How Big Tobacco Expanded American Imperialism

These Schumpeterian inspired narratives of corporate capitalism, as Enstad astutely argues, create a narrow view of capitalism, overlooking the real and influential ways in which economic life intersect with gender, sexuality, and race. We must “look beyond” the story of the brilliant entrepreneur, Enstad writes, to understand the real story of innovation, which involved “cultural intermediaries, significant geopolitical events, and the social circulation of goods” (p. 7).

The rise of the tobacco industry offers a particularly good example of how corporate capitalism was not only shaped by the entrepreneur, but also by factory workers, tobacco farmers, sex workers, consumers, and a multitude of other lives the transnational corporation had intimate contact with (p. 264).

Most British and American men did not smoke cigarettes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — they either chewed tobacco or smoked pipes. Cigarettes had a foreign mystique, often viewed a product for immigrants and outsiders (p. 17). Unlike the cheaper and less acidic bright leaf tobacco used for pipes, Turkish cigarettes had a potent smell and flavor, which led early cigarette consumers to smoke them like cigars, holding the smoke in their mouth rather than inhaling it deep into their lungs (p. 23).

Along with the owners of Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, and Old Golds, Reynolds sought to make Camel cigarettes a cultural spectacle in the United States, while the BAT spent lavishly on marketing their Ruby Queens in China. Both Camels and Ruby Queens, Enstad writes, campaigned to connect their brands to “the aura of jazz” (p. 186). By sponsoring jazz radio shows in both the United States and China, these companies fueled a smoke-filled jazz culture. Smoking became a way for people to participate in this jazzy culture of sophistication and become a “modern” man or woman (p. 186).

Rather than a unidirectional movement, Enstad demonstrates how cigarettes circulated in both directions — it was a Western product to the East and an Eastern product to the West (p. 50). “The bidirectional flow of cigarettes, brand imagery, and tobaccos,” Enstad writes, “contradicts the capitalist story that globalization and modernity flowed from West to East and that Western companies set the codes for consumption and taste that the rest of the world adopted” (p. 18).

This bidirectional construction of modernity, as Enstad further shows, coincided with the formation of a transnational tobacco network that created a manipulative system of labor. Inspired by the Jim Crow South, the new tobacco industry not only maintained racial hierarchies in the US, it expanded them into China (p. 87).

BAT executive Henry Gregory, for instance, managed the company’s agricultural department in China, creating a system of production that was very similar to sharecropping in the American South (p. 88). While bright leaf tobacco brought a higher price than other agricultural commodities, making it attractive to Chinese farmers, it was also one of the most expensive crops to grow, requiring “seeds, fertilizer, flue pipes, and coal for curing tobacco” (p. 98). Since many farmers did not have this equipment, BAT executives began loaning it to Chinese farmers and charging an interest. Farmers went further into debt from coal and fertilizer they borrowed from Chinese landowners, making Chinese bright leaf tobacco farmers dependent on both BAT and local elites (p. 99).

Because cigarettes could be produced in China for a fraction of the cost they could in the American South, BAT leveraged the political influence that both British and US governments had “won by a half-century of imperial wars and arm-twisting diplomacy” to create one of the largest cigarette production operations in the world (p. 14). By the 1930s, around two million Chinese farmers were producing bright leaf tobacco in three provinces, including Anhui, Henan, and Shandong (p. 101). BAT employed both farmers and factory workers, many of whom struck fifty-six times between 1918 and 1940 because they were both overworked and underpaid.

As one of the largest employers in Shanghai, BAT tobacco factories created “their own internal systems of governance,” Enstad writes, and “functioned as important sites of governance in their societies, becoming a form of polity. In both the US and China, factory hierarchies entwined with local political hierarchies and legally ensconced inequalities” (p. 153).

Through her analysis of the transnational tobacco industry, which had intimate contact with laborers in China and the American South, Enstad also reveals how the relationship between the corporation, imperialism, and Jim Crow changed the nature of Western expansion in the first years of the twentieth century. The connection between formal state imperialism and informal commercial imperialism was not new during this period, but it was changing (p. 13). Imperial power no longer emerged from the strength of a single state led empire. Rather, the transnational corporation linked US and British political networks and expanded Jim Crow labor techniques to create new ways of extracting resources from foreign nations.

As we have seen, the BAT did more than create smoked out jazz clubs and a culture of consumption. It also played a leading role in reorganizing society, shaping the lives of farmers, factory workers, managers, and millions of consumers, demonstrating how the transnational corporation a was not just an economic organization, it was also a social and cultural one. Enstad shows how people who had intimate contact with BAT were not passive bystanders. They all played an active role in shaping the corporation, which leaves an important question about why we still hear the echo of Schumpeter in narratives of corporate capitalism that are centered around one (often white) man: the capitalist cowboy.

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