> "In 1835, special taxes were imposed on Indian salt to facilitate its import. This paid huge dividends for the traders of the British East India Company.
The article isn't super clear to me. Was Indian salt that was sold in India taxed?
The article isn't super clear to me. Was Indian salt that was sold in India taxed?
This eventually led to Gandhi marching to Dandi to deliberately violate the salt laws and was one of the key moments in the struggle for Indian Independence.
It really breaks my heart that the British killed tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of Indians for no reason at all and they've gotten away with it both in terms of any actual consequences as well as in the realm of public opinion. And to make matters worse, we still have so-called British intellectuals who like to argue that colonization was somehow a good thing for India.
All times. Above Sir Isaac Newton. Above Charles Darwin. Above William Shakespeare. Reality is stranger than fiction.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in this tiny cell http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/51d081ccecad04b3350...
How can we humans be so cruel?
The British establishment are horrible.
Then again there is a still more wretched creature, who bears the name of labourer, whose income may be fixed at thirty-five rupees per annum. If he, with his wife and three children, consumes twenty-four seers [49 lb] of salt, he must pay a salt duty of two rupees and seven annas, or in other words 7 ½ per cent income tax.
Nope, I am. It's remarkable how high one's tax burden is, once one starts to actually track it. All those sales taxes and fees add up.
> Do you know how the marginal rates work?
Yup. I'm calculating (total government costs)/(total income), for all of my income and all costs-of-government.
No, I spend less than I earn, and save quite a bit. Some of that savings is tax-advantaged, but overall I pay a huge amount of my income in taxes & fees. I don't mind that taxes exist, really; I don't mind paying for a social safety net. But I think something's wrong when half of my productive labour & investment income is taken from me every year.
India has a warm and humid climate and it's hard to preserve food for more than a few hours/days. And here we're talking about a world before fridges or freezers.
It depends on the type of food, but for example for meat, in a world before refrigeration, you could:
* smoke the meat (kind of hard to do for a poor Indian, especially since large parts of India don't have abundant firewood)
* drying, etc. (probably not as effective)
* curing aka salting (probably the most popular solution)
They probably also needed salt for iodine, otherwise you run into nasty issues:
> Iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual disabilities.
New England remained a hotbed of smuggling. Consider the origin of the Kennedy fortune or the current heroin and people smuggling channels through New Bedford and Rhode Island.
Also note the opposition to pot legalization in some of the rural counties of California appears to mostly be lead by illegal pot growers afraid of their (de facto, though not de jure) government price support going away.
My point is simply that, if you read contemporary documents, you’ll see that the smugglers, and others, exploited the situation to promote their respective positions. And the whole story is exploited today with the details filed off.
Propaganda is an important part of nation building.
[+] Admittedly, mostly drunk tavern patrons
Famously, in revolutionary pre-USSR Russia The "Bolsheviks" ("majority") were not in the majority but named themselves so in order to gain credibility and marginalize the majority opposition.
I'm not sure anyone thought to take a scientific poll. Obviously the Patriots were in favor of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk_Resolves
I think it's how it work in Canada for alcohol.
> and the voters having no say in the matter