Salt – A World History

SALT: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky. Penguin, 2003. 496pp.

Reviewed by Günther Simmermacher

The history of the world up to the 1800s has been tied to the history of salt. This, as promised in the title, is the message of Marl Kurlansky’s highly entertaining book.

The preservative qualities of salt, discovered many thousands of years ago, are well-known. Only with the advent of alternative ways of food preservation in the 19th and 20th centuries–in glass and tin, by refrigeration, by addition of chemicals–did salt lose its primacy. The decline of salt set in when, as Kurlansky notes, “most salted foods became delicacies instead of necessities”.

For millennia, those who controlled the production and supply of salt had political power. Salt became the basis of warfare (in the form of gunpowder), and its distribution a means of warfare.

In 18th century France, a punitive salt tax, the Gabelle, symbolised the conditions that led to the 1789 revolution. More than 140 years later, Mohandas Gandhi kicked off a revolution in colonial India that would lead to that country’s independence. The symbolic focal point: salt, and the control thereof.

Kurlansky notes that in Italy and elsewhere, “all great centres of civilisation were founded in places with access to salt”. The Roman army often would pay its soldiers in salt — indeed, the word soldier has its roots in that practice (as has the word “salary”).

One will find many such trivial but marvellous details in Kurlansky’s book. For example, the phase “sailing the seven seas” evidently refers not to the oceans, but to a 40km stretch of treacherous waterways connecting Venice to mainland Italy. Alas, we learn, “the seven seas” were landfilled in the 7th century.

Kurlansky also details fascinating vignettes referring to Church history. These include the fear of a Victorian British merchant of the idea that Italy might become Protestant, the lost salt war between Bavaria and Salzburg’s Archbishop Wolf Dietrich, and the chapel made entirely out of salt in the Polish saltmine of Wieliczka.

While Salt sometimes seems almost pedantic in detail, it is consistently surprising and entertaining. Kurlansky is at his strongest when delving into anthropology. This breezily written book is peppered (as it were) with lovely anecdotes. The reproduction of ancient recipes of salt production and preparation of foodstuff involving salt especially are fascinating.

However, for a book that so meticulously records all minutiae of salt, it seems odd that no mention is made of sub-equatorial Africa.

This omission notwithstanding, Kurlansky has returned the story of a salt to its rightful place in world history. This might have been a dull biography of a substance today’s society takes for granted. That it turned out anything but mundane is a triumph for the writer.