Salt and State Building

In his book, Salt and the Columbian State, author Joshua Rosenthal uses the salt monopoly established by the Columbian government in the 19^th century as a lens to view state building and organization following the end of Spanish colonialism in the Americas. A story of conflict and struggle, the analysis highlights the influential role a commodity can take within society and how political goals of modernization and organization can be pushed through control and taxation of goods such as salt. The author argues that while in retrospect, state policies may have been weak or unsuccessful, they had a lasting effect on the daily lives of the people in the region and the economy as a whole. Using the salt works of La Salina as a microcosm, Rosenthal breaks down and evaluates the issues of fiscal policies and implementation and sheds light on the situation of the country during a tumultuous and changing time period.

Overall, I was most interested in how the implementation of many of the reforms and fiscal policies of the Columbian state actually decreased economic diversity and raised tensions against the state in areas such as La Salina. Following the enactment of the state monopoly on salt, indigenous residents were pushed out of La Salina and their communal lands were divided for state use. Forced to resettle on the outskirts of the town and to replace the incomes they had made in the past from producing and selling salt, the residents turned to cultivating firewood or producing ceramics, occupations that both eliminated subsistence farming in the region and barely provided necessary incomes. Therefore, while salt production in the region was a successful source of revenue for the government, it actually hurt the people of the region as it forced them out of their homes and stripped them of their livelihoods. Throughout the end of the 19^th century, the anger felt by those impoverished by the changes would continually flare up, and many wars and rebellions occurred as a consequence of these tensions created by state control. Ironically, the state building techniques implemented by the government were at once developing national revenue while at the same time destroying national unity and homogeneity. For readers in the modern day, tensions rising from a basic commodity such as salt are surprising because it is readily and cheaply available. However, in the 19^th century the commodity was much harder to produce and its necessity made it an important issue of contention.