The African Roots of Marijuana

“This timely and compelling book profoundly engages with the contemporary interest in medical marijuana and the revision underway in the racial stereotyping of drug users. As the only work that situates Africa and its peoples at the center of a human and environmental narrative that unfolds across the Atlantic world, The African Roots of Marijuana offers a history of cannabis unlike any other.” - Judith A. Carney, coauthor of In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World

"The history and geography of psychoactive cannabis has been written many times, but no other work prior to Chris S. Duvall's The African Roots of Marijuana has explored the crucial importance of Africa and Africans in the story. Indeed, as in so many others areas of biocultural world history, Africans have been written continuously as recipients of knowledge and invention rather than innovators. With a focus on nineteenth-century published works, Duvall exposes forcefully and with felicitous prose the roots underlying the cannabis cultures that exist today." - Robert A. Voeks, author of The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative

"The book should be purchased by every scholar and lay student with an interest in this topic." - Richard Stoffle, International Journal of Intangible Heritage

"Offers a great example of why geographers, historians, and other professionally trained humanists need to keep writing about cannabis: these are the only people who can explain and contextualize the racist and colonialist assumptions baked into much of the most widely read literature on the plant. . . . The academic literature on cannabis may never be the same after The African Roots of Marijuana." - Nick Johnson, Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society

"This book will be a worthwhile addition to any university library and is especially useful for law schools and for programs in criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and history. . . . Highly recommended. All readership levels." - D. R. Kavish, Choice

"Essential reading for anyone with interests in African ethnobotany or cannabis history, and more broadly, will be of value to those interested in the history of nineteenth-century Africa or of slavery." - Wendy L. Applequist, Economic Botany

"The book is richly detailed and reflects years of sustained effort. . . . All in all, this is an excellent piece of scholarship. It should interest anyone with a curiosity about the history of cannabis, Africa, or the geography of drugs." - Barney Warf, Journal of Historical Geography

"Rumors that become published facts in high-end publications and prestigious medical journals are the mainstay of histories of marijuana. Chris S. Duvall, in a magnificently researched and clearly written book, sets right this historiography. . . . Duvall does a brilliant job in consulting available archaeological evidence, carefully studying the spread of words, and, most of all, drawing on sometimes little-studied European observers, especially Portuguese expeditions into the Central African interior. His judicious combination of all of these sources, combined with critical judgement, is convincing and a pleasure to read." - David M. Gordon, International Journal of African Historical Studies

"The Africa Roots of Cannabis provides an important clarion call for scholars of intoxicants to take Africa and Africans seriously when telling the story of cannabis and cultures of pipe smoking in world history." - David A. Guba Jr., Social History of Medicine

"The African Roots of Marijuana is a path-breaking work of scholarship. . . . This work represents a singular scholarly achievement, both in the history of cannabis globally and in its history on the African continent." - Charles Ambler, Bulletin of the History of Medicine

“As African history remains on the fringe of some studies, Chris Duvall’s The African Roots of Marijuana provides a solid foundation for the agency of African people and the central function that the continent plays in the expansion of global transactions.”
  - Paul Hoelscher, World History Connected