Confronting the Capitalist Cowboy

Schumpetarian narratives of the capitalist cowboy create a narrow view of capitalism

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.