Hemp - Historical Cultivation

Historical Cultivation

Hemp has been grown for millennia in Asia and the Middle East for its fibre. Commercial production of hemp in the West took off in the eighteenth century, but was grown in the sixteenth century in eastern England. Because of colonial and naval expansion of the era, economies needed large quantities of hemp for rope and oakum. Other important producing countries were China, North Korea, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, France and Italy.

In Western Europe, nobody banned the cultivation of hemp in the 1930s but the commercial cultivation ceased almost anyhow in the decades after the 1930s. Hemp was simply ousted by artificial fibres.