Cannabis Britannica

Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800-1928

James Mills

260 pages | 8pp halftone plates | 234x156mm

978-0-19-924938-1 | Hardback | 11 September 2003

Also available as: Paperback

Price: £69.00

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A pacily written account of politics, science and empire
Explores the historical background to cannabis legislation
Reveals imperial Britain's role in the cannabis trade
Shows how political circumstances combined almost accidentally to lead to prohibition

Cannabis Britannica explores the historical origins of the UK's legislation and regulations on cannabis preparations before 1928. It draws on published and unpublished sources from the seventeenth century onwards from archives in the UK and India to show how the history of cannabis and the British before the twentieth century was bound up with imperialism. James Mills argues that until the 1900s, most of the information and experience gathered by British sources were drawn from colonial contexts as imperial administrators governed and observed populations where use of cannabis was extensive and established. This is most obvious in the 1890s when British anti-opium campaigners in the House of Commons seized on the issue of Government of India excise duties on the cannabis trade in Asia in order to open up another front in their attacks on imperial administration. The result was that cannabis preparations became a matter of concern in Parliament which accordingly established the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

The story in the twentieth century is of the momentum behind moves to include cannabis substances in domestic law and in international treaties. The latter was a matter of the diplomatic politics of imperialism, as Britain sought to defend its cannabis revenues in India against American and Egyptian interests. The domestic story focuses on the coming together of the police, the media, and the pharmaceutical industry to form misunderstandings of cannabis that forced it onto the Poisons Schedule despite the misgivings of the Home Office and of key medical professionals. The book is the first full history of the origins of the moments when cannabis first became subjected to laws and regulations in Britain.

Readership: Readers with an interest in cannabis and its history; imperial historians; social and cultural historians; historians of social policy; specialists in the social history of medicine.

The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.

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Cannabis Britannica

Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800-1928

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