Salt: A World History

The high demand for salt allowed governments to impose oppressive salt taxes on people who could barely afford them. Kurlansky shows that whatever can be exploited eventually will be, and salt has not been an exception. The greatest examples he gives in the book are the hated gabelle, the salt tax that preceded the French Revolution, and the salt tax levied by the British upon the Indians they had colonized. Indians were being taxed at a rate thirty times greater than the British, out of pure profit motive. This continued even as Indians starved during a famine in which they could not buy food, because their money had always come from the salt that they were no longer allowed to produce. The theme of corruption—and its irresistible nature—are best illustrated by Gandhi’s quote: “It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller” (344). The abundance of salt gave more people access to it, and created the possibility of greater corruption than would be possible with a scarcer substance. 

Much like art, salt seemed to have no set market value. It was worth—as far as salt merchants, producers, and corrupt governments were concerned—whatever they could make people pay for it. As long as there was demand for salt—and the demand didn’t waver until late in the 19th century—prices were set as high as anyone could get away with. However unscrupulous the practices and monopolies were, they signaled the value salt held. This value was also evident in the length to which people would go to obtain it. It was no small feat to mine a mountain with limited resources and crude technology, at great personal risk. But mines grew, and dangerous sea explorations were undertaken to discover new sources of salt while transporting the old. The irony is that salt was everywhere and accessible to nearly everyone until governments and industry titans began to control it.