"Offers a great example of why geographers, historians, and other professionally trained humanists need to keep writing about cannabis: these are the only people who can explain and contextualize the racist and colonialist assumptions baked into much of the most widely read literature on the plant. . . . The academic literature on cannabis may never be the same after The African Roots of Marijuana."
-- Nick Johnson Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society
"This book will be a worthwhile addition to any university library and is especially useful for law schools and for programs in criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and history. . . . Highly recommended. All readership levels."
-- D. R. Kavish Choice
"Essential reading for anyone with interests in African ethnobotany or cannabis history, and more broadly, will be of value to those interested in the history of nineteenth-century Africa or of slavery."
-- Wendy L. Applequist Economic Botany
"The book is richly detailed and reflects years of sustained effort. . . . All in all, this is an excellent piece of scholarship. It should interest anyone with a curiosity about the history of cannabis, Africa, or the geography of drugs."
-- Barney Warf Journal of Historical Geography
"Rumors that become published facts in high-end publications and prestigious medical journals are the mainstay of histories of marijuana. Chris S. Duvall, in a magnificently researched and clearly written book, sets right this historiography. . . . Duvall does a brilliant job in consulting available archaeological evidence, carefully studying the spread of words, and, most of all, drawing on sometimes little-studied European observers, especially Portuguese expeditions into the Central African interior. His judicious combination of all of these sources, combined with critical judgement, is convincing and a pleasure to read."
-- David M. Gordon International Journal of African Historical Studies
"The African Roots of Marijuana is a path-breaking work of scholarship. . . . This work represents a singular scholarly achievement, both in the history of cannabis globally and in its history on the African continent."
-- Charles Ambler Bulletin of the History of Medicine
“As African history remains on the fringe of some studies, Chris Duvall’s The African Roots of Marijuana provides a solid foundation for the agency of African people and the central function that the continent plays in the expansion of global transactions.”
-- Paul Hoelscher World History Connected