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This chapter discusses the formation of an Anglo-American Alliance in the cigarette industry during the 1890s. It examines the growth of Bristol-based W. D. and H. O. Wills after it was granted exclusive control of the American-invented Bonsack machine in Britain and of Nottingham-based John Player and Sons with the use of the Elliott machine invented by Bernhard Baron. It also discusses the management and growth strategies of the American Tobacco Co. (ATC) in the cigarette and cigarette plug sectors, which were accomplished through vertical integration, acquisitions, and horizontal integration. ATC's growth was further strengthened with its entry into the British market and the formation of the British American Tobacco Company (BAT Co.).

This chapter discusses U.S.-based American Tobacco Company's (ATC) acquisition of Ogden's Limited, a well-known tobacco and cigarette manufacturing company in Liverpool, England. Upon his arrival in England in October 1901, ATC owner James Buchanan Duke launched a marketing initiative to promote his new company's product. This prompted a defensive stance among the local competitors, and 13 companies banded together to form the Imperial Tobacco Company. In order the overcome the competition and solidify his hold on the British market Duke registered a company called British Tobacco Company, designed to act as a holding company into which ATC's British interests could later be subsumed. This chapter also discusses the history of the American cigarette industry and Duke's entry into cigarette manufacturing.

Lewis Ginter’s innovation has mistakenly been attributed to James B. Duke, who eventually gained control of the American Tobacco Company. This chapter tells a new story of the rise of the cigarette corporation that breaks free from the undue influence of the theories of Joseph Schumpeter. Duke’s triumph was due not to disruptive innovation with the new technology, the cigarette machine, as is commonly believed, but to his ability to align his personal fate to a remarkable legal, financial and social empowerment of the corporation. Chapter two focuses on the rise of the American Tobacco Company and the legal battles against the ATC’s radical business methods to argue that the corporation took on enhanced powers related to corporate personhood. The ATC benefitted from the new powers granted corporations by New Jersey’s lax incorporation laws, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the stock market. The Duke-controlled ATC soon formed the British American Tobacco Company, a multinational company dedicated to overseas trade, and set its imperial sites on China. As the US waged the War of 1898, the empowered corporation played a new role in imperialism, masked by its private status.

This chapter examines the process by which the global cigarette industry was established during the first half of the 20th century. It also analyses the role played by the British American Tobacco Company Limited (BAT Co.), which became the world's leading international cigarette manufacturer. The evolution of the international cigarette manufacturing industry before the Second World War occurred in four phases. These include the shift from hand-rolled to machine-made products during 1880—1902, the American Tobacco Company's shift towards foreign direct investments, competitors' attempts to challenge BAT Co., and the creation of cartels and informal agreements that replaced the competitive rivalry between manufacturers in 1929.

This chapter discusses the impact of competition, monopsony, cigarettes, and erosion on bright tobacco production in the late nineteenth century. Caswell, Halifax, and Pittsylvania faced increasing competition from new bright tobacco districts. The American Tobacco Company (ATC), a trust formed by the largest cigarette manufacturers, achieved a monopsony over local markets that farmer organizations were unable to break. The rise of the cigarette as the dominant consumer bright leaf product limited top market prices even as it stimulated national tobacco addiction. Environmental problems stemming from standard cultivation practices made growing yellow tobacco more difficult and expensive while at the same time limiting farmers' ability to turn to alternate crops. While the turn of the century did not spell the end of bright tobacco cultivation along the border, it did signal the conclusion of the crop's most promising era.

This chapter tracks the boom of big cigarette brands in the 1910s in both China (Ruby Queen) and the US (Camel), a development that at least partially sparked the interwar spike in cigarette consumption. Previously, the industry assumed that companies had to release many brands for the varying tastes of a diverse market. The largely accidental and unrelated introduction of competition into monopoly situations in both countries caused a new concentration of marketing and distribution resources into a single brand, causing the rise of big brands and revolutionizing branding and marketing strategies globally. The chapter explores how big brands made possible new, more intense processes and affects of brand affiliation and belonging. It concludes with oppositional uses of the brand in the anti-imperial May 30th Movement in 1925 China and among African American baseball players in the interwar US South.

This chapter tells the story of a corporate network that stretched between the US South and China and tracks their development of the corporate cigarette industry in both countries. As bright leaf agriculture expanded, first in the upper South but eventually to China as well, the industry drew on Jim Crow segregation rather than expertise to manage access to jobs on the network. The bright leaf network managed the movement of personnel, materials and ideas between the two countries, including bright leaf tobacco, cigarettes, Southern foodways, and understandings of how to grow tobacco and manage servants. Following Henry and Hattie Gregory, the chapter explores how tactics from Jim Crow became translated into mechanisms for organizing Chinese agriculture as well as Chinese servants in the foreign home. The bright leaf pipeline created a business culture in BAT-China dominated by Southerners, quite segregated from the locations and practices of the Chinese business culture of BAT. The foreign home played an important role in the development of this business culture, as Hattie Gregory drew on her experience with African American domestic servants in managing Chinese servants.

From its inception, the British American Tobacco Company in China was made through cross-racial encounters, but those relationships took on new valences in the interwar period as Chinese businessmen gained more power in BAT. In 1921, Zheng Bozhao and BAT established a subsidiary corporation named Yongtaihe that allotted Zheng considerable power. This chapter explores the significance of Yongtaihe for the inner workings of the corporation and the larger, political face of corporate power. It first follows Frank H. Canaday’s career as the only foreign employee hired specifically to work in Yongtaihe, offering a window into BAT’s reconstitution and the new hybrid forms of business that emerged. It also track’s James A. Thomas, longtime head of BAT-China, as BAT’s most vocal interlocutor, engaged in highly public debates about corporations’ role in foreign relations and imperialism. Yongtaihe served as a symbol of BAT-China’s simultaneous success and failure. Because of Yongtaihe, BAT sold cigarettes—lots of cigarettes. But BAT-China’s dependence on Yongtaihe ran counter to the project and principles of modernity: that the superior, rational business structures of the West could be scaled up without significant change and transposed around the world.

In 2000, renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing installed an exhibit at the homestead of the Duke family, now a historic site and museum, marking the extension of Duke’s cigarette empire into China. Most captivating, Xu projected his father’s medical charts from his final days dying of lung cancer onto the outside wall of a 19th century tobacco barn, testifying to historical connections and culpabilities. The conclusion begins with Xu’s exhibit in order to reflect on the legacy of the transnational connections between the U.S. South and China in the global cigarette industry, including implications for capitalism, corporate imperialism, and health.