Description
Book SynopsisCannabis is a genetically diverse plant that has been commodified for a variety of different purposes by many cultures throughout world history. For thousands of years, people have used its fiber, seed, and flowers to make rope and cloth, rig ships, feed people and livestock, concoct medicines, and alter states of consciousness. Until the nineteenth century, though, most Europeans and Americans were unaware of drug varieties of cannabis. The British encountered them in India and created western-style medicines that sold throughout the Atlantic world by the 1840s, but negative associations with Oriental intoxication and degeneracy sullied the plant's reputation as a viable commodity. Now, after decades of transatlantic criminalization policies against cannabis in the twentieth century, it is making a comeback. In Commodifying Cannabis, Bradley J. Borougerdi traces the tangled histories of its use for fiber, medicine, and altered states of consciousness across the Atlantic world, focusin
Trade ReviewBradley J. Borougerdi offers a sweeping history that examines the greatly varying meanings cannabis has had in the Atlantic World. The plant has been a vital naval store, an economic staple, an exotic intoxicant, and a narcotic scourge. Borougerdi traces the social and economic processes that produced these meanings through his study of a wide range of historic documents. Cannabis has for centuries shaped societies around the Atlantic; this book argues that very old ideas still shape present attitudes about the plant. -- Chris Duvall, University of New Mexico
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Constructed Cannabis Cultures
Chapter 1: The Cultural Botany of Cannabis
Chapter 2: Cannabis in History: A Triple Purpose Plant
Chapter 3: The Ties that Bind: Cannabis Fiber and the Atlantic World
Chapter 4: Reorienting Empire and Transforming Perceptions of Cannabis in the Atlantic World
Chapter 5: "At Once a Curse and a Blessing": The Transatlantic Transformations of "Oriental" Cannabis
Chapter 6: From Rope to Dope: The Indian Hemp Drug Commission and its Transatlantic Aftermath
Chapter 7: Shifting Cultural Consumption Patterns of Cannabis in U.S. Transatlantic History
Conclusion: Refashioning Meaning
