Salt
Anyone who sat through a third grade social studies lesson learned that Europe's search for pepper changed the world. Prince Henry the Navigator, Columbus, and all that. But did you know that salt played an even bigger role in world history?
Unlike pepper, we can't live without salt. It is as essential to life as water. Our bodies need it to digest food, transmit nerve impulses, and move muscles, including the heart.
When we were hunter-gatherers, the salt we needed came from wild game. (Sometimes wild game got the salt it needed by licking the places where we urinated. The circle of life can be weird.) As mankind settled and our diet changed, we had to find salt from other sources, not only for ourselves, but for the animals we domesticated.
In theory, salt can be found almost everywhere on earth. It fills the oceans, lies in rich veins in rock near the earth's surface, and crusts the desert beds of long vanished seas. But until the Industrial Revolution, it was often difficult to obtain.*
The law of supply and demand is almost as dependable as the law of gravity. Because salt was hard to come by, it was valuable. It was one of the first international commodities and the first government monopoly.** Merchant caravans carried it across the most inhospitable places of the earth. Governments taxed it. Roman soldiers were paid in it.*** Mohandas Gandhi staged a protest around it.
The next time you pick up the salt shaker, show a little respect.
* The phrase "back to the salt mines" is rooted in that fact that mining salt was dangerous work, historically done by slaves or prisoners. As late as the mid- 20th century, both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany used labor in the slave mines as punishment.
** China, ca 221 BCE.
***Hence the phrase "worth your salt". Not to mention the word "salary", which comes from the Latin word for salt.
Image courtesy of Carlos Porto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Before Rosie the Riveter…
A generation before Rosie the Riveter, munitionettes "manned"* Britain's factories and mines, replacing the men who volunteered for General Kitchener's New Army in 1914 and 1915.
Women were initially greeted in the work force with hostility. Male trade unionists argued that the employment of women, who earned roughly half the salary of the men they replaced, would force down men's wages.** Some argued that women did not have the strength or the technical skills to do the work.
When universal male conscription was passed in 1916, need out-weighed social resistance. By the 1918, 950,00 women worked in Britain's munitions industry, outnumbering men by as much as three to one in some factories.
The hours were long and the work was dangerous. Munitionettes were popularly known as "canary girls" because prolonged exposure to toxic sulphuric acid tinged their skin yellow. Deadly explosions were common.
Munitionettes were not the only women to enter Britain's work force in World War I. Another 250,000 joined the work force in jobs that ranged from dockworkers and firefighters*** to government clerks, nurses, and ambulance drivers. The number of women in the transport industry alone increased 555% during the war.
At the end of the war, most of the munitionettes and their fellow war workers were replaced by returning soldiers. Many of them were probably glad to go. But the definition of "women's work" had been permanently changed. The thin edge of the wedge had been inserted.
* So to speak.
** Evidently the simple solution of negotiated for women to be paid an equal wage for equal work did not occur to male dominated unions. As a consequence, women's trade unions saw an enormous increase in membership during the war.
*** Imagine fighting a fire in a long skirt and petticoats.
Whose Remembrance?
2nd Rajput Light Infantry in action in Flanders, during the winter of 1914–15
A few statistics from the Imperial War Museum in London make it clear that the First World War was a global war in more than one sense:
- Roughly 1.5 million soldiers from British India served in the war; 80,000 lost their lives. Many of them fought in the trenches on the Western Front--if you don't believe me, check out the names of fallen Sikh, Muslim and Hindu soldiers on the Menin Gate in Ypres.
- More than 15,000 soldiers from the Caribbean fought with the allied forces.
- Tens of thousands of East Africans were drafted into a non-combatant Carrier Corps to support* British troops in Africa.
- Chinese and Egyptian Labour Corps, with roughly 100,000 and 55,000 men, supported British troops in France and the Middle East
Taken together, those numbers change the face of World War I. And that's not even counting participants from French colonies and "areas of influence". Not to mention the segregated African American units who fought in France.
The Imperial War Museum is commemorating the WWI centennial with a wide ranging research project titled Whose Remembrance? focusing on the experience of the peoples of Britain's former empire in the wars. The researchers seem to be asking questions not only about the topic itself but what it tells us about how history is constructed. This is worth watching.
*That word, supported, deserves some attention.