Sodium chloride: Encyclopedia II - Sodium chloride - Salt throughout history

Sodium chloride - Salt throughout history

Salt's preservative ability was a foundation of civilization. It eliminated dependency on the seasonal availability of food and allowed travel over long distances. By the Middle Ages, caravans consisting of as many as forty thousand camels traversed four hundred miles of the Sahara bearing salt, sometimes trading it for slaves.

Until the 1900s, salt was one of the prime movers of national economies and wars. Salt has played a prominent role in determining the power and location of the world's great cities. Timbuktu was once a huge salt market. Liverpool rose from just a small English port to become the prime exporting port for the salt dug in the great Cheshire salt mines and thus became the source of the world's salt in the 1800s.

Salt created and destroyed empires. The salt mines of Poland led to a vast kingdom in the 1500s, only to be destroyed when Germans brought sea salt (often, to most of the world, considered 'superior' to rock salt). Venice fought and won a war with Genoa over salt. Genoa, however, had the last laugh. Genovites Christopher Columbus and Giovanni Caboto destroyed the Mediterranean trade by introducing the New World to the market.

Salt was once one of the most valuable commodities known to man. Salt was taxed, from as far back as the 20th century BC in China. In the Roman Empire, salt was sometimes even used as a currency, giving us the term salary ("salt money", see below for etymology). The Roman Republic and Empire controlled the price of salt, increasing it to raise money for wars, or lowering it to be sure that the poorest citizens could easily afford this important part of the diet. Throughout much of history, it influenced the conduct of wars, the fiscal policies of governments, and even the inception of revolutions.

In the empire of Mali, merchants in 12th-century Timbuktu—the gateway to the Sahara Desert and the seat of scholars—valued salt enough to buy it for its weight in gold; this trade led to the legends of the incredibly wealthy city of Timbuktu, and fueled inflation in Europe, which was exporting the salt.

In later times, for instance during the British colonial period, salt production and transport were controlled in India as a means of generating enormous tax revenues. This ultimately led to the Salt March to Dandi, led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1930 in which thousands of Indians went to the sea to illegally produce their own salt in protest of the British tax on salt.

The salt trade was based on one fact — it is more profitable to sell salted foodstuffs than to sell just salt. Thus sources of food to salt went hand in hand with salt making. Before the salt mines of Cheshire were discovered, a huge trade in British fish for French salt existed. This was not a happy accord, for each nation did not want to be dependent on each other. The search for fish and salt led to the Seven Years War between the two. With the British in control of saltworks in the Bahamas and North American cod, their sphere of influence quickly covered the world. The search for oil in the late 1800s and early 1900s used the technology and methods pioneered by salt miners, even to the degree that they looked for oil where salt domes were located.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Salt throughout history", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki