From the blog post: ... ... ... The author goes on to talk about importance of salt taxes in Venice and France. ...
From the blog post:
Making salt does not seem, at first glance, all that interesting as an industry. Even ninety years ago, when salt was proportionately a much larger industry in terms of employment, consumption, and economic output, the author of a book on the history salt-making noted how a friend had advised keeping the word salt out of the title, “for people won’t believe it can ever have been important”. The bestselling Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, published over twenty years ago, actively leaned into the idea that salt was boring, becoming so popular because it created such a surprisingly compelling narrative around an article that most people consider commonplace. (Kurlansky, it turns out, is behind essentially all of those one-word titles on the seemingly prosaic: cod, milk, paper, and even oysters).
But salt used to be important in a way that’s almost impossible to fully appreciate today.
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Because of salt’s preservative properties, many believed that salt had a crucial connection with life itself. [...] No house was said to generate as many rats as a ship passing over the salty sea, while no ship was said to have more rats than one whose cargo was salt. Salt seemed to have a kind of multiplying effect on life: something that could be applied not only to seasoning and preserving food, but to growing it.
Livestock, for example, were often fed salt: in Poland, thanks to the Wieliczka salt mines, great stones of salt lay all through the streets of Krakow and the surrounding villages so that “the cattle, passing to and fro, lick of those salt-stones”. Cheshire in north-west England, with salt springs at Nantwich, Middlewich and Northwich, has been known for at least half a millennium for its cheese: salt was an essential dietary supplement for the milch cows, also making it (less famously) one of the major production centres for England’s butter, too. In 1790s Bengal, where the East India Company monopolised salt and thereby suppressed its supply, one of the company’s own officials commented on the major effect this had on the region’s agricultural output: “I know nothing in which the rural economy of this country appears more defective than in the care and breed of cattle destined for tillage. Were the people able to give them a proper quantity of salt, they would … probably acquire greater strength and a larger size.” And to anyone keeping pigeons, great lumps of baked salt were placed in dovecotes to attract them and keep them coming back, while the dung of salt-eating pigeons, chickens, and other kept birds were considered excellent fertilisers.
Indeed, salt had been used since ancient times as a fertiliser. Contrary to popular belief, when the Romans allegedly destroyed Carthage and salted the earth, such practices in the ancient world were not about rendering the land infertile by making it too saline for anything to grow. You’d need an impossibly large amount of salt to do that. There’s no evidence Carthage was sown with salt at all, but the chosen ancient method of ruining farmland — seemingly practised by Ashurbanipal in the subjugation of Elam, for example — was to sow salt with the seeds of particularly aggressive weeds. Salt was sown not because it sterilised, but the opposite — because it could be so remarkably fructifying.
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A population deprived of salt was thus one that was weaker and more prone to disease — and at a time when the vast majority of the economy’s energy supply came from the straining of muscle, both human and animal, that weakness in effect meant a severe energy shortage. Although the main fuels for muscle power were carb-heavy grains like wheat, rye, oats, and rice, the indispensable ingredient to getting the most out of these grains was salt [...]
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When compared to other necessities like grain, salt did not need to be traded in especially large quantities either, meaning that its supply could be monopolised with relative ease. And it could not be produced everywhere. Salt tended to be lacking the further you got from the sea coast, unless there happened to be some relatively rare inland sources like salt lakes, brine springs, or rock salt mines. And it could even be lacking on the sea coast where it was either too humid or too cold to get salt cheaply by evaporating seawater using the sun, or where there was insufficient fuel for boiling the brine. These places were thus prone to being charged inflated prices, while the states that controlled places where the costs of production were low — in warmer and drier climes where the salty water of coastal marshes could cheaply be evaporated using only the heat of the summer sun — could extract especially large monopoly profits from the difference. The revenue from controlling solar salt thus became the basis of many kingdoms, some unusually powerful republics, and even empires.
The author goes on to talk about importance of salt taxes in Venice and France.
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Indeed, there is something unusual about the landlocked areas of much central Europe, which may help explain why the Holy Roman Empire had so many tiny sovereign states: it had a great many inland salt sources. I’ve not had a chance to look into it carefully just yet, but it’s striking how almost all the major players in the region — Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, the Palatinate of the Rhine, Lüneburg, Lorraine, Burgundy, and Brandenburg — each controlled salt sources of their own during their periods of greatest influence.
From the blog post:
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The author goes on to talk about importance of salt taxes in Venice and France.
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