified elsewhere. She repeats a story that circulated after the war, about the discovery of bright leaf cultivation and curing methods by a North Carolina man enslaved on an antebellum plantation (p. 12). She notices that the story promoted a specific political agenda, in that the man had declared himself a faithful Democrat who missed his enslavement, but she misses the way the invention myth legitimized new cultivation and curing techniques that had developed to serve the credit arrangements of sharecropping, after emancipation. These findings would buttress Enstad's claims about the ways politics, race, and corporate managerial hierarchies were fused. Ignoring them means that bright tobacco culture in the U.S. South, where it grew alongside Jim Crow, remains unexplored—an essentialized element of southern culture. Likewise, Enstad seems to accept the claims of jazz music to primitivism and erotic heat—failing to account, for example, for Michael Borshuk's argument about jazz as modernism in Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (2006).
It is a shame to encounter these errors and gaps when so much interesting information on the early corporation, and the history of its spread, is at stake. One assumes the author's information is accurate when it combines Lewis Ginter's personal life and the gentlemen's clubs of late nineteenth-century London to find that “homosocial, elite male culture came to carry markers of gayness or camp” and that “the rise of [cigarette brand] Ruby Queens changed the Chinese industry as a whole” (pp. 41, 164). Deeper reading might also have given Enstad opportunities to link the history of racial capitalism to scholars’ research in more traditional fields. There are insights here that could inspire wonder and excite scholarship in new directions. Examples include the recognition that corporate personhood developed at a moment that witnessed increasing legal restrictions of personhood for women, African Americans, and Chinese people; that BAT's “foreign corporate culture … developed … around white Southern identity”; and that BAT-China's claims to be a force for international peace relied on “an abstraction of economic exchange rather than … actual experience” (pp. 78, 88, 255). But it is hard to know what to learn from a text whose expressions of both story and argument are more extravagant than measured and that has set itself apart from the existing scholarly conversation.
