And if anyone wants to have a look, here's the site with details of the legislation Eric V. Olson mentioned
Another non-parallel is that nobody has planted a Great Hedge across Iraq to enforce collection of the salt tax.
India's full of collectible salt, having a long coastline and plenty of salt pans. The salt tax meant that the sale or production of salt by anyone but the British government was illegal so people had to pay for something they'd picked up freely before. The prices tended to be extortionate and well beyond the hopes of manual workers, so the people who sweated most were the least able to replace their salt.
The body doesn't respond to severe salt deprivation by screaming for it urgently, as it does when it doesn't get enough water. Instead, the person feels breathless and exhausted to begin with, and if salt intake doesn't rise they start suffering much more seriously - cramps, weakness, sever breathlessness and cardiac distress when they exercise. Fevers and diarrhoea become much, much more dangerous.
Cattle need salt, too, or their milk yield goes down. All in all, it was very bad for your agricultural labourer who wasn’t able to afford the salt anyway but whose income went downhill as he stopped being able to work so hard and his cattle dried up. It wasn’t so simple to make a direct connection between all these woes and reduced salt levels – it’s easier to say someone’s died of a disease than to work out they’re suffering from mineral deficiency. Also, medical history is written by the winners; why should the people cashing in on salt note their accountability for the wastage of the poor?
The Great Hedge was a strange-but-true method of clamping down on salt smuggling in the Bengal Presidency in the last few decades of the C20th. It was a heavily guarded mass of thorns about 20 feet high and 8 feet wide. It was theoretically impossible to get through: even if a smuggler got past the soldiers he’d have infinitely more trouble hacking his way through 8ft of dense vegetation than sticking a ladder up against a wall.
So the British built (grew?) a 2300 mile long hedge across India in the 1860s and now nobody knows about it because it was made of plants and died. How weird.
Roy Moxham found some funny lines on a map, investigated, and wrote the first account of this crazy piece of horticultural history in 2001.
And in the spirit of picking up cool links while skipping over the internet trying to repair my memory of this book, here’s something about the Harappa civilisation which stretched over India being technologically advanced and knocking the socks off the bronze age folks in Europe, who didn’t exactly have socks – at least, not socks as we know them.
Josh - I misread your post as "are aliens stealing our sheep" and had a lovely few minutes thinking that if aliens wanted to guarantee widespread insomnia, the logical thing to do would be to steal all the imaginary sheep.
Patrick - thanks for the Semolina help a few open threads ago, great site, very happy now.
I've come to do more shameless cadging from the SF hive-brain that lurks in these shiny, non-scroll-downy pages. My friend has been given the job of updating (creating?) the science fiction section in her secondary school's library, because she teaches physics. However, she doesn't read science fiction, so she passed the job onto me. Now, if I could do the same to you, a beautiful reading list would suddenly materialize out of the ether. So: what do you think they should buy? School language restrictions please, same with explicit sex stuff.
Cheers.
I have utter faith there are people here who can help me with this one.
A long time ago, when I was going through my dad's old science fiction, I read a story called Semolina. It begins with a girl whose breakfast starts talking to her, because it's an alien. She's called Susan, I think, and there's a car going quite fast downhill at one point. But if I told you, you'd have to kill me.
Does anyone know who wrote it? Google just comes up with recipes, and a slice of my life is just this big old void of yearning to read it again.
We didn't have a TV either, but I caught up on The Mysterious Cities of Gold at university.
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