Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Salt

Essential to maintaining life, salt has been the source of wars, urban growth, social and political systems, the rise of global trade, monopolies, industrial advances, and the migration of populations.  Today, salt is used freely in our diets and on icy roads among other things, as it is both cheap and widely available.  For almost all of recorded history however, it has been just the opposite, with salt being a precious commodity that was needed by everyone.  Because of this, populations migrated to areas where salt could be easily extracted, setting up small communities there.  These communities prospered, eventually growing into towns and even cities.  Some city-states, such as Venice, acquired a monopoly on the salt trade in their region, and often went to war with other countries to maintain their monopoly.  One particularly salt-rich area was the Sahara desert, and the salt from here was traded with various nations by Berber traders via camel caravans.  Just south of the Sahara, the city of Timbuktu began to prosper from the salt trade and became a major trading post, not to mention a center of Islamic expansion, by the fourteenth century.  In Europe, much of this Saharan salt was used to fish for marine life in remote bodies of water, using the salt to preserve the catch until brought back to shore.

Throughout the Ages, salt has been taxed, often excessively, in almost every civilized nation.  Both the Greeks and Romans imposed a salt tax, and this practice continued into the Middle Ages and well into modern history.  For example, in France the gabelle, an infamous, oppresive, and deplored salt tax, began in 1259 as a moderate tariff on salt to maintain a standing army.  However, it grew into a hefty tax that also required French citizens to purchase a weekly amount of salt set by the king.  In 1790, during the French Revolution, the gabelle was abolished, but brought back by Napoleon in 1805, and remained in affect until after World War II.  Britain also had imposed a salt tax on its people and its colonies, causing some resentment in places like India, which peacefully and successfully revolted from British rule under Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s.  In the American Revolution, the British blocked off salt imports to the colonies, putting a great hardship on the colonists, as salt was still a necessity.  In the American Civil War, Union forces captuered Saltville, Virginia in 1864, which proved to be a major blow to southern civilian morale and may have even led to the ultimate defeat of the Confederate Army.  Clearly, salt has had a major effect on the course of human events, having shaped the world we now live in.

Click here to see a video on the formation of NaCl (just the first part of the video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yjge1WdCFPs

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