Guest Lecture

Date: Friday, March 1, 2019
Time: 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: Sid Smith Hall, Room 2098
Speaker: Nan Enstad, UW Madison

Traditional narratives of capitalist change often rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. In “The Jim Crow Cigarette in China,” Nan Enstad upends this story, revealing the myriad cross-cultural encounters that produced corporate life before World War II.

In this startling account of innovation and expansion, Enstad uncovers a corporate network rooted in Jim Crow segregation that stretched between the United States and China and beyond. Cigarettes, Inc. teems with a global cast—from Egyptian, American, and Chinese entrepreneurs to a multiracial set of farmers, merchants, factory workers, marketers, and even baseball players, jazz musicians, and sex workers. Through their stories, “The Jim Crow Cigarette in China” accounts for the cigarette’s spectacular rise in popularity and in the process offers nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of corporate power itself.

Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, an affiliate of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and the Afro-American Studies Department, and the current Director of the UW Food Studies Network.

*This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, the Department of Historical Studies and the Department of History at the University of Toronto.