Cannabis has never been a more controversial substance in Britain. Over the last decade it has been reclassified twice, has been the subject of a range of official investigations and scientific studies, and has provoked media campaigns and all manner of political gesturing. Cannabis Nation seeks to understand this period by placing it back into the historical context of the long-term story of cannabis and the British. It takes up where its predecessor, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800-1928 (2003) left off. James Mills traces the story back into the last days of the Empire, when Britain controlled cannabis-consuming societies in Asia and Africa even while there was little taste for the drug back home. He shows that cannabis was caught up in control regimes established to deal with opium and cocaine consumption, while it fell out of favour as a medicine. As such, when migration after the Second World War brought the Empire's cannabis-consumers to the UK, they faced hostile attitudes towards their favourite intoxicant. From that time on a growing number of groups and agencies took an interest in cannabis. Ambitious bureaucrats in the Home Office saw in it an opportunity to draw resources in to the Drugs Branch, while the police began to use laws related to it for a number of other purposes. Experts ranging from pharmacologists to sociologists formed committees on the subject, and its association with colonial migrants lent it an exotic aura to the politically-minded of the 1960s counter-culture and the working-class youth of Britain's inner cities. Since the 1970s governments were content to devolve responsibility to the police for working out the best legal approach to the substance, and efforts to wrestle this back from them proved difficult a decade ago. Cannabis Nation considers all of these trends, details the often eccentric characters that have shaped them, and concludes that current positions and arguments on cannabis can only be properly assessed if their historical origins are clearly understood.

Sport in South Asia has a long and varied history that is often dramatic, sometimes violent, and which always promises to reveal much about the broader currents that have shaped culture and society. Some 100 years ago, an Indian became the star of England's cricket team, an 'Untouchable' was offered a contract in the English domestic cricket league, and an Indian win in a football match against an English Regiment was celebrated by a crowd of 60,000 as a nationalist victory. Almost a century on, the dead body of an Indian wrestler was paraded at the front of a Hindu crowd in order to incite the attacks on the Muslim neighbourhood that sparked the Aligarh riots in which almost a hundred people were killed, and in 1998, 141,000 fans attended the derby match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal in Calcutta, one of the largest ever crowds at a football game anywhere in the world. These stories contain elements of colonialism and show the rise of nationalism and the emergence of communalism; other examples show how the establishment of nationhood in a post-colonial world, the challenge of the regions to the political centre and the impacts of globalization and economic liberalization have all left their mark on the development of sport in South Asia. Quite simply, South Asian history and society have transformed sports in the region while at the same time such games and activities have often shaped the development of South Asia. This unique volume is both an introduction to the sporting histories of the region and an exploration of the relationships between sport, history and society in South Asia.

The human body in modern South Asia has been continually manipulated into political enterprise. The body was central to the project of British colonialism, as it was in the Indian response to colonial rule. By constructing British bodies as normative and disciplined, and Indian bodies as deviant and undisciplined, the British could fashion an ideology of their own fitness for political power and defense of colonialism itself. The politics of physicality then manifested in reverse in many ways, not least through Ghandi s use of his body as public experiment in discipline, as well as a living rejection of British rule and norms of physicality. In the post-colonial period, the politics of physicality continued and, through mass communication, became more public with bodies and their symbolic meanings deployed not only against the European "Other" but, increasingly, against other Indian bodies - be it the representation of political aspiration, beauty pageants and the representation of nationalism on the world stage, the furtherance of feminist issues, or the moral issues of sexual images of women in the media.The editors bring together some of the best new scholarship on physicality in modern India in a single volume, and provide a balance of materials from colonial and post-colonial India. Included are new writings by established and upcoming writers in the social sciences and humanities, all based on original research.

The human body in modern South Asia has been continually manipulated into political enterprise. The body was central to the project of British colonialism, as it was in the Indian response to colonial rule. By constructing British bodies as normative and disciplined, and Indian bodies as deviant and undisciplined, the British could fashion an ideology of their own fitness for political power and defense of colonialism itself. The politics of physicality then manifested in reverse in many ways, not least through Ghandi s use of his body as public experiment in discipline, as well as a living rejection of British rule and norms of physicality. In the post-colonial period, the politics of physicality continued and, through mass communication, became more public with bodies and their symbolic meanings deployed not only against the European "Other" but, increasingly, against other Indian bodies - be it the representation of political aspiration, beauty pageants and the representation of nationalism on the world stage, the furtherance of feminist issues, or the moral issues of sexual images of women in the media.The editors bring together some of the best new scholarship on physicality in modern India in a single volume, and provide a balance of materials from colonial and post-colonial India. Included are new writings by established and upcoming writers in the social sciences and humanities, all based on original research.

Sport in South Asia has a long and varied history that is often dramatic, sometimes violent, and which always promises to reveal much about the broader currents that have shaped culture and society. Some 100 years ago, an Indian became the star of England's cricket team, an 'Untouchable' was offered a contract in the English domestic cricket league, and an Indian win in a football match against an English Regiment was celebrated by a crowd of 60,000 as a nationalist victory. Almost a century on, the dead body of an Indian wrestler was paraded at the front of a Hindu crowd in order to incite the attacks on the Muslim neighbourhood that sparked the Aligarh riots in which almost a hundred people were killed, and in 1998, 141,000 fans attended the derby match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal in Calcutta, one of the largest ever crowds at a football game anywhere in the world. These stories contain elements of colonialism and show the rise of nationalism and the emergence of communalism; other examples show how the establishment of nationhood in a post-colonial world, the challenge of the regions to the political centre and the impacts of globalization and economic liberalization have all left their mark on the development of sport in South Asia. Quite simply, South Asian history and society have transformed sports in the region while at the same time such games and activities have often shaped the development of South Asia. This unique volume is both an introduction to the sporting histories of the region and an exploration of the relationships between sport, history and society in South Asia.