Business history has undergone a revolution of sorts. Following years of emphasizing primarily economic and organizational factors located within the firm, historians have moved to incorporating a wide range of influences, including racial and gender discrimination, religion, union relations, and the environment to explain changes in the ways people conduct business. Even so, the power of the corporation to dictate who belongs in the histories of business—drawing attention to company executives, directors, stockholders, and others considered central to the management of the corporation—continues to hold sway in the field.
Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism builds on what many labor and gender historians have long known; namely, that the corporation is made up of a wide range of actors with formal and informal ties to the organization. In doing so, Nan Enstad joins a handful of other scholars, such as Bethany Moreton and B. Alex (formerly Betsy) Beasley, whose work compels a rethinking of the rise of the modern corporation by revealing its indebtedness to multiple political and cultural forces at the local, national, and global levels: in this case, in the multinational cigarette industry. Those looking for a familiar story that celebrates technological innovation at the hands of entrepreneurs such as James B. Duke and other cigarette tycoons will be disappointed. Rather, readers will encounter sex workers, jazz musicians, farmers, and baseball players, in addition to upper- and lower-level managers, factory workers, and consumers.
Cigarettes, Inc. tells the story of the growth of the cigarette industry by tracing the expansion of the American Tobacco Company (ATC) and later the British American Tobacco Company (BAT). The latter grew out of a merger between the ATC and the Imperial Tobacco Company of Britain to become one of the world’s first multinational corporations. Over seven chapters that bring together a global cast of characters from Egypt, the Jim Crow American South, and China, Enstad reveals the new relationship forged between multinational corporations involved in producing and marketing cigarettes and imperialism. The cigarette’s remarkable rise in popularity occurred not from the result of entrepreneurial individuals or Western superiority but from the intimate relationships forged by diverse actors, who together comprise the multinational corporation.
These intimate relationships included actors who had no formal ties to the corporation itself but who nonetheless played critical roles in constructing what Enstad calls the “bright leaf network” (10). The bright leaf network, for Enstad, was a product of Jim Crow and a conduit for spreading ideas about racial distinction and hierarchy across the globe. In Chapter 3, Enstad introduces the reader to Hattie Gregory, wife of Henry Gregory, who ran BAT’s agricultural department in China. While her husband worked to establish a bright leaf production system serving the company’s local manufacturing plant, Hattie performed cultural labor that proved crucial to the corporation in other ways, including constructing an American Southern-style home structured along racial, gender, and class lines. “Other foreigners likely had an idea of the bourgeois home as a private space defined by the absence of the market, but Hattie was accustomed to the home being both a place of intimate care and paid labor, and she consciously developed her role of race manager” by overseeing Chinese household staff and preparing Southern food that provided the company’s largely white Southern managers with a sense of comfort and familiar privilege amid an otherwise foreign climate (111). Meanwhile, the company hosted separate social events for their Chinese employees. Elsewhere, Enstad reveals racial, gendered, and other hierarchies based on place of origin as central to the construction of ATC’s and BAT’s labor forces (Chapter 4) and distribution networks (Chapter 5) in the United States and China.
Enstad’s attention to the production and reproduction of racial hierarchies within the cigarette industry does not prevent her from simultaneously pushing back on notions of Western (read white) superiority, which she does by demonstrating the historical contingencies present in the rise of the cigarette industry. In Chapter 2, for instance, Enstad shows how ATC profited from the Fourteenth Amendment. Initially passed by Congress to bestow citizenship rights to African Americans, Enstad explains how ATC lawyers appropriated the amendment’s federal protections awarded to legal persons, including protections of private property and due process, to expand the powers of the corporation. Meanwhile, in China, BAT benefited from privileges won by multiple imperial powers, including Japan in the Sino-Japanese War, which enabled foreign companies to operate in treaty ports outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese people and with access to a wide range of services, including “cheap and abundant servants to lavish entertainment venues” (14). Here, as elsewhere, Enstad illuminates the complex legal infrastructures undergirding international business while also demonstrating the multiple links connecting global capitalism and imperialism.
Bringing together insights and modes of analysis from cultural, labor, political, transnational, and business history, Cigarette’s Inc. truly pushes the boundaries of corporate history and provides a model for future historians to rethink the multinational corporation and its relationship to national and imperial politics.
