> "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?
Yes, the British imposed taxes on Indian salt produced and sold in India in order to force people to buy imported (British) salt. Millions of people died because they literally couldn't afford salt any more.
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.
Citing such a list shows a fairly comprehensive void of understanding British culture. Guy Fawkes is pretty high on that list for a home-grown, treasonous terrorist, wouldn't you say? Just below Bowie.
Yes it was, from my reading of the article it was taxed for both profit and to make British-produced salt (ctrl+F Cheshire salt) more price competitive with local salt. There's a quote from 1881 in there:
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.
I don't know a lot about the particulars of this situation, but I do know a bit of history. If things are how I expect them to be, yes, they were using it for preserving food.
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.
The 7.5% is not income tax - it's just salt-duty! If we were to add a 7.5% duty for salt alone to your current 50% tax burden, I'm sure you'd be marching too.
Suspect the average early twentieth century Indian farmer would kill for the OP's state subsidised education, healthcare, unemployment benefits and pension too, never mind his disposable income after tax...
No, I mean that my income, capital-gains, sales & property taxes, along with fees like those for my car registration, equal roughly half my total income.
I wouldn't say that sales tax is a large burden, but 8½% adds up over time.
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.
Maybe, but your 50% left cover your expenses for food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc. I doubt that the 93% the average Indian laborer or farmer had covered his basic necessities. And as another posted said, this was just the salt tax.
Except, if you read that entry closely you’ll see that the Tea Act combatted smuggling. While the Wikipedia talks about the grievance of colonists, what I learned in high school in Boston (different from what my kid learned in California) was consistent with this: it was the smugglers who destroyed the tea.
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.
Smuggling is just transporting stuff against the law. The salt marchers smuggled salt once they took it. I'm not sure what's "except" about your description. Both protests were about unreasonable restrictions on trade meant to enrich the British at the expense of their colonies. The main difference is that you don't need tea to live, so the Tea Act was somewhat less oppressive.
Where “smuggling” is defined as tea that was imported without paying duties to the crown; duties that colonists didn’t have any say in imposing. To make the comparison with alcohol in the 1920s work, it’d be like the government banning the purchase of alcohol from everyone except the government’s anointed “company”, and the voters having no say in the matter.
In fact that sort of smuggling goes on all the time with cigarettes and alcohol es with government monopolies, and as various ways of arbitraging different tax regimes.
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.
You're overindulging in cynicism. It's fair to say that, smugglers or not, Boston as a whole wasn't too found of Crown rule: tea party, Boston Massacre, Powder Alarm, Intolerable Acts (inc. abolishing home rule), etc. The closing end of the Battle of Lexington and Concord were citizens[+] showing up just to take potshots at the retreating redcoats. The war basically started with British troops under siege in Boston.
I don't know if this is true (can't trust anything to not be propaganda anymore) but iirc we learned in school that less than a third of Americans supported Independence with more than a third being indifferent and about a third strictly loyal to to British government. If there was a referendum, we can assume that pro Independence would have likely lost.
I believe this is the case (it's been decades since I read the original docs but that is my recollection). It's pretty typical for revolutionary movements, successful or not, to be well in the minority.
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 don't know where that's famous (I've never heard it before) but I think the name Bolshevik simply derives from an internal party vote which Lenin's faction won (against what became known as the Mensheviks (minority)).
Across all 13 colonies, sure but Massachusetts might have tilted more heavily towards independence. Googling around quickly (because this is just a petty comment thread after all), there's a NYtimes OpEd that said it was more like 40+/20-/40abstain but then other sources indicate Massachusetts was far higher. Again, having the lion's share of rebellious acts, notable incidents, and the focus/ire of Parliament.
There is no historical evidence linking Joseph Kennedy to bootlegging other than the totally unverified claims of a dying monster 50 years after prohibition ended. It’s a political smear.
What are you talking about, the rumors of the Kennedys being bootleggers/smugglers have existed since the end of prohibition due to the rather immediate appearance of their liquor importation and distribution business once prohibition was repealed. Plus there's the fact that they sold the family alcohol business to a known mobster who was a bootlegger. While the truth is probably much less exciting, such myths are definitely not due to some political smear in the 80s by a "dying monster" (no idea who you're referencing).
If you're interested in that sort of thing there's an old movie that covers it in some detail. The name escapes me, but I think it has that dude from Iron Man 3 in it.
The article isn't super clear to me. Was Indian salt that was sold in India taxed?