Nan Enstad begins her marvelous Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism in China. China might not seem an obvious place to begin a history of the cigarette – a product so associated with the United States that the Marlboro Man stands as an avatar for the mythical cowboy masculinity of the American west. But it was in China as much as in the United States, we learn, that cigarettes began to truly change the world: the cigarette rose in popularity simultaneously in both countries, a product of imperial ambition, corporate power, and quiet desire. An account that begins in China, Cigarettes, Inc. promises a multifaceted history – a labor history, a cultural history, a business history, a history of sexuality, an imperial history – full of useful interpretive inversions. It does not disappoint.

The cigarette is the deadliest consumer product ever. This is, in part, why it is worth studying. But in Enstad's hands, the cigarette is also a different kind of killer, wielded to slay two “fables of capitalism” (5) that distort popular and scholarly understandings of modernity. She first takes aim at the legend of James B. Duke, who presided over the American Tobacco Company (ATC) as it gobbled up hundreds of rival firms in the frenzied churn of the “Great Merger Movement” in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was not Duke's force of personality, or even his acquisition of a novel cigarette-making machine, that catapulted American Tobacco to the status of a trust. It was the fact that Duke – who also held the reins of the British American Tobacco Company (BAT), a joint venture between ATC and the British Imperial Tobacco Company – controlled the cigarette machine in overseas markets, China foremost. Historiographically, Enstad's target is the Schumpeterian interpretation of history rooted in Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand (1977), a masterpiece of US business history. One speculates that her target is also an updated version of this fable of capitalism: the disruptive innovator who has traded in Duke's trademark cigar for a USB-chargeable JUUL.

It wasn't technology or personality that created the modern cigarette. It was empire – yes, territorial, but mostly corporate. The agents of this empire were what Enstad terms the “Bright Leaf Network”: the white men, largely from tobacco-growing regions of North Carolina and Virginia, who worked at British American Tobacco in China in the first decades of the twentieth century. A product of the Jim Crow south, the men of the Bright Leaf Network drew upon “what they knew in order to build new systems in concert with myriad Chinese people, from businessmen to farmers” (87). Drawing upon the diaries, letters, oral histories, and interviews of the BAT men (and women who accompanied their husbands to China), Enstad provides a glimpse into the anglophone business culture in China, a culture where white southerners imagined themselves as racially superior but were constantly confronted with their utter dependence upon native Chinese people. BAT would not have succeeded in China had it not been for the innovations of businessman Zheng Bozhao, responsible for the astonishing success of the Ruby Queen cigarette (at times known as Da Ying – which translates as “Great Britain” – depending on the extent to which anti-Americanism animated local politics), or the glamor lent to the cigarette by the high-class courtesans who were an essential part of business banquets in turn-of-the-century Shanghai.

And herein lies the second myth that Enstad snuffs out: the idea that technology transfer – and, indeed, modernity itself – has traveled unidirectionally from West to East. By exploring how BAT operated on the ground – “a more peopled approach” (262) – Enstad offers a new perspective on the history of the corporation. Chinese businessmen gained influence in BAT during the interwar period – a fact that members of the Bright Leaf Network were keenly aware of in China, but were loath to admit to white audiences. In a superb final chapter, Enstad follows the career of Frank Canaday, an American who began as an entry-level employee of a Chinese subsidiary of BAT. Canaday's letters reveal shock that the native Chinese he encountered were actually capable human beings: “Imagine yourself suddenly in a land where a Chinese drives your motor car, where a Chinese is engineer” (234). But Canaday and his fellow corporate imperialists, all of whom relied upon Chinese intermediaries for their language skills and capacities as sales brokers, never could quite articulate the corollary of this insight: that their own status atop a supposed civilizational hierarchy was tenuous. When he left Shanghai amidst the anti-imperial uprising of 1925, Canaday fell back upon well-worn tropes of Chinese backwardness.

The point here is the erasure that Canaday performed – in service of his ego, yes, but also in service to the ideology of white supremacy upon which the American, the British, and the British–American tobacco empires rested. With a brilliant reading of letters, essays, and photographs, Enstad surfaces what Canaday would have us ignore. By fleshing out the human stories that animate and enchant the corporation, Cigarettes, Inc. offers a model for scholars from a variety of fields to reimagine capitalism itself as made up of intimacies as much as financial flows, supply chains, and government policies.