Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [11]
Nations and monarchs have often taxed salt in order to raise revenue. At various stages in the 2,000 years of salt tax codification, these monies provided a major source of funding for the Great Wall of China, built between the fifth century BCE and the sixteenth century CE to protect the Chinese Empire against rivals to the north.
Salt’s role in creating prosperity for nations has been rivaled by its role in destabilizing or even breaking them. France’s gabelle (from the Latin gabulum, or tax) was a direct salt tax levied by the king, first initiated in 1286. It gave the monarchy a monopoly over the distribution of salt, and actually forced every French citizen to buy a certain amount of salt per week at a price fixed by the government. At its worst, the purchase cost of salt could reach as high as one month’s wages for an average family every year. (In 2010 dollars that amounts to over $3,800 annually spent on salt for an average household!) Violent outbursts of mass civil disobedience were common in France by the early seventeenth century, and one common manifestation was the killing of the agents of tax farmers hired to enforce the gabelle, which had become a potent symbol of inequality.
As the tax rate varied by region, smuggling between regions with lower tax rates and those with higher ones was also rife. Those caught unarmed with contraband salt on them would be sent to the galleys for a year or two for a first offense, six years for the second. Those caught armed in the same predicament were sentenced to death. During the years of the gabelle, 2,300 men, 2,800 women, and 6,600 youths were imprisoned for possession of illegal salt.
In India, the British East India Company began taxing salt in the late eighteenth century, a practice that received government support in 1835. In 1885, the first Indian National Congress in Bombay protested the taxation on salt, and Gandhi used popular opposition to the salt tax to launch his famous Salt Satyagraha in 1930—the first organized campaign of nonviolent opposition to British Rule in India’s struggle for independence.
Jo Haemer salt cellar, hand chased, solid sterling silver with 24 karat gold inlay and accompanying scallion salt spoon.
THE RISE OF BIG SALT
Goods are neutral; they can be used as fences or bridges. —Mary Douglass
From the Neolithic period until the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, most human communication outside of the household revolved around the exchange of goods and services. In fact, commerce has always been one of the most powerful ways to transmit culture across distances—for thousands of years, it has been both a dominant mode of communication and the substance of that communication.
Where salt was made, how it was made, and by whom determined the value and meaning of the salt. Was it made near a trade route or deep in a range of jagged mountains? Were the salt makers mercantile and predictable or imperialistic and hostile or neighborly and generous? Was the salt made by solar evaporation and available only seasonally, or by boiling brine over fire that required a constant supply of wood, or both; or was it mined from deposits, dependent on the vicissitudes of human labor as much as geology?
Salt making on a regional basis reached its peak worldwide in the mid 1800s. At the time, the saltworks of Guérande employed in the neighborhood of 900 salt workers. In the late 1850s, mechanization came to the salt-making regions of the Mediterranean, where the topography and climate were conducive to much larger scale production than traditional practices allowed. Salt crystallizing pans that once measured a few hundred square feet were expanded to dozens of acres. Water was pumped mechanically where gravity used to do the job, and mechanical combines replaced