CHP 8 | Early Garden Hemp Hero
The early household lived in close contact with nature. The Secrets of Alexis of Piemont treats the home and garden as sites of experimentation, where agriculture, domestic management, and natural philosophy were in constant negotiation. Knowledge was passed down not only through books, but often through oral tradition, inherited like any other household tool. Hemp, […]
CHP 9 | From Hatchel to Man-of-War
Hemp was a stubborn servant, hard to break and demanding rigorous labor before it yielded anything at all. Yet once worked and brought to market, it underwrote the expansion of empires as well as security at home. Hemp became an indispensable component of both national and personal armories, supplying the sinews of war, trade, coercion, […]
CHP 7 | Before Modern Wellness
FOR DIGESTION Hemp’s place in early medicine was neither mystical nor marginal. It was practical and grounded in the empirical habits of pre-modern life. Remedies survived because they appeared to work often enough to justify repetition. One of the hemp seeds most frequently cited benefits concerns disorders of digestion. One passage claims and that a […]
CHP 6 | Kingdom of Necessity
There are natural resources in history so ubiquitous that they become nearly invisible. They are so fundamental to the construction of daily life that they vanish into it, like mortar between stones. Salt. Iron. Linen. And hemp. Hemp was not merely a crop so much as a condition of life, so common as to be […]
CHP 5 | Appeasing Ivan the Terrible
As Ivan aged, his disposition darkened. The early optimism of his reign, once buoyed by the conquest of Kazan, gave way to attrition. Revolts persisted in the east, while in the south the Crimean Tatars, supported by the Ottoman Empire, remained a constant menace. As his strategic environment deteriorated, his demands on his English counterparts […]
CHP 4 | England Chooses Trade Over Alliance
Few records survive from sixteenth-century Russia, owing in part to the devastation of the Time of Troubles at the century’s end. Russia’s first civil war followed the collapse of the Rurik dynasty (862–1598), which ended after the death of Ivan the Terrible’s son, Feodor. Feodor was born in May 1557, two years after England had […]
CHP 3 | The Muscovy Company Is Born
During the reign of our sovereign lord King Edward VI, and with his encouragement and approval, his subjects—following the King’s generous example—undertook, at their own risk and great expense, an expedition for the glory of God, the honor of the Crown, the increase of royal revenues, and the general benefit of the entire realm of […]
CHP 2 | Through the White Sea to the Tsar
The tempest arrived with little warning. By afternoon, the sea had begun to swell and visibility collapsed into a thick molasses of mist. Weather like this was common so far north, but for Sir Hugh Willoughby, unaccustomed to Northern seas, struggled to keep the fleet together. Richard Chancellor’s and Stephen Borough’s superior seafaring instincts prevailed. […]
CHP 1 | England’s Northern Voyage: 1553
By the early 1550s, England had reached a structural limit at a moment when the supreme naval powers of the age—Spain and Portugal—were carving up the world. These Iberian kingdoms did not merely discover new lands; they institutionalized exclusion. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and its successor, the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), were not symbolic […]
The Historical 2018 Farm Bill
This blog will highlight the importance of the 2018 Farm Bill and how it has impacted the Hemp Industry.
The 5-Minute History of Hemp
This blog will cover the history of Hemp and how it has co-evolved with human civilization for thousands of years.