Nan Enstad on Multinational Cigarette Corporations and Jim Crow Capitalism

09/06/19 • 59 min

Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

The multinational corporation is a pervasive institution. For example, it’s nearly impossible to listen to this show without interacting with one. But what is the history of this thing we call the multinational corporation? And who gets to count as its constituents?

Today, we investigate this topic and how it has been shaped by cigarettes—from the workers who grew the tobacco to those who governed the tobacco companies. And we discuss what this history can tell us about race, gender, region and geography.

Our guest is Nan Enstad. Nan 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. She is. the author of Cigarettes Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism.

Nan Enstad on Multinational Cigarette Corporations and Jim Crow Capitalism

Previous Episode

Episode 58: Chris Dietrich on the Energy Crisis and the Anticolonial Elite

When we talk about the 1973 energy crisis, we tend to cast it as a moment when Americans questioned assumptions about how the domestic economy worked and the U.S. role in the global economy. We don’t always spend as much time thinking about why the crisis happened, or what it represented in the Global South. OPEC’s decision to cut production and raise prices stemmed from a longer history of anti-colonial activists demanding a fundamental change in how the global economy operated. As countries with oil reserves pushed out colonial powers, local elites demanded sovereignty over their new nation’s political life but also over their natural resources.

Today we speak with Chris Dietrich, who tells us about the longer history of anti-colonial elite thinking about oil, which culminated in what we in the U.S. tend to call the 1973 “energy crisis.”

Next Episode

Adom Getachew on Anti-colonial Worldmaking

Students in U.S. history surveys come away from their lessons on World War I with one conflict fresh in their minds: How could Woodrow Wilson, a president who advocated segregation and famously screened the racist film Birth of a Nation in the White House, also have been an architect of the League of Nations and a champion of the self-determination of colonized people in Africa and Asia?

In this episode, we speak with Adom Getachew, who casts Wilson in a different light. She argues that the people who developed ideas of self-determination were instead anti-colonial elites from colonized nations. Wilson worked against their aims and tried to reestablish racial hierarchies and white dominance. These anti-colonial thinkers fought for decolonization as a means to fight global white supremacy and capitalist exploitation of the global South

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