The story of corporate capitalism is often articulated as “the benevolent spread of progress,” as historian Nan Enstad observes in her new book Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (p. 5). This narrative often begins in the West and moves further and further East, eventually consuming the world. This perceived natural experience, we are often told, not only exported modern products, technologies, and commercial formations to the East, it also transformed ‘primitive’ societies into ‘civilized’ ones.
The leading protagonist of this West-to-East movement, the story goes, was the innovative entrepreneur. Using metaphors of natural mutation, the late economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that the entrepreneur was the central driver of creative destruction, which involved the (destructive and eventually productive) transformation from “water wheel to the power plant” or “craft shop to the factory.” 1 For American entrepreneur James B. Duke, it was the reorganization of the tobacco industry.
Scholars such as Alvin J. Silk and Louis William Stern have argued that “Duke accomplished [a] Schumpeterian type of innovation” by consolidating the largest US tobacco manufacturers into the American Tobacco Company and then merging it with the British Imperial Tobacco Company in 1904.2 Following the narrative legacy of Schumpeter, Silk and Stern articulate a story of Duke single-handedly reorganizing the tobacco industry to create one of the largest transnational corporations: the British-American Tobacco Company (BAT). These and other stories of entrepreneurial driven capitalism expressed by scholars such as Patrick G. Porter and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., among many others, have been repeated so many times that they have come to be viewed as natural.
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).