James Mills's book, Cannabis Britannica, chronicles the changing British views of a plant grown on the Indian subcontinent. Cannabis was seen as alternatively beneficial or threatening by British authorities. Mills's book is important for illustrating how British imperialism had far reaching legal, cultural, and even pharmaceutical impacts. Mills writes clearly and is able to explain the chemistry and cultivation of as well as the customs behind cannabis with a sure hand. He is less successful in drawing out the theoretical implications of the use, regulation, and trade of drugs for relations between metropole and periphery.

Mills's book has a definite historiographical and contemporary agenda. Mills wishes to begin “the task of examining the historical origins of Britain's laws and policies on cannabis” (vii). This task will ultimately take two volumes, with the next installment covering the period from 1928 to the present. In addition to forging new historiographical ground, Mills wishes to contribute to contemporary debate about illegal drugs. He argues that history has a place in contemporary debates over drugs if it can show that the original restrictions to cannabis “were the outcomes of poor research or hidden agendas” (vii).

In his first purpose, Mills has some success. The study of British imperialism has become extremely wide-ranging in the past twenty years. Manchester University Press's Studies in Imperialism series has covered a broad range of topics ranging from the military to theater, law, marriage, and masculinity. Recent work outside of this series has examined even more controversial areas. Phillippa Levine's Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (Routledge, 2003) and Jock McCulloch's Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Indiana University Press, 2000) investigate previously neglected aspects of British imperialism with theoretical sophistication. Certainly a study of cannabis fits new scholarly interest on the moral panics associated with the British Empire. As Mills discusses, previous historical treatments of the history of cannabis and the legal restrictions of cannabis have been sensationalistic and conspiracy driven.

Mills has used a wide range of primary sources in keeping with his stated purposes. He has examined a formidable range of official reports from the United Kingdom and colonial governments as well as the League of Nations. He has also made good use of medical journals and travel literature. Mills does an excellent job in showing that British attitudes to cannabis and hemp drugs were not static during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first British institution interested in hemp was the Royal Navy, which used it for rigging, ropes, and sails. Eventually, the mind-altering qualities of hemp drugs became recognized. Mills shows how British merchants and scientists eagerly experimented with the drug (often on animals but also with human subjects). He shows how the British colonial administration in India tolerated a roaring trade in hemp drugs from which significant tax revenue was raised. Concerns over possible negative social repercussions of excessive cannabis use led to a major government investigation (the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893–94). However, decisive action by the British government did not come until after the First World War. As Mills convincingly shows, a combination of strong diplomatic pressure through the League of Nations and growing domestic drug scares led to the decision to designate cannabis as a banned substance within Britain. In telling this tale, Mills is on strong ground. He does an excellent job in showing the fascination cannabis held for British medical researchers, the general complacency held by colonial administrators, and the failed effort by moral reformers and temperance advocates to restrict cannabis use before 1914.

It is in his second purpose that Mills is more open to criticism. Centering his study of cannabis and empire on the causes for the original British restrictions to cannabis is problematic on a number of levels. First, his ultimate conclusion that distrust of cannabis (and ultimately legal controls) sprang from “political, moral and cultural factors that often resulted in exaggerated, ill-founded, and downright mistaken assumptions” (218) is not as novel as the author believes. As presented, it would seem that cannabis was misunderstood and stigmatized. However, for this conclusion to hold weight, more substantive detailed comparisons with the causes of the British regulation of other illegal drugs are required. Otherwise, one could argue that every controlled substance in Britain has become controlled for the reasons given for cannabis. Mills's book is ultimately less satisfying than it might have been for a second reason. By narrowly defining his secondary purpose as giving history a place in contemporary debates over government regulation of drugs, he misses out some other larger, potentially more interesting avenues for discussion. Though implied, Mills does not elaborate on how cannabis played its own unique role in relations between metropole and periphery. A study of cannabis in British India might have contributed to current debates in imperial history about cultural exchange, material culture, racial stereotyping, anthropology, and cultural imperialism. Mills avoids interacting with the wide-ranging historiog raphy on these topics. He does not even devote much time to discussing the changing political climate between Britain and India that may well have contributed to new attitudes toward Indian drugs after 1918. By concentrating his focus on the progress of British tolerance or restrictions toward cannabis, Mills keeps his tight narrative moving forward. However, the greater theoretical implications over the British encounter with cannabis in India are largely unexplored.

Cannabis Britannica serves as an excellent scholarly introduction to a previously taboo subject. It firmly lays out a narrative with which future historians can work. Perhaps as a pioneering work this is more than sufficient. However, subsequent historians may need to develop further the theoretical implications of cannabis for the British imperial experience.