Pall Mall brand cigarettes were introduced in 1899 by the Butler & Butler Company, in an attempt to cater to the upper class with the first "premium" cigarette. Its name is taken from a 17th century game in which a player attempts to drive a wooden ball with a mallet down an alley and through a raised ring using as few strokes as possible; derived from Latin palla and malleus, or "ball" and "hammer", respectively. Pall Mall is also the name of a very upscale street in the West End of London.

In 1907, Pall Mall was acquired by American Tobacco with the sale of Butler & Butler. The new owners used the premium brand to test innovations in cigarette design, such as the "king-size" (now the standard size for cigarettes at 85mm), a new way of stuffing tobacco that supposedly made cigarettes easier on the throat.

Pall Malls reached the height of their popularity in 1960 when they were the number one brand of cigarettes in America.[1] The gambles in design had paid off and so the company introduced "longs", or 100mm cigarettes (again creating a standard, this time for long cigarettes). It would later be dethroned in 1966 by Winston cigarettes, when Pall Mall found that it could no longer compete with the advertising campaign "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." Ironically, in the 1940s, Pall Mall had its own grammatically incorrect slogan which touted it as the cigarette which "travels the smoke further", referencing the longer 85mm length. Their famous slogan during the '50s and early '60s was "OUTSTANDING...and they are MILD!".

In 1994, Pall Mall and Lucky Strike were purchased by Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation as the former American Tobacco company shed its tobacco brands[2]. Brown & Williamson merged with R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company on July 30, 2004, with the surviving company taking the name, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. R. J. Reynolds continues to make unfiltered and filtered styles of Pall Mall for the U.S. market, emphasizing the latter. British American Tobacco makes and sells Pall Mall outside the U.S.

Pall Mall currently is in the "Growth Brand" segment of the R.J. Reynolds brand portfolio[3]. Within British American Tobacco, Pall Mall is one of their four drive brands.[4]