Hashish, hemp and empire: cannabis in the medieval and early modern worlds

Between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, cannabis led two very different lives. In the cities of medieval Egypt and Syria, a resinous preparation called hashish became familiar enough to worry jurists, preachers and sultans, who argued over whether it should be treated like wine. At the same time, and for far longer, the plant's tough stem fibres were twisted into rope, woven into sacking and canvas, and pulped into paper. Rulers who never gave a moment's thought to intoxication cared a great deal about hemp, because ships could not sail without it.

This article follows both lives. It starts with the medieval Islamic world and with Franz Rosenthal's classic study of hashish in Arabic sources. It then looks at one of the most durable legends in drug history, the story of the hashish-crazed "Assassins", and at how the historian Farhad Daftary took it apart. From there it moves south and west, to the arrival of cannabis in Africa, the new smoking technologies that developed there and the long-running argument over how drug-type cannabis crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. It ends with hemp as an economic and strategic crop, from Chinese paper to the rigging of European warships, and with the reasons for its decline.

Running through all of this is a question of method. Much of what is popularly "known" about cannabis in these centuries comes from legend, travellers' tales, guesswork about words and the enthusiasm of modern advocates. Careful historians have spent decades sorting the evidence from the embroidery, and their work is as interesting as the stories themselves.

A plant already on the move

By the medieval period cannabis already had a very long human history. Earlier articles in this series cover its botany and origins (origins), the archaeological evidence for its early use as fibre and food (prehistory), and the first securely dated evidence of ritual burning in Central Asia and the Levant (antiquity). By the time of the period covered here the plant was grown or gathered across much of Eurasia. In South Asia, preparations later known as bhang, ganja and charas had become part of religious and medical life.

What changes in the centuries covered here is the scale and direction of movement. Trade networks across the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Sahara and eventually the Atlantic carried people, goods and habits further and faster than before. Cannabis travelled with them, sometimes as seed, sometimes as a product, and often simply as knowledge: how to grow it, what to call it, how to prepare it and what it was good for. It is worth remembering that the plant's two main products travelled along largely separate tracks. The resin-rich, intoxicating forms moved mostly through informal, everyday channels: migrants, labourers, sailors, the enslaved. Fibre hemp moved through the deliberate policies of states and trading companies. The two stories meet only occasionally, but both are part of the same plant's history.

Hashish in medieval Islamic societies

Rosenthal's The Herb

The standard scholarly study of cannabis in the medieval Muslim world is still Franz Rosenthal's The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society, published in 1971. Rosenthal was a distinguished scholar of Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history, and his book is a work of philology: close reading of texts, attention to the meanings of words and careful tracing of how arguments developed over time. It follows cannabis through Arabic sources from roughly the twelfth to the sixteenth century (Rosenthal, 1971).

The title itself is a clue. The Arabic word ḥashīsh means, at its root, grass or dried herbage, so the name of the drug is itself a rather plain, everyday word: "the herb". That ordinary vocabulary is a reminder that, for the people who used and argued about it, hashish was a familiar thing rather than an exotic one.

A study of this kind has to work across many kinds of writing: legal opinions, medical and pharmacological works, chronicles, literature. Each genre has its own conventions and biases. A legal treatise condemning hashish is likely to stress its worst effects; a poem celebrating it may exaggerate its pleasures for comic or literary effect; a chronicle reporting a crackdown may tell us more about a ruler's wish to appear pious than about how widely the drug was actually used. Part of the value of a broad study like Rosenthal's lies in setting such voices side by side.

Egypt and Syria in the later Middle Ages

Rosenthal shows that hashish consumption became widespread in Egypt and Syria (Rosenthal, 1971). These two regions formed one of the great political and cultural centres of the medieval Islamic world. From the late twelfth century they were ruled by the Ayyubid dynasty founded by Saladin, and from the mid-thirteenth century until the Ottoman conquest of 1516–17 by the Mamluk sultanate, a regime whose ruling elite was recruited from enslaved soldiers. Cairo was among the largest cities in the world, and Damascus and Aleppo were major centres of learning and trade.

These were dense, literate, commercial urban societies, with markets, colleges of law, hospitals, mosques and Sufi lodges. They had a large class of scholars and judges whose job was to interpret religious law and apply it to new circumstances, and a lively literary culture that produced everything from devotional texts to bawdy verse. That combination helps explain why hashish left so many traces in the written record. A practice that might have gone unremarked in a small rural community became, in a great city, a visible social phenomenon, something to be argued about in law, satirised in poetry and occasionally attacked by the authorities.

The sources cannot tell us with any precision how many people used hashish, or how often. Medieval chroniclers did not collect statistics, and writers who mention the habit usually do so because they disapprove of it or find it entertaining. "Widespread" here should be understood as a judgement drawn from the frequency and tone of the sources, not a measured quantity.

Sufis and "the herb"

In the sources Rosenthal studied, hashish is associated especially with Sufi circles (Rosenthal, 1971). Sufism is the broad term for the mystical traditions within Islam, which seek a direct, inward experience of the divine. By the later Middle Ages Sufism was organised into orders, each tracing a spiritual lineage back through a chain of teachers, and Sufi lodges were a familiar part of city life. Sufi practice often involved rituals of remembrance of God, music, poetry and the pursuit of ecstatic states.

It is easy to see why critics linked Sufis and hashish, and also why that link should be treated with some caution. For opponents of certain Sufi practices, the association was a useful weapon: a way of suggesting that mystical experiences were really just intoxication, and that wandering dervishes were idlers rather than holy men. Some sources do suggest genuine use of hashish in Sufi settings. But the strength of the association in hostile writings may partly reflect the polemics of the time. Historians reading these texts have to keep both possibilities in view. The association is real in the sources; how far it reflects actual practice across the many varieties of Sufism is harder to judge.

Is it like wine? The juristic debate

The heart of Rosenthal's story is a legal argument. Hashish provoked extensive juristic debate over whether it should be treated like wine (Rosenthal, 1971). To see why this question mattered so much, it helps to know a little about how Islamic law works.

Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) draws first on the Qur'an and on the recorded sayings and practice of the Prophet. The Qur'an clearly prohibits wine (khamr), and a widely cited prophetic tradition extends that prohibition to intoxicants in general. Hashish, however, is not mentioned in these foundational texts, which date from the seventh century, centuries before hashish became a prominent issue in Egypt and Syria. Faced with a new substance, jurists had to reason their way to a ruling. One of the most important tools for doing so was analogy (qiyās): if a new case shares the essential feature, or "effective cause", of a case already settled, it takes the same ruling.

The question therefore became: what exactly was it about wine that made it forbidden, and did hashish share that feature? If the reason for the prohibition was intoxication, and hashish intoxicated, the analogy seemed strong. But the matter was not so simple. Any jurist reasoning about a new substance in this framework had to face questions of the following kind:

• Is it an intoxicant in the same sense as wine? If its effects were judged to be of a different kind, the analogy would be weaker, and the classification would affect what kind of ruling and what kind of punishment applied.
• What about medicine? Many plants with powerful effects were used medicinally. Jurists had to decide where the line fell between legitimate therapeutic use and vice.
• What about harm? Beyond the formal analogy with wine, there were arguments from harm: to the intellect, and to social order.
• How should it be punished? Wine-drinking carried a fixed penalty in Islamic law. Whether the same penalty applied to hashish, or whether the authorities should use their discretion, depended on how the substance was classified.

Sunni Islam recognises four main schools of law, and legal reasoning within and between them allowed room for disagreement. What emerges from Rosenthal's account is that the status of hashish was not settled by a single pronouncement: it was argued over extensively, and the reasoning took real intellectual effort.

Suppression and its limits

Alongside the legal argument came periodic attempts at suppression (Rosenthal, 1971). Rulers and officials from time to time ordered crackdowns. The word "periodic" is important. Repeated campaigns suggest that each one had limited lasting effect, and that hashish use tended to return once official attention moved elsewhere.

Medieval Muslim rulers had their own reasons for such campaigns. Visible enforcement of religious law was one way for a ruler to demonstrate piety and legitimacy, particularly at times of crisis such as famine or plague, when public misfortune might be read as a sign of divine displeasure. A crackdown on hashish, like a crackdown on wine, could serve a political as well as a moral purpose. Reading the chronicles, historians therefore have to ask not only what was done but why it was being recorded.

A medieval mirror of modern arguments

What makes Rosenthal's material so striking for a modern reader is how familiar the arguments sound. Medieval jurists argued about intoxication, harm to the intellect, social disorder and the boundary between medicine and vice. In many ways their debate anticipated the modern one.

It is worth being careful with that parallel. The medieval jurists were not doing pharmacology or public health in the modern sense; they were interpreting a body of religious law using its own methods and categories. But the basic questions they faced recur in very different settings. Is this substance essentially the same as one we already prohibit, or different in kind? Should the law target the substance, the intoxication or the harm? Can a thing be a medicine in one context and a vice in another? Later articles in this series show twentieth-century legislators and diplomats asking very similar questions in very different language (medicine and prohibition). The moral and legal framing of cannabis has shifted repeatedly over the centuries, and the medieval Islamic debate is one of the earliest well-documented examples of that process.

The "Assassins": anatomy of a legend

The popular story

Few stories in the history of drugs are repeated as often as this one. In the mountains of Persia and Syria, the story goes, there lived a secret sect led by a sinister figure known as the Old Man of the Mountain. He drugged young men with hashish, carried them into a beautiful hidden garden that he passed off as paradise, and then sent them out to murder his enemies, promising them a return to paradise if they obeyed. These "hashish-eaters" gave their name to a new word in European languages: assassin.

It is a vivid tale, and almost every part of the drug connection turns out to be legend. The historian Farhad Daftary, a leading specialist on the history of the Ismailis, dismantled it in The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma'ilis (Daftary, 1994).

Who the Nizari Ismailis were

The people behind the legend were the Nizari Ismailis, a branch of Shi'i Islam. The Ismailis had produced the Fatimid caliphate, which ruled Egypt from Cairo for two centuries. After a succession dispute in the Fatimid state at the end of the eleventh century, the followers of one claimant, Nizar, broke away. Under the leadership of Hasan-i Sabbah, they took the mountain fortress of Alamut in northern Iran and built a network of fortified strongholds there and, later, in the mountains of Syria.

The Nizaris were a small community surrounded by far more powerful enemies, including the Sunni Seljuk Turks and, in Syria, various Muslim rulers and the Crusader states. They did use targeted killings of prominent opponents as a political and military tactic, and this gave them a fearsome reputation. Their state lasted until the Mongol conquests of the mid-thirteenth century, when Alamut fell. The community itself survived, and its descendants form the Nizari Ismaili community of today.

So there is a historical kernel: a real community, real fortresses and real political killings. What Daftary challenges is the hashish story wrapped around it.

A term of abuse

The key evidence is linguistic. In Daftary's account, ḥashīshī (plural ḥashīshiyya) was a term of abuse used by other Muslims for the Nizaris, meaning roughly "low-class rabble". It was applied "without any derivative explanation reflecting any special connection between the Nizaris and hashish" (Daftary, 1994).

In other words, calling someone a "hashish-user" in this setting was an insult, comparable to calling them riff-raff or degenerates. It drew on the low social reputation that hashish had in the societies Rosenthal describes. It was not an eyewitness report of how Nizari agents prepared for their missions. The Nizaris' enemies had every reason to blacken their name, both for their religious beliefs, which Sunni writers regarded as heretical, and for their political violence. A contemptuous nickname fitted that purpose.

The phrase "without any derivative explanation" is the crux. The hostile Muslim sources that used the insult did not, on Daftary's reading, explain it as a reference to drugged killers. The connection between the name and an imagined practice was made later, and largely elsewhere.

From insult to legend: Crusaders and Marco Polo

In Daftary's account it was the abusive name that "gave rise to the imaginative tales disseminated by the Crusaders" and later by Marco Polo (Daftary, 1994). The sequence matters. First came an insult; then came stories invented to explain it.

The Crusaders encountered the Syrian Nizaris directly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Nizari fortresses in the Syrian mountains lay close to Crusader territory, and relations ranged from conflict to uneasy diplomacy; Crusader leaders were among the targets of Nizari attacks. Western chroniclers who wrote about the sect knew little of its beliefs and could not read its literature. They heard a strange name, saw a group capable of striking down powerful men, and filled the gaps with explanations that made sense to them: blind obedience, secret rituals, and eventually intoxication.

Marco Polo's account of his travels, written down at the end of the thirteenth century, gave the story its most famous form, with the Old Man of the Mountain and his false paradise. By then Alamut had already fallen to the Mongols, and Polo was repeating tales about a state that no longer existed. His book was immensely popular in Europe, and its version of the Assassins passed into European literature and, eventually, into the vocabulary of European languages, where "assassin" came to mean simply a political murderer.

Why the legend endured

The Assassins story is a good example of how cannabis history has absorbed Orientalist legend. "Orientalism", in the critical sense the term has carried since the late twentieth century, refers to the habit of European writers and scholars of portraying the Islamic world and Asia as exotic, irrational, sensual and dangerous: a mirror in which Europe could see itself as rational and civilised. A secret sect of drugged fanatics fitted that picture perfectly.

The story also survived because it was useful to later writers. Nineteenth-century European scholars proposed the hashish etymology as a learned explanation, giving the legend an air of scholarly authority. In the twentieth century, campaigners against cannabis could cite it as proof that the drug caused violence, while enthusiasts could enjoy it as colourful lore. A legend that serves several different agendas at once is very hard to kill.

For the historian, the lesson is methodological. A word is not a description. When a group is given a nickname by its enemies, the nickname tells us first about the attitudes of the people who used it. Turning it into evidence of behaviour requires independent support, and in this case, Daftary argues, that support does not exist. Recognising legend and Orientalist fantasy for what they are is one of the recurring tasks of cannabis historiography.

Cannabis in Africa

Routes of arrival

Cannabis reached Africa from South Asia and the Middle East, probably by several routes, including the Indian Ocean coast (Duvall, 2019). That word "probably" is important; it reflects how hard it is to trace the movement of a plant across a continent with few written records from the relevant periods.

The Indian Ocean route makes sense against what is well known about that ocean's history. For many centuries before European ships arrived, seasonal monsoon winds allowed merchants to sail between East Africa, Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India on a regular cycle. Ports on the East African coast, part of the Swahili world, were connected to markets across the ocean, trading in goods such as ivory, gold, textiles and spices. People moved along these routes as well as goods: merchants, sailors, settlers and enslaved people. Plants, and knowledge about how to use them, could travel with any of them. Other plausible routes ran from the Middle East through Egypt and the Nile valley, or across the Red Sea.

Once in Africa, cannabis did not remain a foreign curiosity. It was incorporated into local medical, ritual and recreational practice (Duvall, 2019). Different societies adopted it in their own ways and fitted it into their own systems of healing, sociability and belief. Over time it spread far into the interior, reaching central and southern Africa.

Smoking technologies and the water pipe

Chris Duvall's The African Roots of Marijuana (2019) is the most important recent study of this history. Duvall is a geographer, and his book brings together botany, linguistics, ethnography and archival history. One of his central arguments concerns technology: how cannabis was consumed.

Duvall argues that African smoking technologies, including the water pipe, turned cannabis into a fast-acting, easily dosed drug (Duvall, 2019). The point is subtle but important. The way a substance is taken shapes what it does. Eating or drinking cannabis preparations produces effects that arrive slowly and are hard to judge. Inhaling smoke produces effects quickly, which allows the user to judge them and stop. Smoke drawn through water is also cooler. In Duvall's account, the smoking practices developed in Africa transformed the cultural character of the drug, making it something that could be taken in small, controlled amounts in ordinary social settings.

This is a striking claim for anyone used to thinking of African history as a passive recipient of innovations from elsewhere. Duvall's argument places African people at the centre of a technological change that would later spread across the Atlantic and beyond. As with any broad thesis, specialists may debate its details, but it has changed how historians frame the global history of cannabis smoking.

Words as evidence: dagga, riamba and mariamba

Some of the most suggestive evidence for this history is linguistic. Names such as dagga in southern Africa and riamba in the Kasai region of central Africa reflect how deeply cannabis became embedded in regional cultures (Duvall, 2019). A plant that has acquired its own local names, rather than simply borrowing a foreign one, has usually been present long enough to become part of everyday life.

Duvall also argues that the word "marijuana" most probably derives from African terms such as mariamba (Duvall, 2019). This is a significant claim, because the word is often assumed to be simply Mexican Spanish. On Duvall's account, the familiar name of the drug in the Americas carries a trace of its African history, a history that later users of the word were mostly unaware of. The later story of the word, including its use in twentieth-century American campaigns against the drug, is taken up in another article in this series (medicine and prohibition).

The limits of the evidence

Linguistic and ethnographic evidence is valuable, but it has limits. Words can be borrowed, reshaped and reinterpreted, and similar-sounding words can arise independently. Dating when a word first entered a language is often impossible without written records, and for much of pre-colonial Africa such records are scarce. Ethnographic descriptions from the colonial period, meanwhile, were usually written by outsiders, often with their own prejudices, describing practices that may already have been changing.

For these reasons, Africa's pre-colonial cannabis history depends heavily on linguistic and ethnographic inference. That does not make it unknowable, but it does mean that many conclusions are probable rather than certain. Duvall's "most probably" about mariamba is a model of the right tone: a careful argument from the best available evidence, stated with appropriate caution.

The Atlantic crossing

Two accounts

How drug-type cannabis reached the Americas is one of the most interesting debates in the field. There are two main accounts, and they focus on different centuries, different populations and different kinds of evidence.

The indenture account

The first account emphasises indentured South Asian labourers in the nineteenth-century Caribbean, whose vocabulary persists in Jamaica (Duvall, 2019). The historical background is well established. After Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in the 1830s, plantation owners in the Caribbean looked for new sources of cheap labour. One answer was indenture: workers recruited, mainly from India, on contracts that bound them to plantation work for a set number of years. Large numbers of South Asian workers travelled to British colonies in the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana, over the following decades, and their descendants remain an important part of those societies.

Many of these workers came from regions of India where hemp drugs were long-established, everyday consumables. The word ganja, used in South Asia for the dried flowering tops of the plant, is still the common term for cannabis in Jamaica. On this account, the drug and its name crossed the ocean together with the indentured labourers.

Duvall's Central African route

Duvall (2019) argues instead that "Cannabis indica entered the Atlantic World and crossed the ocean primarily with enslaved people shipped from western Central Africa", mainly via Angola. This places the crossing earlier, in the era of the transatlantic slave trade, and links it to one of the largest forced migrations in history.

Western Central Africa, the region of the Kongo and Mbundu peoples and the Portuguese colony of Angola, was one of the largest sources of enslaved people sent across the Atlantic, especially to Brazil. If cannabis use was established among people in that region, it is plausible that knowledge of the plant, and perhaps seed, travelled with some of them.

Duvall adds an important caution. "Enslaved Africans as a generic group did not carry cannabis across the Atlantic" (Duvall, 2019). It was specific Central African populations who did so. This matters for two reasons. Historically, Africa was not a single culture, and cannabis use was not evenly spread across the regions from which people were taken. Morally, it guards against a careless generalisation that would attach a drug habit to an entire continent's people. Precision here is both better history and better ethics.

Why the accounts are not exclusive

At first sight these seem like rival theories, but they need not be. The two accounts are not mutually exclusive. South Asian migration probably reinforced and renamed practices in the British Caribbean that may already have had African roots.

This kind of layering is common in the history of plants and customs. A practice can arrive with one group, survive quietly in a few places, and then be reinforced, reshaped and given new names by a later wave of migrants. If that later wave is larger, better documented or more visible to officials, it may come to look like the origin. The fact that Jamaican usage has a South Asian name is strong evidence of South Asian influence, but by itself it cannot rule out earlier, African-rooted use of the same plant. Different parts of the Americas, Brazil and the British Caribbean for example, may also have had different histories.

Fibre hemp: a deliberate introduction

Hemp for fibre, by contrast, was introduced deliberately by European colonial authorities. This is the clearest example of the two tracks described at the start of this article. While drug-type cannabis crossed the Atlantic largely through the movements of enslaved and indentured people, often unrecorded, fibre hemp arrived as a matter of policy. European governments wanted their colonies to supply strategic raw materials, and hemp was high on the list, which brings us to the plant's economic history.

Hemp as a strategic economic crop

Fibre and seed before resin

For most of recorded history the economic value of cannabis lay in its fibre and seed, not its resin. That is easy to forget, given the attention modern debates pay to the plant as a drug, but for most farmers, merchants and governments over the centuries, cannabis was primarily a source of long, strong bast fibres from the stem and of an oil-rich seed. Hemp-type and drug-type plants had in any case long followed different paths of selection, and the fibre crops grown on a large scale in Europe and China were not grown for intoxication.

China: cloth and paper

In China hemp was a staple textile fibre and one of the raw materials of early paper (Clarke and Merlin, 2013). For much of Chinese history, before cotton became widespread, hemp cloth was the everyday clothing of ordinary people, while silk was reserved for the better-off.

Paper is one of China's most celebrated inventions. Chinese tradition credits its invention to a court official, Cai Lun, at the beginning of the second century CE, although archaeological finds suggest paper-like materials existed somewhat earlier and that he refined rather than invented the process. Early papermakers used plant fibres, including old rags, fishing nets and bark, beaten into pulp, and hemp fibre was among these materials. Over the following centuries, papermaking spread from China across Asia and eventually, by way of the Islamic world, to Europe.

Rope, canvas and sea power

In early modern Europe, hemp rope and sailcloth were strategic naval supplies (Mills, 2003). The reason was physical. A large wooden sailing warship needed enormous quantities of cordage: the standing rigging that held its masts upright, the running rigging used to work its sails, anchor cables and countless smaller lines. Hemp fibre was strong, and it held up well at sea, which made it the preferred material. Sails, too, were made from heavy woven cloth, and the English word "canvas" is itself ultimately derived from the Latin cannabis.

Rope wears out, rots and breaks, and a navy's rigging needed constant replacement. Hemp was therefore a "naval store", in the same category as timber for hulls and masts, and tar and pitch for waterproofing. Any state with maritime ambitions needed a dependable supply. In wartime, a blockade that cut off hemp imports could threaten a fleet's ability to put to sea.

Mills (2003) shows that British interest in cannabis as a source of fibre for rope dates back at least to the sixteenth century. That is a long time before cannabis as a drug became a matter of policy in Britain. Mills's wider study, Cannabis Britannica, is mainly concerned with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the British Empire came to regulate hemp drugs, but it begins from this older and more mundane story: the British state first noticed cannabis as rope.

Russia and the Baltic trade

Russia became a leading exporter of hemp to the maritime powers (Clarke and Merlin, 2013). The Baltic Sea was the great source of naval stores for western European navies, supplying timber, tar, flax and hemp, and Russian hemp was shipped through Baltic ports to Britain, the Netherlands and other seafaring states.

This created an uncomfortable dependence. A navy that relied on a foreign power for one of its essential materials was vulnerable if relations broke down or if a rival controlled the sea routes. Concern about that dependence helps explain why governments kept returning to the idea of growing more hemp at home or in their colonies.

Colonial encouragement

Colonial administrations in North America and elsewhere repeatedly tried to encourage hemp growing for imperial self-sufficiency, with mixed results (Clarke and Merlin, 2013). The logic was mercantilist: colonies existed, in the eyes of the imperial governments of the day, to supply the mother country with raw materials it would otherwise have to buy from rivals. Hemp for the navy was an obvious candidate.

The word "repeatedly" signals that these efforts did not simply succeed. Hemp is labour-intensive to process. The stems must be retted, which means left to partially rot so that the fibres separate from the woody core, and then broken and cleaned, all of which demanded a great deal of work before mechanisation. Colonial farmers and planters often found other crops more profitable, whatever officials hoped. As a result, governments issued encouragement, bounties and instructions more than once, and outcomes varied from place to place.

Decline

From the nineteenth century the crop declined in the West. Several changes, overlapping in time, undermined its position:

• Cotton. The industrialisation of cotton spinning and weaving, and the vast expansion of cotton growing, especially in the plantation economy of the American South, made cotton cloth cheap and abundant. It displaced hemp and linen for many textile uses.
• Jute. Jute, grown above all in Bengal, became the dominant fibre for sacking and coarse cloth; in Britain, Dundee became the centre of a large jute industry in the nineteenth century.
• Manila hemp. Despite its name, "Manila hemp" is not cannabis at all but abacá, a fibre from a relative of the banana grown in the Philippines. It proved well suited to ropes at sea and competed directly with true hemp in its core market.
• Steam. As steamships replaced sailing ships, the navies' appetite for rigging and sailcloth collapsed. The strategic argument for hemp, which had sustained state interest for centuries, faded.
• Synthetic fibres. In the twentieth century, synthetic fibres such as nylon took over many of the remaining uses for rope and cordage.

Twentieth-century drug controls then made it harder still to grow. Because fibre hemp and drug-type cannabis are the same species, laws aimed at the drug often caught the fibre crop as well. That story, and the later revival of interest in industrial hemp, belong to other articles in this series (medicine and prohibition; science and reform).

Hemp-paper myths

The history of hemp has attracted its own crop of legends. Popular claims that particular historic documents or early printed books were written on hemp paper are mostly unverified and should be treated sceptically. One well-known example concerns the US Declaration of Independence; the engrossed copy displayed in Washington is in fact written on parchment, which is prepared animal skin, not paper of any kind.

The appeal of such claims is understandable. They connect a contested modern plant to respected national symbols and suggest that its past has been unfairly forgotten. But they illustrate a broader problem in the literature: overclaiming. Hemp was genuinely important in the history of paper and of the navy, and there is no need to exaggerate it. Every such claim needs to be checked against the physical document or a reliable analysis of it, and many do not survive the check.

What we know, and what we don't

The medieval and early modern history of cannabis is unusually rich in stories, and unusually uneven in evidence. It helps to set out where the ground is firm and where it is not.

What is reasonably well established

• Hashish consumption became widespread in medieval Egypt and Syria and is well documented in Arabic sources from roughly the twelfth to the sixteenth century, where it is associated especially with Sufi circles (Rosenthal, 1971).
• Medieval jurists debated at length whether hashish should be treated like wine, and rulers made periodic attempts to suppress it (Rosenthal, 1971).
• The name ḥashīshī applied to the Nizari Ismailis was a term of abuse; the stories of drugged assassins were imaginative tales spread by Crusaders and later by Marco Polo (Daftary, 1994).
• Cannabis reached Africa from South Asia and the Middle East and became embedded in local medical, ritual and recreational life, as names such as dagga and riamba show (Duvall, 2019).
• For most of recorded history, cannabis's main economic value lay in fibre and seed, and hemp rope and sailcloth were strategic naval supplies in early modern Europe (Mills, 2003; Clarke and Merlin, 2013).
• Western hemp growing declined from the nineteenth century under competition from cotton, jute and Manila hemp, the end of sail and, later, synthetic fibres.

What remains uncertain

• How widespread hashish use really was in medieval societies, and how far its link with Sufism reflects practice rather than polemic.
• The precise routes and dates by which cannabis entered Africa. "Several routes, including the Indian Ocean coast" is a probable reconstruction, not a documented itinerary.
• The weight of the two Atlantic accounts. Duvall's argument for a primary Central African route is powerful, but the relative contributions of African and South Asian migrants probably varied from region to region.
• Etymologies. Duvall's derivation of "marijuana" from terms such as mariamba is, in his own word, the most probable explanation. It is not certain.
• Hemp-paper claims about particular historic documents remain mostly unverified.

A broader lesson runs through all of these. The best recent work on this period, from Rosenthal's philology to Daftary's dismantling of the Assassin legend, Duvall's African history and Mills's archival history of empire, has succeeded by treating sources with care: asking who wrote them, why, and what they could actually have known. That is a useful habit for anyone reading about cannabis, whose history has been written, and rewritten, by people with strong reasons to want it to come out a particular way.

Sources

Clarke, R.C. and Merlin, M.D. (2013) Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany. Berkeley: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/9780520954571.

Daftary, F. (1994) The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma'ilis. London: I.B. Tauris.

Duvall, C.S. (2019) The African Roots of Marijuana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv11hpqx7.

Mills, J.H. (2003) Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rosenthal, F. (1971) The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society. Leiden: E.J. Brill.