First published in 1930, this is the personal adventure narrative of Henri de Monfreid—nobleman, writer, adventurer and inspiration for the swashbuckling gun runner in the Adventures of Tintin. “Henri de Monfried satisfies the most exacting reader. One is never for a moment suspicious that his amanuensis is crediting him with words he could not use or thoughts he would not entertain. The impression conveyed by Ida Treat's really superb rendering of the French searover's story is that M. de Monfried could write very well indeed if he thought it worthwhile, but that he expresses himself as a rule in other ways. “Briefly, Henri de Monfried is the son of a Bostonian artist of French descent who lived in the south of France and married a French peasant girl. The boy grew up and tried various callings, but finally yielded to a Wanderlust which took him to French Somaliland, at the southern end of the Red Sea. He became a Moslem and engaged in pearling, gunrunning, slaving, and the smuggling of hashish into Egypt. He has a family. He is fifty years old. The Arabs call him Abd el Hai. This book is what he calls the first half of his life. He is too interested in life itself to take consolation in memoirs as yet. The British navy calls him the Sea Wolf. He makes a hobby of raising the French flag on islands inconveniently near to British coaling stations. “There are [...] sketches of sea-boards and seamen in this book which recall the master's hand and mind. And there is never a word too much. A touch light as a feather; an ironical glance as his adversary departs defeated, or an equally ironical bow as the British Lion mauls him and lets him go—to try again.”—Saturday Review

Nobleman, writer, adventurer and inspiration for the swashbuckling gun runner in the Adventures of Tintin, Henri de Monfried lived by his own account 'a rich, restless, magnificent life' as one of the great travellers of his or any age. Infamous as well as famous, his name is inextricably linked to the Red Sea and the raffish ports between Suez and Aden in the early years of the twentieth century. This is a compelling account of how de Monfried sought his fortune by becoming a collector and merchant of the fabled Gulf pearls, and was then drawn into the shadowy world of arms trading, slavery, smuggling and drugs. Hashish was the drug of choice, and de Monfried writes of sailing to Suez with illegal cargoes, dodging blockades and pirates. This compelling book is a unique and detailed portrayal of a colourful and dangerous world that has now disappeared. It allows us to share in the exhilarating adventures of a legend whose love for the sea and zest for life run across every page.

Secret agents, gun runners, White Russians, and con men—they all play a part in Michael B. Miller's strikingly original study of interwar France. Based on extensive research in security files and a mass of printed sources, Shanghai on the Métro shows how a distinctive milieu of spies and spy literature emerged between the two world wars, reflecting the atmosphere and concerns of these years. Miller argues that French fascination with intrigue between the wars reveals a far more assured and playful national mood than historians have hitherto discerned in the final decades of the Third Republic. But the larger history set in motion by World War I and the subsequent reading of French history into global history are the true subjects of this work. Reconstituting through his own narratives the histories of interwar travel and adventure and the willful turning of contemporary affairs into a source of romance, Miller recovers the ambience and special qualities of the age that produced its intrigues and its tales of spies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

After arriving from South Asia approximately a thousand years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the African continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa—often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes—shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana, Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while providing an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.

Pearls, People, and Power is the first book to examine the trade, distribution, production, and consumption of pearls and mother-of-pearl in the global Indian Ocean over more than five centuries. While scholars have long recognized the importance of pearling to the social, cultural, and economic practices of both coastal and inland areas, the overwhelming majority have confined themselves to highly localized or at best regional studies of the pearl trade. By contrast, this book stresses how pearling and the exchange in pearl shell were interconnected processes that brought the ports, islands, and coasts into close relation with one another, creating dense networks of connectivity that were not necessarily circumscribed by local, regional, or indeed national frames. Essays from a variety of disciplines address the role of slaves and indentured workers in maritime labor arrangements, systems of bondage and transoceanic migration, the impact of European imperialism on regional and local communities, commodity flows and networks of exchange, and patterns of marine resource exploitation between the Industrial Revolution and Great Depression. By encompassing the geographical, cultural, and thematic diversity of Indian Ocean pearling, Pearls, People, and Power deepens our appreciation of the underlying historical dynamics of the many worlds of the Indian Ocean. Contributors: Robert Carter, William G. Clarence-Smith, Joseph Christensen, Matthew S. Hopper, Pedro Machado, Julia T. Martínez, Michael McCarthy, Jonathan Miran, Steve Mullins, Karl Neuenfeldt, Samuel M. Ostroff, and James Francis Warren.

Cannabis Britannica explores the historical origins of the UK's legislation and regulations on cannabis preparations before 1928. It draws on published and unpublished sources from the seventeenth century onwards, from archives in the UK and India, to show how the history of cannabis and the British before the twentieth century was bound up with imperialism. James Mills argues that until the 1900s, most of the information and experience gathered by British sources were drawn from colonial contexts as imperial administrators governed and observed populations where use of cannabis was extensive and established. This is most obvious in the 1890s when British anti-opium campaigners in the House of Commons seized on the issue of Government of India excise duties on the cannabis trade in Asia in order to open up another front in their attacks on imperial administration. The result was that cannabis preparations became a matter of concern in Parliament which accordingly established the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The story in the twentieth century is of the momentum behind moves to include cannabis substances in domestic law and in international treaties. The latter was a matter of the diplomatic politics of imperialism, as Britain sought to defend its cannabis revenues in India against American and Egyptian interests. The domestic story focuses on the coming together of the police, the media, and the pharmaceutical industry to form misunderstandings of cannabis that forced it onto the Poisons Schedule despite the misgivings of the Home Office and of key medical professionals. The book is the first full history of the origins of the moments when cannabis first became subjected to laws and regulations in Britain.

Few images are as evocative as the silhouette of the Arab dhow as, under full sail, it tacks to windward on glittering waters of Red Sea before moving across the face of the rising or setting sun. In this authoritative new book, Dionisius A. Agius, one of the foremost scholars of Islamic material culture, offers a lucid and wide-ranging history of the iconic dhow from medieval to modern times. Traversing the Arabian and African coasts, he shows that the dhow was central not just to commerce but to the vital transmission and exchange of ideas. Discussing trade and salt routes, shoals and wind patterns, spice harvest seasons and the deep and resonant connection between language, memory and oral tradition, this is the first book to place the dhow in its full and remarkable cultural contexts.