From the Publisher
From the award-winning and bestselling author of Cod comes the dramatic, human story of a simple substance, an element almost as vital as water, that has created fortunes, provoked revolutions, directed economies and enlivened our recipes.
Salt is common, easy to obtain and inexpensive. It is the stuff of kitchens and cooking. Yet trade routes were established, alliances built and empires secured - all for something that filled the oceans, bubbled up from springs, formed crusts in lake beds, and thickly veined a large part of the Earth's rock fairly close to the surface.
From pre-history until just a century ago - when the mysteries of salt were revealed by modern chemistry and geology - no one knew that salt was virtually everywhere. Accordingly, it was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history. Even today, salt is a major industry. Canada, Kurlansky tells us, is the world's sixth largest salt producer, with salt works in Ontario playing a major role in satisfying the Americans' insatiable demand.
Hihglights
On the Myth
In our uncounscious, we associate it with longevity and permanence.
Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.
The Tang dynasty, the Egyptians and the great Ibn Batuta
During the Tang dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 907, half the revenue of the Chinese state was derived from salt.
The Egyptians did not export great quantities of salt, but exported considerable amounts of salted food, especially fish, to the Middle East.
In 1352, Ibn Batuta, the greatest Arab-language traveler of the Middle Ages, who ahd journeyed overland across Africa, Europe, and Asia, reported visting the city of Taghaza, which, he said, was entirely built of salt.
Like the Egyptians, they (the Celtics) learned that it was not as profitable to trade and transport salt as salted foods.
Salt and the Romans
The Celts were innovators. The Romans were nation builders. The Roman genius was administration-not the originality of the project but the scale of the operation.
Roman government did not maintain a monopoly on salt sales as did the Chinese, but it did not hesitate to control salt prices when it seemed necessary.
The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At tiems soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word "Salary" and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word "sal" became the French word "solde", meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.
Venice and the salt trade
Salt was the key to a policy that made Venice the dominant commercial force of southern Europe.
When the Venetians were forced to import salt, they made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it.
Unlike the Chinese salt monopoly, the Venetian government never owned salt but simply took a profit from regulating it trade.
The grand and cherished look of Venice, many of its statues and ornaments, were financed by the salt administration.
Wherever they went, they tried to dominate the supply, control the saltworks, even acquire it if they could. Venice manipulated markets by controlling production. In the late thirteenth century, wishing to raise the world market price, Venice had all saltworks in Crete destroyed and banned the local production of salt.
No state had based its economy on salt to the degree Venice had or established as extensive a state salt policy except China.
Genoa, salt and the opening of the Atlantic trade
After 1250, Genoa went farther into the Mediterranean, buying salt in the Black Sea, North Africa, Cyprus, Crete and Ibiza-many of the same saltworks that Venice was trying to dominate. Genoa built Ibiza into the largest salt producer in the region.
Salt was the engine of Genoese trade. (...) Genoa competed with Venice not only for salt but for the other cargoes that were exchanged for salt, such as textiles and spices.
The Genoese were pioneers in maritime insurance, banking, and the use of huge Atlantic-sized ships.
Yet among thoses who finally undid the amritime empire of Venice were two Genoese-Cristoforo Colombo and Giovanni Cabot.
Now the Atlantic, and not the Mediterranean was the most important body of water for trade.
Genoa succumbed to the new reality, and during Spain's golden age, the Geonese served as the leading banker and financiers of that expanding Atlantic power.
Salt, war and the Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, salt already had a wide variety of industrial applications besides preserving food. It was used to cure leather, to clean chimneys, for soldering pipes, to glaze pottery, and as a medicine for a wide variety of complaints from toothaches, to upset stomachs, to "heaviness of minds."
While northerners had the fish but could not make the salt and southerners had salt but not the cod, the Basques had neither. And yet they managed to get both.
For the British, salt was regarded as of strategic importance because salt cod and corned beef became the rations of the British navy. It was the same with the French. In fact, by the fourteenth century, for most of northern Europe the standard procedure to prepare for war was to obtain a large quantity of salt and start salting fish and meat.
Salt and the Hanseatics
The Swedes had a wealth of herring but nothing with which to salt it.
For both meat and fish, somking was a northern solution to a lack of salt.
The salt shortage of the northern fisheries was solved by a commercial group that organized both herring and salt trades. Between 1250 and 1350, a grouping of small associations in northern German cities formed.
Known as the Hanseatic League (...) these associations pooled their resources to form more powerful groups to act in their commercial interests.
By the fourteenth century, the Hanseatics controlled the mouths of all the northerly flowing rivers of central Europe from the Rhine to the Vistula. They had organozations in Iceland, in London, and as far as the Ukraine and even in Venice.
At the hight of their power in the fifteenth century, the Hanseatics were believed to have had at their command 40'000 vessels and 300'000 men.
For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were known as Easterlings because they came from the east, and this is the origin of the word "sterling", which meant "of assured value".
Ketchup, the French salt tax and New England entrepreneurs
Good to know: Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce "kecap ikan".
By the late eighteenth century, more than 3'000 French men, women, and even children were sentenced to prison or death every year for crimes against the gabelle (French salt tax). The salt law in France, as would later happen in India, was no the singular cause of revolution, but it became a symbol for all the injustices of government.
The small-scale Yankee entrepreneur, for whom New England was famous, found an poortunity in salt. By 1800, a small initial investment in a Cape Cod saltworks would quickly yield returns of 30 percent.
Disruptive technology
Chemistry changed forever the way we see salt. But it was inventions in other fields that radically changed the role of salt in the world.
Salt for food will never become completely obsolete. But since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it has steadily become less important.
Competition came from the invention the process of preserving food in jar and in tin containers trough fermentation.
A twentieth-century invention dealt an even worse blow to teh salt fish industry and, for that matter, to fish: The idea of using cold to preserve food.
The railroad, faster transportation, and better market systems had introduced more people to fresh fish. By 1910, only 1 percent of the fish landed in New England was cured with salt.
