Throughout the long age of empires, Europeans enjoyed these dried remains of several exotic plants from the two Indias. Gradually, soft drugs became an everyday habit for every civilised person – moreover, a habit that became the very essence of his or her civilised behaviour. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these addictive substances, from tea to opium, made up the biggest group of commodities in international trade. There is a biological component in this addiction, but it is also shaped by traditions, fashions, prices, political contexts and much else. For example, tobacco is addictive in any form – whether chewed, taken as snuff, or smoked; legal or smuggled; consumed alone or in cigar lounges. The habit is conditioned and contagious – it spreads from one person to another in the manner of an infection. If a certain form of tobacco is cheap, or if it is well advertised, it spreads faster. Taxes and high prices reduce the toxicity of a product; fashion or advertising can have the opposite effect. Administrative measures – e.g. criminalisation – have lesser impacts. The habit spreads among a population as a result of imitation and because of the social character of consumption. Addiction is individual but also societaclass="underline" the consumption of such a commodity may grow even if individual doses stabilise.
Capital grows endlessly; this is essential for capitalism. Its most rapid growth occurs not when consumption leads production but, conversely, when supply boosts demand. Addictive substances are invariably connected to energy. This is the energy that sugar gives to the body and petrol gives to a driver, the energy that is expended in work, procreation and recreation, the energy that is stored in the form of fat. Concentration encourages a monopolistic development and arbitrary pricing, and addiction guarantees the unlimited growth of trade. Even technical progress does not change the pattern of addiction. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons formulated a startling paradox. An increase in the efficiency of a certain resource does not reduce its consumption but, on the contrary, increases it. Precisely because efficiency produces cheaper products, they become available to more customers, demand for them grows, and more raw material is expended in making them. Collective addiction grows into fetishism – an extreme case of a mono-resource dependency. Changing fashions bring variety to this fetish and boost its consumption.
Salt
Ubiquitous in markets, salt is the only raw material available both in the sea and on dry land. It is sourced in mines and lagoons and processed in salt works. And yet there are places where there is no salt. This makes the trade in salt massive but local. Kept dry, it doesn’t rot, catch fire or become infested with vermin. The salt trade developed local markets; transporting and taxing salt helped to fill the coffers of early modern states. To collect their levies, they established customs posts at the bottlenecks of the transportation networks – at seaports, porterages and the rare bridges over rivers, and on mountain passes. Instead of sending tax collectors into peasants’ farmyards, these states switched to taxing everything that moved and did not decay. Often, this meant salt.
Although edible salt is freely available in seawater, boiling brine is an inefficient way of obtaining it. It takes a lot of firewood to produce a spoonful of salt. On the sea coast near Rome, brine was poured into shallow pans made of lead and evaporated by the sun. Venice adopted a cheaper and safer method of crystallising salt in ‘cascades’ – coastal salt works. A small bay was partitioned to create a chain of pools which were separated by dams but connected by locks. A windmill channelled seawater into the upper pool; evaporated by the sun, the solution went down a level when the lock was opened. Collected from the lowest pool, the salt had to be dried and milled, and the product was ready. The method is simple but it did not work in many other places. Venice exported huge amounts of salt to Constantinople, though there was no shortage of seawater there. In the tidal marshes of Northern France, fine sea salt – fleur de sel – forms a thin crust floating on the water; it has to be harvested by hand, a task which was traditionally done by women, but the volumes were low. The Venice-style ‘cascades’ require bays that are protected from storms and flooding but not connected to river estuaries where the water is fresh, not saline. Widespread in the Mediterranean, this method was less common in Asia. There are few places in the world with lagoons like that of Venice.
In the thirteenth century Venice established a monopoly on the salt trade. Practising mercantilism avant la lettre , the republic allowed salt trading to be conducted only through its own warehouses. Packed into sacks, salt was taken from the cascade farms onto terra firma in the countryside around Venice, to Bologna and even Tuscany. It was also exported by sea and traded all over the Adriatic. The salt monopoly became the economic foundation of the only Italian state which didn’t have a Roman heritage. The islands in the Mediterranean developed their own cascade farms; when returning from these early colonies, commercial ships brought the salt to Venice, using it as ballast. Importing salt to Venice, grading and storing it, selling it to the locals and re-exporting it became the vital tasks of the republic’s administration. Like the Navigation Acts which England would later introduce, the salt monopoly did not nationalise the commodity but controlled its movement. All sea trade in salt had to go via Venice and only Venetian ships could transport it. The fleet earned revenue and the republic received taxes, which were easy to collect on home territory. Salt producers who broke these rules were destroyed by force of arms. A whole region of Venice, Punta della Dogana, was converted into salt warehouses. Surprisingly modern, the Salt Administration was a kind of super-ministry consisting of three tiers – Collegio, Ufficio and Camera. The salt college took strategic decisions and was subordinate to the Council of Ten; the salt office managed monopoly trade, subsidies and taxes; the Camera, the salt chamber, was the bank, which issued trade credits and promissory notes guaranteed by the future production of salt. For centuries, the salt trade was the main contributor to Venice’s revenue; the salt monopoly continued until the military defeat of 1509. The profits were spent on canals, palaces, the navy and other state expenditures. But, like the canals, the salt works were prone to silting up so that the law of diminishing returns affected them as much as any other extractive industry.