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> "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
by Xeoncross 9y ago
> "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?
- analog31 9y agoIt gets even more bizarre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March
- mwerty 9y agoNot too different from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
- gumby 9y agoExcept, 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.
- jt2190 9y agoWhere “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.
- gumby 9y agoIn 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.
- Steltek 9y agoYou'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. [+] Admittedly, mostly drunk tavern patrons
- mcny 9y agoI 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.
- gumby 9y agoI 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.
- 9y ago
- blackbagboys 9y agoThere 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.
- pdeuchler 9y agoWhat 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).
- mikeash 9y agoSmuggling 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.
- 13of40 9y agoIf 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.
- exhilaration 9y agoYes 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.
- eadmund 9y agoI'm sure that the labourers had to pay for other taxes too, but man, I'd kill for only 7½% income tax. Right now my total tax burden is about 50%.
- afterburner 9y agoYou're probably thinking of just your top marginal rate on income tax?
- eadmund 9y agoNo, 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.
- afterburner 9y agoSeems highly unlikely unless you're not including the gains from your capital gains in your ratio. Do you know how the marginal rates work?
- eadmund 9y ago> Seems highly unlikely unless you're not including the gains from your capital gains in your ratio. 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.
- wsxcde 9y agoYes, 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.
- senatorobama 9y agoHistory will judge them harshly indeed.
- pellucide 9y agoIsnt now the time to discuss that history
- moonka 9y agoNot that harshly. Just look at the new Churchill biopic with Gary Oldman.
- mcny 9y agoYou're right. Or just the fact that Brits voted him number one greatest Britons of all times in 2002. All times. Above Sir Isaac Newton. Above Charles Darwin. Above William Shakespeare. Reality is stranger than fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_Britons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_Britons
- yesenadam 9y agoWell, Princess Diana was #3. So the whole thing's pretty moronic and irrelevant. Still, I guess everyone has their own idea what great means.