Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

The fact that hemp was a useful plant and yet had unusual psychoactive properties defined its later fate. Its production was repeatedly banned, either by royal decree or by Acts of Parliament. The US Congress considered any hemp plant, even scientifically bred, as a source of drugs and in 1937 introduced a prohibitive tax which undermined its production; the industry had to be urgently re-established during the war. For similar reasons, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Protestant farmers didn’t wish to cultivate a source of easy pleasure in their fields. As a result, the Protestant states had to buy processed hemp from other countries. It isn’t clear, however, why this logic didn’t prevent the Anglo-Saxons and the Dutch from cultivating hops and tobacco.

Hemp and the Oprichnina

While the Spanish and Portuguese empires were directing their ships to the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, England was preoccupied with the North. In the sixteenth century, the Venetian navigator Sebastian Cabot made his base in Bristol; from there he searched for a northern route to China. His interests chimed with the dreams of another trailblazer, the alchemist and astrologer John Dee. Having drawn up horoscopes for the royal houses of Europe and maps for the Muscovy Company, Dee was the first person to formulate the concept of the British Empire. Mixing legalese, mysticism and history, Dee asserted British rights to all northern lands, great and small, from Greenland to the possessions of the duke of Muscovy: according to Dee, this exclusive right of the English crown came down from King Arthur. In 1555 Dee and Cabot formed the Muscovy Company – the first joint stock corporation registered in England. Elizabeth I took an interest and commissioned Dee to work on a book, The Limits of the British Empire . 8

This was the era of travel without maps, the hasty colonisation of distant lands, and well-thought-out ‘alliances’ with neighbouring countries. In 1553 three English ships, watched by the boy king Edward VI, set off from Greenwich to seek a new route to China through the northern seas. The ships were locked in the ice of the White Sea; one of the captains, Richard Chancellor, was saved by the Pomors, a northern people who had long been under the rule of Moscow. Chancellor managed to reach Moscow, conducted successful talks with Ivan IV (the Terrible), and took back to England a present of furs. More importantly, the tsar granted him a monopoly on trade in the White Sea. A year later Chancellor set off back to Russia, taking presents from the new English queen, Mary Tudor, to Tsar Ivan. He drowned on this voyage, but the English equated his discovery of Russia with the Spanish discovery of America. Another heroic Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, sailed across the White Sea four times and reached Persia this way. All the same, he didn’t succeed in finding a new route to India; having entered Khwarazm in present-day Uzbekistan, he realised that he was on the old Silk Road. But Ivan the Terrible granted the English the right to trade freely and without duties, wholesale and retail, on the White Sea and throughout Russia; from there they could trade with third parties such as Persia or India. Most important was the English monopoly on trade on the White Sea; other foreigners, for example the Dutch, were forbidden to land on its shores or islands. The English were granted other unusual privileges – e.g., they were not subject to the Russian courts, and if they committed a crime on Russian territory they had to answer only to the Muscovy Company in London. They were also presented with a house in Moscow (now a museum, the Old English Court, not far from the Kremlin). They were given the right to establish trading posts in the north. The most important trading post was at Kholmogory, and there the English started a factory, making rope from local hemp. Customs officials and local governors did not have the right to interfere in Muscovy Company business. 9