books

Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History is the kind of book that rearranges your sense of the world by picking up something ordinary and refusing to put it down. And if it has flaws (and it does), they are the flaws of a writer who simply found too many good stories to tell.

The premise is irresistible once you sit with it. Salt, the only rock we eat, was for most of human history one of the most valuable commodities on earth. It funded wars, founded cities, drew the borders of empires, and, when denied, sparked revolutions. Kurlansky moves from ancient Chinese brine wells in Zigong to the salt cod economies of the North Atlantic, from the Roman Via Salaria to Gandhi's march to Dandi, and somewhere along the way you realise that quite a lot of what you thought you knew about trade, taxation, colonialism, and cuisine traces back to a single white crystal. The section on the British salt monopoly in India is particularly good, and the treatment of how salt taxation underwrote empire after empire is genuinely illuminating. There are also smaller pleasures tucked in everywhere: the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland repurposed as a subterranean ballroom, the origins of Tabasco, the slow arrival of the red pepper into Sichuan cooking, the role a salt shortage played in ending the American Civil War.

Kurlansky's voice is warm and clubbable. He sprinkles in witty asides, ancient recipes, and the sort of dinner-party trivia you will find yourself repeating within the week. There are recipes for garum, for paocai, for preserved herring, and they lend the book the texture of a well-kept commonplace book rather than a straight history.

That commonplace-book quality is also the book's chief weakness. Salt can feel scattered. Chapters start and stop without much connective tissue, the organising principle flickers between chronology and geography and theme, and the final stretch reads a little like Kurlansky emptying a notebook he could not bear to leave unused. Anyone coming to it expecting a clean narrative spine may find themselves a bit lost. The science, too, is lighter than the subject deserves: the revolution in uniform salt crystallisation that made the whole global market what it is today is mentioned repeatedly but never properly explained, and the modern industrial story, including the astonishing amount of salt hidden in processed food, goes largely untouched. The lens occasionally tilts Eurocentric, though less so than many books of its vintage.

None of this quite undoes the pleasure of reading it. Salt is best approached not as a definitive history but as a guided wander through one of the most consequential substances humans have ever chased. Taken in that spirit, in chapters, alongside other reading, it is generous, surprising, and quietly changes how you look at the shaker on the table.