17. The British Raj’s Extreme Solution to Tax Avoidance
Salt is so readily available and cheap, that we take it for granted. It is so abundant nowadays that we are more worried about too much salt in our food, rather than too little or none at all. It was not always so. Throughout much of history, salt – whose sodium is an essential nutrient for human health – was not easily available everywhere. That made it a highly valuable commodity in places without salt sources. One such place is Northern India, which had to import salt from elsewhere in the subcontinent.
When the British conquered India, they decided to cash in by monopolizing salt production, then squeeze the natives for all they could get out of them with salt taxes. Those taxes were highly unpopular, and protests over their collection helped fuel the rise of Indian nationalism and sowed the seeds of India’s independence movement. More immediately, however, the British had to contend with rampant salt smuggling from southern India, where salt was abundant and salt taxes were low, to northern India, where the opposite was true. They came up with an extreme solution: a 2500-mile-hedge across the subcontinent.
