Smoking is the number one preventable cause of death and disease in the world. This has been known for some time but the responses of governments to this problem have varied enormously. Many countries which now have comprehensive tobacco control regimes did very little to regulate tobacco until the 1980s. Further, many countries still have very limited tobacco controls. The book raises two key questions: Why is there often such a wide gap between the size of the policy problem and the government response? And why, if the problem is the same across the globe, does policy vary so markedly across political systems? This is the first major book by political scientists explaining global tobacco control policy. It identifies a history of minimal tobacco control, linked to the power of the tobacco industry, then charts the extent to which governments, aided by public health advocates, have regulated tobacco domestically and internationally in the modern era.