Book Review: Holly Jarman, The Politics of Trade and Tobacco Control
| Author | P Sean Morris |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929916676761 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsGeneral Politics |
128 Political Studies Review 15 (1)
book is not very theoretical since it mainly con-
sists of case studies. The case studies to support
the link in the bottom-up approach are wide and
clear. In the top-down approach, the case studies
are not wide enough to generalise the theory.
Many regions in the world have multiple layers
of governance, so the top-down link in such
cases may be weak, but it does not mean that
top-down cannot work. The authors should have
looked for such case studies to strengthen the
top-down link. It seems that as a whole the bot-
tom-up link is stronger than the top-down one.
The largest section of the book deals with
establishing the food–nationalism link.
Consequently, the study of global politics through
this link is not given much space in the book.
There is some repetition of the arguments across
the chapters. In some places, this may be required,
but in many places, it could have been avoided.
To a great extent, the investigation of various
cases in the book does justice to the topic and
addresses a neglected area of study.
Manish Kumar
(Jawaharlal Nehru University)
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929916676760
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The Politics of Trade and Tobacco Control
by Holly Jarman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015. 159pp., £45.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781137384157
Tobacco control is always a tricky business to
discuss because there are two things to bear in
mind about the tobacco industry that drives the
global economy and provides numerous jobs and
tax revenues for various countries. The first is
that the tobacco industry is powerful – it can
influence government policies. The second is that
the profits and income of the tobacco industry are
staggering. In view of these concerns, states are
often mindful in how far they can go in regulating
the tobacco industry. Regulation can affect the
financial windfall which states would normally
get from the industry, and at the same time, the
repercussions of smoking on public health can
easily outweigh the benefits that nations gener-
ally enjoy from the tobacco industry.
Since the 1980s through to the 2000s, there
has been an intense movement in various indus-
trialised countries beginning in Canada and
Australia before spreading to other countries for
the tobacco industry to be tightly regulated from
a public health perspective. It has only been in
recent times that those efforts have paid off,
when various countries such as Canada,
Australia and others caved in and introduced a
slew of regulatory measures on tobacco firms
operating within their jurisdictions.
This is the narrative that Holly Jarman
develops in her book to illustrate how the inter-
nal politique of those states unraveled and
spilled over onto the international plane, and
especially the fact that ‘the global economic
reach of tobacco companies translates into
political power’ (p. 20), and thereby is able to
‘influence public health debates using trade
agreements’ (p. 23). What is particularly inter-
esting is that Jarman navigates this divisive
topic with such clarity and impressive pedigree
that all five chapters and the well-thought-out
conclusion not only unpack the politics of trade
and tobacco control but also set the ground for
resolving conflicts that may arise as a result of
tobacco regulation.
The spillover of tobacco control onto the
international plane is highly worrying and, as
Jarman argues, on the one hand, tobacco firms
use the international trading system of laws
to ‘leverage’ and ‘challenge tobacco control’
(p. 7), while at the same time, where national
governments regulate the tobacco industry
from a public health perspective, ‘there remains
a lot of legal uncertainty regarding what
constitutes a legitimate public purpose for
government polices’ (p. 44). Given that
Jarman successfully argues that political
conflicts regarding tobacco control is well
beyond national politics, the book is therefore
an essential contribution to the global discord
that surrounds tobacco control.
P Sean Morris
(University of Helsinki)6
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929916676761
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
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