In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire by Robert Hoyland

 In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire 

By Robert Hoyland

Robert Hoyland was born on January 18, 1966. Professor Hoyland was a student of Patrica Crone from what I can tell during his time as a Leverhulme fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. He would in turn serve as Professor of Islamic History at Oxford and Professor of history at the University of St. Andrews and UCLA. He currently serves as Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Beyond that, not much is said about his private life and I assume he prefers it that way so I will respect his preference (As an educator I understand this, being in front of a class is like a performance and you need to keep some stuff back and be private about personal things. {Everyone, our guest editor Mr. Davis}).  Let's talk a little bit about Patrica Crone because another student of hers, Tom Holland has shown up repeatedly in this review series. Patrica Crone, a Danish historian, was known for leading a revisionist (in a lot of circles I know of saying revisionist is usually not a good thing, and often means “white washing” but I assume that is not the case here?{A revisionist in history is simply someone who challenges the established narrative, either with new evidence of events or as we’ll see by looking differently at existing evidence}) school of history, that is to say, a group of historians who question the established narrative of a historical event or events. In this case, using non-Islamic sources, she questioned the established narrative of the creation of the Arabic Empire and the establishment of Islamic civilization. The established line is that the armies of Arabs, either all Muslims or majority Muslims burst out of the deserts of Arabia and fell upon the weakened and depending on who you ask degenerate empires of Persia and Byzantine. The empire of Persia fell entirely and was swept away, while the Byzantines lost half the empire but were able to hold the heartlands of Anatolia and Greece until the coming of the Turks. Using the law written by the founder of Islam Muhammad the conquering Arabs represented a break from the past civilizations of antiquity and the creation of something utterly new. But... What if Islam wasn't fully formed at the time of the conquest? What if the armies of the Arabs were more mixed in their makeup? And what if Islamic civilization isn't as clean a break as many like to present it? (Sounds like a combination of painting the arabic armies as a powerful dangerous “other” along with framing the Byzantines/Persians as lax or degenerate.{which is rather common whenever an imperial society is destroyed or suffers heavy losses to a society seen as less advance beyond its borders}) 

In God's Path, published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014, Professor Hoyland uses Islamic, pre-Islamic Arabic sources and non-Islamic sources to paint a much more complex and messy picture of the rise and fall of the Arabic Empire and the Islamic Civilization that emerged from that process. To do this he draws from a staggeringly wide variety of sources, Christian monks and priests in conquered Egypt (an interesting group in their own right), the land deeds of Indian Kings, military orders from Chinese governors on the western edge of the Tang Empire, inscriptions from tombs and monuments, Persian accounts, the histories of varied people like the Armenians, Nubians, and Imazighen (for the record, this is the preferred name of the Berber people of North Africa, I will be using it for the review since this is what they call themselves(well that’s just common courtesy)). He also uses Arabic and Islamic sources, looking at things such as tax records (HA! Just ask Capone about the importance of tax records, fun fact the Social Security office had made a typo on my records that no one caught but the IRS when I started working.) and letters to get a grip on the debates that were raging inside Islamic/Arabic society at the time. Now Professor Hoyland isn't the only person to do this, Tom Holland did this earlier and more sensationally in his book In the Shadow of the Sword. In God's Path seems to have gotten less push back, in part because of the later publishing date but also I think because of the more academic presentation. There's also the fact that Tom Holland has a higher profile. Either way, let's turn to In God's Path and take a look at the arguments and how they're presented. 

Professor Hoyland first starts with careful mapping out the beginning of a unifying Arabic identity, which is primarily linguistic. By which I mean it's based on language, Arab according to many people is anyone whose native language is Arabic or an Arabic derived language. I should note that not everyone agrees with that definition, especially in places like Egypt and Lebanon but it's a definition that has old and deep roots going back to the Roman Empire (that is a pretty long shared history). In fact, one of the birthplaces of Arabic identity according to Professor Hoyland is the Roman established province of Arabia. A large semi-autonomous border province that was mainly used by the Empire to raise men for the Roman war machine, because of this we have plenty of tomb inscriptions that read here lies such and such a proud Arab Roman soldier. Going even further these Romanized Arabs, who held on to their native tongue even while learning Latin and later Greek, also identified as kin with the desert nomads called Saracens by the Romans. More importantly, these Saracen tribes also saw Arab-speaking inhabitants as kin. As did the Arabic-speaking people of Yemen. All the Arabic-speaking groups at the time would be increasingly influenced by contact with older and more organized states. The Arabs of the west and north by contact with Rome/Byzantine and Persia and the Yemeni by contact with Axum or what we call today Ethiopia. By the time of the 5th century the Arabs were forming into rather sophisticated states on their own, what we call secondary states, states that grow up on the contact points between organized, centralized urban controlled societies and tribal, less centralized societies. Prolonged contact tends to lead to the tribal societies adopting organizational methods and technology that improves their capabilities. Keep this in mind, it'll be important later. 

Professor Hoyland also makes a point of giving us a tour of the 6th century, which might be one of the worst centuries in history. This starts around 536 when some unexplained event caused a shroud of dust that dimmed the sun across the northern hemisphere. This caused massive crop failures for years, with some sources from time claiming that harvests flat out failed from 536 to 539AD(Hey I know about this one, there may have actually been two separate volcanic eruptions, the first in South America in 535 AD and then a second in Iceland around 539-541AD which literally put enough sulfur and particulate matter into the upper atmosphere to lower light levels  This was a pretty serious combination that might have lead to a whole number of changes to the global climate.). In addition to this temperatures plummeted with snow falling in China as late as August (Something similar happened in 1816 when snow fell in boston in June, yep that's also because of a volcanic eruption). War followed on the heels of famine, as did plague, and the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire locked horns for the final time in a series of wars of near-apocalyptic dimensions. At points, the Persians occupied Egypt, the Levant, and Syria, while at others the forces of Rome struck deep into the Iranian Plateau taking the holiest sites in Iran and the Imperial capital. At the end of the wars, Persia was almost shattered due to internal uprisings and civil war, with the Persian Emperor only able to stay on his throne due to Byzantine blades. Meanwhile Byzantine was a hollowed-out wreck of itself, with entire provinces reduced to near-wilderness, the treasury empty and exhaustion felt at every level of society. This is when drums began to beat in the desert. The Arabs had increasingly been used as foot-soldiers and enforcers by both sides in this conflict and expected to be paid for their sweat and blood. Only there wasn't any money to pay them with and well, that just wasn't going to do. On top of that in the east, many of the Arabs had been unified under the rule of a new movement, one that promised that anyone who fought for it would have a share in the spoils.  So the probing armies of the eastern Arabs met disgruntled western Arabs, who knew where all the money was being kept and just how weak and undermanned the armies guarding that money were.  The combination was too much to resist. (I feel that after a few years of reading both your fiction and nonfiction reviews one of the biggest rules I can take away from them is always pay your army/mercenaries.{It’s certainly in the top 5})

Professor Hoyland makes the case that Arab armies didn't just erupt fully formed from the deserts but were in large part made up of Arab veterans of the Persian and Byzantine Armies. These Arabs would have been Christian or Jewish but the vast majority would have been some sort of monotheistic believer and all of them would have been hungry for loot. Loot that was there to be had. While the imperial governments of Persia and Byzantium were drained nearly dry, the great cities of Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran, and more still had plenty of money in their economies. From the Arabs own writing it's very clear that many of them were as motivated by loot as they were by God. The Persian empire would shatter under their assault and the Byzantines would be rocked back on their heels. Another thing that would strengthen the Arabs immensely would be their willingness to cut deals in exchange for surrender and their acceptance of new recruits.  For example, entire Persian military units would change sides for the promise of a share in the loot and not having to pay taxes to the Arabs. Marginalized peoples in both empires would happily jump ship in exchange for an upgrade in status. Local leaders and princes would submit, pay large tributes in exchange for maintaining their own privileges and control. Most of the time conversation wasn't required, in fact, many Arabs prefer to encourage conquered peoples not to convert to Islam as it wasn't even required for Arab soldiers. Plus at the time of the early Arabic empire, Muslims, including civilian ones, didn't pay taxes.(I can see why they didn’t encourage conversion, too much and you don’t have a sufficient tax base and you are back to not paying your army.{At first if you took part in military campaigns, you not only got loot but a life long stipend even if you quit. The Arabs switched to a salaried army after half a century due to the sheer expense})  The Arabs themselves were settled in large fortified garrison towns among the conquered peoples and while the process of being conquered was terrifying for decades afterward it was a case of “meet the new boss, the same as the old boss”. However, the Arabs needed some sort of administrative structure and commonality beyond speaking Arabic to maintain and keep the empire they had conquered for themselves. Because the Byzantine Emperors, while working on the barest of resources and sometimes rather shaky in their authority, were still the heirs of Rome and they weren't letting anything go without a fight. Insurrection, rebellion, espionage  and direct military responses would gnaw at Arabic strength and demand increasingly complex and multi-layer responses to hold what they had, never mind expand.

This led to several responses. First off, the Arab Empire began identifying itself by its opposition to Byzantium. The Romans were respected, feared and their possessions and knowledge desired but they were also increasingly seen as the great other, or the opposing team if you will, that was blocking the Arabs from the great final victory. This didn't mean rejecting everything from Roman civilization but if the Romans are your great nemesis becoming a Roman copycat is kinda riddled with problems (especially if you are the new boss and same as the old boss). The second thing was the increasing privileged and central position of the religion of Islam, which help provide the empire a guiding framework and ideology that wasn't inherited from the Byzantines, as Christianity was increasingly seen as a Roman religion and part of the Roman identity. Islam provided a separate religious identity and justification for imperial authority. Third, the influx of Persian thought, as the Persian empire was subsumed entirely but on the eastern edges of the Arabic Empire and in the Iranian Plateau, the Arabs had had to make a lot of deals that preserved centers of Persian ideas and identity. On top of this many of the slaves that took over, administrative tasks were Persian and when they converted and were freed, they became a class of religious scholars that hammered together the great body of Islamic religious law usually claiming to be using sayings of the prophet Muhammad. This was however a protracted and long process of compromise and debate. 

In the end, what Professor Hoyland suggests is that Islamic civilization isn't nearly the clean break with the past it presents itself to be. (Isn’t that a lot of history? We like to pretend that these big events in history happen then all of a sudden a new country or idea has sprung fully formed into existence.  Like the declaration of independence was signed and BAM you got yourself ‘murica the revolutionary war was just a formality cause now everyone is ‘murican.  Not the actual truth of slowly developing and evolving cultural identities and political structures that themselves change over time.)  Much of pre-Islamic law and practice (cutting off a thief's hand to use a famous one) pre-exist Islam for example(was that a Persian or Roman thing?{middle eastern, so cross cultural}) and strains of Persian mysticism would emerge in Islam itself. As would Greek thought and education. This isn't to say that the Arabs didn't bring anything new to the table, their own ideas of community, law, and more would play a huge role in things but in the end, Islam according to Professor Hoyland would adopt and modify traditions and thought processes from the ancient world making it more of evolution than a revolution in religious and legal practice and thought. It's an interesting and thoughtful read and I don't get the feeling of trying to pull Islam down for political purposes here. If anything a clearer understanding of the origins of Islam helps everyone, even Muslims have a greater appreciation for the events in question. I did like how the book spends a considerable amount of time in central Asia (Central Asia seems to often get ignored during this period in time but yeah I can see the importance) as well showing us the reactions of the Indians and Chinese to this new Imperial state on the edge of their sphere of influence which helps pull us away from a Eurocentric narrative that can sometimes dominate these discussions. In addition, at the back of the book, you have great supporting material like a timeline, a list of important figures and who they were exactly, a discussion on his sources, and a fairly nice Appendix. Which makes this a really good reference book. All in all, I'm giving In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire By Robert Hoyland an A and a stamp of recommended. Go give it a read if this period of time at all interests you. 

So this book was chosen by our ever-wise patrons, if you would like a voice and a vote in the process consider joining us https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for as little as a dollar a month.  Next week starts our World War II month with Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal by Ben Macintyre.  Until then stay safe and keep reading!

Blue text is your guest editor Mr. Davis

Black text is reviewer Garvin Anders

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History By Dr. Sidney W. Mintz

 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

By Dr. Sidney W. Mintz

Dr. Sidney W. Mintz was born on November 16, 1922, in Dover, New Jersey. His father Soloman Mintz was a New York tradesmen, while his mother Fanny was a garment industry organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), one of the first massive general union groups of North America and an organization known for its various ties to socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist movements. As you might have guessed, Dr. Mintz learned the basics of Marxist thought and theory pretty much from birth, but we'll get back to that. Dr. Mintz earned a B.A in psychology from Brooklyn College, graduating in 1943. Afterward, he promptly enlisted in the US Army Air Corps and served for the rest of World War II. Once honorably discharged, he enrolled in the doctoral program in anthropology at Columbia University under the supervision of Dr. Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict, two powerfully influential voices in modern anthropology. Dr. Steward was one of the fathers of Cultural Ecology, a theory that became a subdivision of Cultural Anthropology that argues that the way small-scale societies adapt to their environment had effects that echoed into post-industrial societies - For example how wealth, power, and prestige were divided. Dr. Ruth Benedict was seen as one of the direct successors of Franz Boas, who is considered the father of American Anthropology. Dr. Benedict was one of the anthropologists who blazed a path to Anthropology not just studying individual societies but grappling with those studies to create broader understandings of how cultures work. She's mostly known for her work with Margaret Mead and for books like Patterns of Cultures, The Chrysanthemum, And The Sword, as well as an early anti-racist work The Races of Mankind. 

We don't have the space to go into this too much, just know that Mintz was literally studying at the feet of masters of the discipline who are widely respected and honored even today. Dr. Mintz completed his dissertation on sugar cane plantation workers in Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico; this work would profoundly affect his later studies and career. He would focus on the Caribbean throughout his long academic career at Yale University running from 1951 to 1974 and his founding of the Anthropology Department at John Hopkins University, guest lecturer at M.I.T, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and College de France. Dr. Mintz would bring into his works methods of Marxist thought (which means a focus on economic history and social class) and historical materialism (which among other things proposes that the development of human society can be traced through a series of stages based on economic production to put it really, really simply). I simply do not have the space to explain how this impacted Cultural Anthropology, not if we're going to discuss the book (also as a mercy to your audience {shush youself}). Nor do we have space for the legion of honors and awards that Dr. Mintz won, but he was pivotal in bringing about the idea that Anthropology should include a historical dimension and not just document the present-day situation and practices of existing cultures. In today's review, Sweetness and Power, Dr. Mintz set out to map the impact of Sugar on English society specifically as well as Anglo societies in general (One cannot neglect the anthropological significance of Timbits to post-war Canadian society).

Sweetness and Power was released in 1985 and frankly shows its age, not just in how it presents its arguments but in its word choices, construction, and who the arguments are aimed at (recently designated “geriatric millennial” in a ghoulish turn of phrase discharged into a Medium post about team-building at work). For example, the book is divided into 4 long and broad chapters where more modern writers would have preferred shorter, more focused chapters. Dr. Mintz prefers to use academic terms, including many which are no longer in use. This can slow down reading as you may have to stop to puzzle some things out. Make no mistake, this book is not aimed at the common person but is focused on people who have already received some training in Anthropology. This is because the book was written before “pop” history/social science books came into popularity so for most academics of Dr. Mintz's time the idea of writing for the masses wasn't really on the table (or, if it was, it was seen as disreputable - Carl Sagan received pushback from the scientific community early on for his popular works. Indeed, even today one can expect a bit of snobbery if you’re communicating via a medium without an impact factor). So the average person might feel a little lost in this book, especially the opening chapter. I'll try to translate a little but this should not be considered a comprehensive updating or modernization so if you try to pass your class just using this review, kids, you'll get the grade you deserve and no sympathy from me - I warned you (crap, now I’ll never graduate from High-fructose Corn University - Go Choco-diles!). That said, if you push through the opening chapter, the book opens up quite a bit and becomes more accessible as you get into it.

Sweetness and Power argue that Europeans and Americans have transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace near-necessity of modern life. Dr. Mintz first presents the idea that once you moved past the hunter-gather stage, most societies organized their meals around a central carbohydrate: Bread, porridge, rice, etc. Other foodstuffs were organized around the central carbohydrate so to speak, - A modern example would be a plate of spaghetti with the noodles forming the central part with meat or vegetable sauces serving a supporting role (A carbohydrate concerto, in other words). He also argues that traditionally those meals are a social event, that humans are meant to eat together in a group from a common pot. Doing so helps reinforce social bonds and in a way reinforces how a society sees itself. Sugar would undermine this in Dr. Mintz's argument by making meals a much more individual event, having fat-heavy, sugar-rich foods increasingly push complex carbohydrates out of the central place of meals (“Down with Oreo’s revisionist wrecking! All hail Frito-Dorito-Tostito-Thought!” - Josip Broz Tostito). I'll admit I think he's onto something here, as people report both a decrease in sharing meals with others and an increasing amount of social alienation even before the lockdowns of COVID (I would be curious about whether the lack of shared meals is a causative factor in people’s increased sense of isolation, or if its a symptom of the ways we’ve arranged our lives around things like work - Or, if these things play off each other). That said, my own look at the US shows that our diet was very corn and meat-based (CORN!). At least before the industrial revolution and the first wave of urbanization for a lot of folks beef, pork, venison or game birds would take the center of the plate with vegetables or corn serving as a counterpoint. The urban poor, however, would have a carbohydrate-focused meal centered around bread or porridge, but they weren't a large group in the settler nations until we start towards the industrial revolution from what I can see (remember before 1820 the majority of Americans lived in rural settings).

Dr. Mintz also makes the argument that sugar was one of the vital fuels of the industrial revolution in England by providing calories to the English workforce of the 1800s and 1900s. This case is made through an examination of the history of sugar in Europe in general but is way more focused on the history of sugar in England and how England was first exposed to sugar via foreign trade. Now I should make it clear that when I say sugar in this review I specifically mean either sugar from sugar cane or beets; the book was written and released before the rise of artificial sweeteners and the dread arrival of corn syrup that has widely replaced sugar in a lot of ways in the United States. One of the big differences noted is that most of Europe got their sugar from Portuguese colonies in Brazil; England, however, seized several Caribbean islands through a combination of ruthless military action and colonial expansion and used those islands to provide sugar directly to England as part of the Atlantic triangle trade. This meant that England had a captive sugar supply that used captive slave labor to both keep the price down and the profit high for a small group of Englishmen. Even then, this might not have come to anything except the East India Company at the same time encountered tea and started converting large chunks of India into a tea plantation. The combination of tea and sugar created a hot substance that also supplied calories quickly, so you had a setup where mass consumption of sugar benefited plantation owners, factory owners, and everyone with stock in the East India Company (buy stock in the Yeast India Company - It’s always rising). Now Dr. Mintz isn't arguing for a conspiracy (nor a high-fructose cornspiracy) ; these groups and individuals acted independently and often against each other, but when the East India company argued for a tariff against coffee (for example), no one had any reason to argue against it and all understood that such a tariff would also benefit them. This helped lead to tea becoming a central part of the British diet, to the point that drinking tea is considered part of the British identity (the Welsh and Scottish also drink tea in massive amounts so this isn't only an English thing) despite the fact that no one on the islands would have tasted tea until the 1650s when it was ironically served as a novelty drink in the popular coffee houses of the day.

Dr. Mintz also leads us through the transformation of sugar from something primarily used as a medicine to treat sore throats and indigestion to primarily as a decoration on the tables of the wealthy, to a spice that was used on everything from ducks to Brussels sprouts, and finally to a mass-consumed commodity. This is a fairly interesting history in and of itself and how sugar is used seems to be attached to how easy it is to get a hold of. I was struck by some of the decorations though, where sugar is mixed with almonds to make a sweet paste and sculpted into different shapes and forms; at first strictly for decoration, but over time into edible overly-elaborate desserts until sugar just flat out took over over the dessert course. In doing this it pushed out honey and various savory foods as the human sweet tooth took its toll (it really do be like that sometimes).

Sweetness and Power is about 35 years old as of this review, so its use as a look at the modern diet is obsolete, to put it mildly. As a historical or academic work, it's still rather informative but I would recommend double-checking some information. This makes its usefulness limited but it is also a work that makes you think about how you're eating, where you're eating, what you're eating, and why you're eating it without trying to make you feel guilty about it. Indeed, I think we could do with less guilt in our food conversations and more open discussion; something to bring up at your next family meal, assuming your family has those (The Sugar Council kindly suggests ignoring this advice - Instead, guilt can be cured with more sugar!). Because of its drawbacks, I'm going to verge on heresy (delicious slaaneshi heresy) and refuse to give it an A. I feel that the obtuseness of some of the language choices, its age (the similarly-aged editor previously withheld commenting on this but - Not cool, Brobert Goddard, inventor of the not-cool rocket… not cool{I’m older than you and this book, I’ll comment as I please.}), and the very organization of information in the book work against it. However, it provides a wealth of information and is a great snapshot of how historical and academic books were written in the mid-80s (if a writer should ever wish to capture the frisson of submitting an article for journal review immediately before unwrapping a newly-purchased Tears for Fears cassette and crushing a can of Tab) and is a very strong and informative book in its own right. So I'm giving Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Dr. Sidney W. Mintz a B+ because the fact that after 35 years this book still manages to be relevant, provide information, and be an interesting read is a triumph all on its own.

So quick note, our normal editor Dr. Allen will be taking a leave of absence for the rest of the summer and we'll be having a number of guest editors in to sub for him.  He will return in September however!  While this book wasn't chosen by our ever wise patrons, the next book In God's Path was and if you would also like a vote in choosing what books come up in the review docket, considering joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads  A dollar a month gives you a vote on upcoming reviews and more!  Next week we step away from food history with  In God's Path by Robert G. Hoyland.  Until then stay safe and Keep Reading!

Purple text is our guest editor Mike

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Salt: A World History By Mark Kurlansky

 Salt: A World History 

By Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky is an American journalist and writer born in Hartford Connecticut on December 7th, 1948. He attended and graduated in 1970 from Butler University, with a BA in theater. After graduation, he headed off to New York and worked mostly as a playwright with several off-off-Broadway productions (this means theaters with fewer than a 100 seats), and winning the 1972 Earplay Award for best radio play of the year. He worked several other jobs during this time: commercial fisherman, dock worker, paralegal, cook, pastry chef, and playwright in residence at Brooklyn College. In 1976 he decided to try his hand at journalism and ended up working as a correspondent in Western Europe for the Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and eventually the International Herald Tribune based out of Paris. In 1982 he moved to Mexico, still practicing journalism. In 1992 he wrote his first book A Continent of Islands, which was a nonfiction work about the nations and peoples of the Caribbean. It was the first of many nonfiction books written by Mark Kurlansky about the history and peoples of regions, like his 1999 work The Basque History of the World. However, a lot of his other works such as his 1997 book Cod focus on the history of food. Salt: A World History was published in 2003 by Penguin Publishing and won a Pluma Plata award; it's also the topic of this week's review. A quick note, our regular editor won’t be joining us today, please welcome our guest editor Mike. 

So salt, it’s the only rock we eat and is craved by many of our fellow creatures; for example, a lot of the early roads first cut through North America followed game trails to salt licks. At the time of the book’s publication, the US was the world's biggest salt producer at 40 million metric tons a year. It was overtaken in 2012 by the People's Republic of China, which now produces about 62 million metric tons annually. The Chinese are also the world's biggest consumers of salt (literally) although efforts through education have led the average Chinese consumer to reduce their salt intake. This decline in salt consumption is reflected across the entire world; for example, in the US only 8% of the salt we produce is meant for human consumption (Did this percentage share used to be higher in the past? Or has the consumption of table salt in the US declined in per capita terms? {Yes to both}). Over half of our current salt production is used for de-icing roads. Over in Europe, the amount of salt in people's diets has fallen in half since the 19th century. While we still eat a lot of salt and most experts would tell us that we're eating to much, salt consumption across the world is on a steady tick downwards; while you still need a certain amount of salt in your diet, the odds are likely you could stand to eat less of it and will eat less in the future. While salts of various kinds still have a wide variety of industrial uses, it does seem like a food item fated to be pushed increasingly to the edge of the table. However, there was once a time when salt was not just a vital and sought-after part of everyone's diet, but an item of national security, where being dependent on another nation for salt could spell ruin and despair. Why was that? How did different governments deal with that and how was salt used across the ages?, Finally, why has there been a dramatic reduction of salt use in the last century? Well, let's discuss that.

As you might have guessed, Mr. Kurlansky takes us on a tour of the history of salt, which stretches back into prehistory. Hunter-gatherer societies used salt, but humanity’s first large-scale attempts at making salt didn’t arise until after we settled down and started farming.  Once we became farmers who were attached to a single location, we found ourselves with a problem that most nomadic groups don't have: How do we preserve our food through winter, or whatever the equivalent season is where you can't grow new crops, so we can make it to spring and plant new crops? The answer we came up with was salt. Salt was one of our first methods of keeping food from spoiling and it was far and away the most popular and widespread answer. Salt can be used to preserve both meat and vegetables for long periods and can be used for large amounts of food. In some cases, salt even enhances the taste of the food in question. Salt can even be used to preserve butter and is vital in making food products like cheese. Back in the days before supermarkets and high-speed travel, the ability to keep food from spoiling for months was the difference between life and death; thus, salt became a necessary and treasured commodity. 

While images of salt mines may be dancing in your head right now, interestingly enough that's not where we got most of our salt. Instead, most of it came from either the sea or brine ponds along the coast. At first, we would simply get water from these ponds or the sea and boil it away in pots. However, it was soon noted that solar evaporation created better quality salt (Does the author give any details about why this is? I am curious {Grain and crystal size are more uniform and tend to be smaller, for most of human history people though smaller grains were better}). This led to people building artificial brine ponds accompanied by a series of ponds where water would become increasingly salty, making it easier to extract the salt. This could get a bit labor-intensive, however, (Was this universally labor-intensive or did some civilizations figure out to make this process easier? {It remains labor-intensive until automation}) and soon across the world salt works were the concern of the state. There were also of course the proverbial salt mines where salt was dug up from underground and those were even more labor-intensive. Organizing that extensive labor force and getting salt from the mine or the salt work, and then from the salt work to the consumer became a state-level concern. So salt became a driving force in creating not just states but states that were centralized and strong enough to maintain the trade networks and keep the labor organized, paid, and fed.

     This is most clearly illustrated in China where salt (along with iron) became a state monopoly, a deeply reviled and hated monopoly that would cause intense debate across centuries in Chinese society. Confucianists, for example, would gain public support by arguing against it and saying that it led to the state being in direct conflict with its people which made it bad policy. Chinese folklore would lionize and make heroes out of smugglers and rogues who defied the monopoly and sold illegal non-government salt. Rebellions would use the salt monopoly as a rallying cry, but Chinese states would be perpetually seduced by the mass profits that could financially power a state-level military all on its own. Nor was China the only state to succumb to this lure -  France had the hated gabelle, a series of regional-level salt taxes, with each region of France paying a different amount. The French found a way to make an even more loathed system than the Chinese by not only making it arbitrary but by pairing it with salt duties. The Sel Du Devoir at times required every French subject over the age of 8 to purchase 15 pounds of salt a year at mandated high government prices. You were also forbidden from using any of that 15 pounds to make salt products like hams, fish, or cheese to keep from competing with government-appointed butchers and the like (The pious and faithful French subject was only allowed to gather the salt into a pile and stare at it while cursing the hated English for their perfidy). This honestly really helps me grasp why the French were so rebellious as a people and resisted centralized authority. The British example in India is so notorious that when the founding fathers discussed salt taxes it was denounced as imperial-style tyranny. Of course, British salt policy in its colonies later grew so oppressive that Gandhi was able to use it as a rallying cry to jump-start his nonviolent independence movement. 

On the other hand, not every nation took such a heavy-handed approach - Ancient Egypt was fairly liberal when it came to salt, with the Pharaohs preferring to focus their energy on dominating the export market for salted fish.  Indeed, salted fish actually made them more money than raw salt did according to documents that archaeologists would find. Nor was every salt tax violently resisted or hated - Venice had a salt subsidy in addition to paying merchants to import salt. Between the salt subsidy and the fact that the Byzantine Empire allowed Venice to move goods from their ports completely duty and tax-free, Venetian traders were allowed to undercut their competitors on... Everything else. Fast forward to the United States where a salt tax actually paid for a number of the New England canals connecting the cities and ports of New England to the Great Lakes. In fact, the American salt tax for the canals is the only popular salt tax I can find on record, proving that even Americans will accept and even cheer on a tax if they can see some tangible material benefit from it like shiny new infrastructure (The pretzel-shaped interchanges on interstate highways being a subconscious manifestation of this link between salt and popular infrastructure).

Mr. Kurlansky doesn't just take a look at how salt powered the growth of state power and its relationship to government policy; he also looks at how salt was used on different foods and in different times and places. Whether it's the Roman fish sauce garum, or how salt made the massive cod and herring industry not just possible but so profitable that nations would go to war to possess far-off cod fishing waters. Salt also played a role in how different meats were prepared and became widespread from ham to corned beef. What really intrigued me was just how many sauces have their roots in salt: Tabasco sauce, soy sauce, and even ketchup. I had no idea going into this book that ketchup started out as a sauce made up of anchovies, salt, and various herbs and spices; Tomato ketchup wouldn't take over as the main type of ketchup until the 1800s (I’m guessing, however, that cats were never the main ingredient of catsup {As far as I can tell no}). Even the interplay of sugar and salt is discussed in this book. Mr. Kurlansky also includes a number of recipes in the book so folks can see just how much salt affects things. The book also covers the downfall of salt, as refrigeration became possible year-round and canning was invented. Canned meats and vegetables first replaced salted foods as military rations because they would keep longer and were easier to carry, but these new preservation methods would spread to the civilian world quickly enough. The rise of chemistry as science also led to the discovery of more diverse salt products causing table salt to lose more of its importance as production shifted away to more profitable industrial salts that are actually poisonous. Today it's rare to see salt-preserved food anywhere because due to industry and globalization we just have better alternatives (Out of curiosity, does Kurlansky talk about the medical establishment connecting sodium with heart disease in the late 20th century? Given that there’s still a ton of high-salt food available for purchase it may not have made much of a dent in real terms.{He does but doesn’t really go in-depth into it. Just noting that high salt consumption has been linked to a number of bad health outcomes.}).

     Mr. Kurlansky gives us something of a grand tour in this book - How salt impacted the creation of the state as we understand it, how the different policies and stances taken by various governments caused problems or fueled the solutions to problems. The book also takes an in-depth look at salt as a food and  industrial product. I found this book fairly interesting because these days we tend to overlook salt and don't assign a lot of importance to it in our lives (Briefly putting on my Comrade Tortoise hat, it is interesting how salt is again becoming a conspicuous signifier of wealth and status - See artisanal Himalayan salt vs. proletarianized iodized table salt). Some of us even try to cut out of our lives completely. I would even argue this is a book that aspiring world history students should look at and a book that aspiring fantasy authors should consider giving a look at. I'm giving Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky an A.

        I'd like to thank our readers for their patience this week.  Next week we should be on track with Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W Mintz.  Until then stay safe and keep reading!

Indigo text is our guest editor Mike

Black text is your reviewer Garvin 

            

Why Did the Chicken Cross the World By Andrew Lawler

 Why Did the Chicken Cross the World

By Andrew Lawler

Andrew Lawler is an American Journalist and author was born in Norfolk Virginia on May 25th, 1961. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1983 with a B.A in Interdisciplinary Studies. He landed his first reporting job just days before the explosion of Challenger in 1986 and spent the next 15 years or so as a science reporter in Washington. After that, he spent a year as a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and founded the New England Bureau of Science. His articles have appeared in the Smithsonian, National Geographic, Audubon, New York Times, and Washington Post. In addition, he has written two books with a third book set to be released in November of 2021. Today we are reviewing his first book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the world published in 2014 with a reprinting in 2016.

Chicken is the cornerstone source of protein in the modern world, the average Chinese citizen will eat over 22 pounds of chicken meat this year and the average American will eat 4 times that (Honestly we eat way the hell too much meat generally.). In the United States, the chicken is the most commonly eaten meat, surpassing beef in the last decade, and you likely ate chicken if not today at least a day or so ago before reading this. Nor is the United States alone in its appetite, Mexico is the world's single greatest consumer of chicken eggs, importing 20,000 tons of eggs in 2019 alone. There are an estimated 26 billion chickens alive on the planet right now (With an extremely high turnover rate.). Making them the most numerous bird and one of the most numerous vertebrates on the planet, or at least on land (Given plummeting fish stocks, probably don’t need that qualifier. {given that the Bristlemouth fish is numbered in the trillions by most sources… We need the qualifier} Fair.). The modern chicken is used for everything from food production to vaccine creation to helping health experts guard us against West Nile Virus. Which begs a question, where are all these chickens? I mean think about it, there are only 400 million or so cats on the planet but I'm willing to bet my mostly American audience has seen a lot more cats in their lives than chickens. Never mind dogs at 900 million or even rats, who we are often locked in a battle to remove from our lives. Beyond that, I'm sure most of you can remember the last time you saw a cow from your car as you drove past a farm with a horse or three. At 25 billion chickens, with over 9 billion of them living in the US alone, shouldn't we be drowning in these birds? For that matter, where did this bird even come from? Has our relationship always been like this? How is it even in the deepest, reddest part of the Bible belt I picked up the evolutionary history of animals like the horse, pig, cow, and dog but I can't even remember a vague discussion of the chicken? These are some of the questions that we grapple with in this book as Mr. Lawler attempts to trace the creation of the chicken from a wild jungle fowl to a product of American Scientific Farming and Capitalism without restraint (But he’s being redundant.). To our relationship to it as a spiritual symbol and divine herald to barely considered but often eaten meat dish.

Lawler traces the chicken to Southeast Asia using a combination of archaeological, genetic, and biological evidence (Honestly, it isn’t that hard.  They’re the same species, recognizably so, as a wild bird you can still find hanging around.  At least for their species and place or origin.  Time of domestication is harder. {Actually!  There was a huge amount of argument as a number of biologists favored other species, I think it’s settled now but the book is 7 years old.} Likely one of the other closely related species?). Now archaeological evidence is difficult because chicken bones are unlikely to survive long enough to become such evidence. However, there is a bunch of other evidence, based on carving and other art, as well as primary written accounts. For example, we know that the Egyptians considered the chicken a foreign animal in the Bronze age with written accounts of chickens being brought over from Babylon and Mesopotamia as gifts for the Pharaoh. For that matter, the Greeks would call the Chicken the Persian bird and often use it as a mocking symbol of the Persian Empire. Tracing the bird from Babylon, we find it was called the royal bird during the Akkadian Empire and was associated with a lot of goddesses. Like almost all of them, it was also considered a creature of light due to its crowing at dawn, symbolically banishing the darkness of night (Okay, that’s kinda cool). With that we're sent further east, where the history of the Chicken in India is rather mysterious, this is because a lot of the early Indian civilizations like the Happara and Mohenjo-Daro civilizations left behind records but we can't read them. In fact, when it comes to the repeating symbols that we find in both cities we're not even 100% sure that they're a writing system. Some of those symbols sure look chicken-like though. Through the magic of genetics and fragmentary archaeological evidence, we can follow the Chicken back to Vietnam and its most likely ancestor the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus.  The domestic chicken is Gallus gallus domesticus.  If you’ve ever wondered what wild roosters look like, the chicken minstrel in Disney’s Robin Hood.  He’s a straight-up Red Jungle Fowl.). We also learn that the Red Jungle Fowl has interbred so much with its domestic counterpart that's in danger of genetic extinction. However, due to a group of American Farmers who have maintained pure strain Jungle Red Fowl for decades, it may be possible to reseed the population (It wouldn’t take much, to be honest.  Even interbred, there aren’t that many genetic differences. {The geneticist and biologists who specialize in these birds disagree, apparently the mutation that separates the two is a big deal, the pure bred Red Jungle Fowl for example is so skittish that even being picked up a handler it’s known for years can cause a stroke or a heart attack (Woah, that’s impressive.  I stand corrected.)}. It's here also we learn that we might not have even eaten the damn birds for the first 1000 years of their domestication! Birds were mostly kept for religious reasons, to keep down pests, for their eggs (Hens lay at least an egg a day when they’re well-fed, can be left to forage or be fed scraps.  That’s way more useful than the meat to a pre-industrial society.), as pets (They are wonderful animals and do make pretty good pets.), or even as fighting animals. That said eating the chicken didn't become really common until the Roman period, but the Romans made up for that by loving roasted chicken and exporting chickens as food animals to every corner of the Empire. It's at this point the book focuses on how the chicken became a staple part of the diet of basically the whole world. 

You see after the Empire fell, the chicken itself fell out of favor. There were just other birds that people preferred. At least in Europe, the preferences of Africa and Asia aren't really discussed at this point. The book takes us through how the chicken was present in the middle ages and mostly kept for its eggs with people preferring the meat of pheasant and other game birds over chicken (A live chicken will feed the family for years.  A dead one...once.  Also, fun linguistic side note for you English speakers.  Ever wondered why we have separate words for the animal and the meat, for things other than chicken?  Well, words like beef, pork, and venison are derived from the French, while the word for Cow, Pig, and Deer are derivations from the original Old-English and thus Germanic languages.  This happened because after the Norman Conquest, the people who raised the animals used their words for them, while the people who ate them used their own.  Chickens are the same word because the people raising them were the people eating their eggs and sometimes them.  Probably also why historical records specify a preference for game birds.  The nobility did the writing, and the peasants got executed if they hunted the pheasants.  The peasants almost certainly ate their chickens when they got long in the beak. {I’m not saying they didn’t eat chickens but records were kept of even what the peasants ate and the peasants had a marked preference for waterfowl and other types of birds over the chicken, in fact in large parts of Europe there were more ducks kept than chickens.  Chickens mostly show up as fighting animals in the records, as every culture who keeps them has a sport of rooster fighting}).  Things changed when we hit the Victorian Era and the first big so-called “hen crazes” started with wealthy British folks collecting exotic chicken breeds from Asia and other places and cross-breeding them with the goal of creating a better bird (They did this with everything.  Dogs, pigeons, rats…). Charles Darwin was even able to use this as evidence for his emerging theory of natural selection. It's not until after the civil war that “hen crazes” start spilling over to the United States, which is where we switch gears and focus on the history of the bird in the US because it's in the US that the chicken's modern situation came about.

The chicken was not a big part of our colonial diet, folks often preferred game birds, turkeys, and waterfowl to chickens (Again, the eggs.  And their usefulness for pest control…). On top of that men were encouraged to focus their energies on larger livestock, especially cattle and pigs. There was one group of people who were encouraged to spend a lot of energy in rising and maintaining chickens, however. Slaves. The south became the main source of chicken meat and eggs in the United States with almost the entire production under the control of enslaved African Americans. In fact, owners encouraged this mostly by letting enslaved African Americans keep all the profits from chicken meat and egg sales, but also refusing to buy chicken from other groups which pushed poor whites completely out of the industry until after the civil war (Huh.  Neat.). Now European recipes usually called for roasting or baking the chicken but no one shared these recipes with the African Americans who didn't have the time for them anyway. That said the west African people of the time had domesticated chickens for centuries before Europeans showed up and they had their own traditions on how you cook a chicken. They fried those birds in oil (And that is where that stereotype comes from.). This would spread like wildfire pushing out most European traditions in the US until our chicken cooking traditions were mostly from the continent of Africa, or to be specific Nigeria and the Yoruba people. However, the chicken was distinctly 3rd place on American plates at best until the single most fundamental event in modern history, World War II. With the government rationing beef and pork and encouraging chicken, big business got involved and pushed out the African Americans and women who had controlled the market until this point (Because of course, it did.  Can’t let them have anything when there is a profit to be made, after all.). In the 1950s, in the spirit of scientific farming, scientists were rallied to create the bird of tomorrow. A massive breasted bird that can grow to full size in under 3 months, convert 2 pounds of feed into a pound of meat and endure the hellish state of factory farms just long enough to be killed (Poor birds.  Normal chickens can still fly…{fuck some of those birds can barely stand!}). 

Interestingly enough, the factory farm industry wasn’t willing to let him into the farms themselves (There’s a shock!). In fact, Mr. Lawler makes a point of just how much work is put in to keep people out and prevent people from thinking about what is going on in these factory farms. Now you don't have to be a PETA member to find what we do now horrific or to find this little tidbit incredibly shady (No.  No you don’t.  And yes, factory farms are terrible for the chickens.  They are also terrible for the farmers.  See, the way Tyson and the like work is that they own the birds and they contract out to “independent” farmers.  Farmers who have to buy their birds, and put up with constantly changing requirements and low per-bird contract rates, which means they are stuck in a massive debt trap with no control over their own business.  To the point where they are punished for trying to not be assholes to the birds, and get black-listed if they speak out.  Fun fact, by the way, the factory farms create a literal shit ton of effluent that pollutes rivers and drinking water supplies, but they are not covered by...basically any clean water regulations thanks to lobbying.). It turns out that due to lobbying by companies like Tyson Foods, factory-farmed chickens are exempt from almost every animal cruelty law that usually governs the treatment of livestock (And this, kids, is what we Marxists talk about when we talk about the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, or when liberals talk about regulatory capture.  The people who actually raise the chickens don’t want this, but they’re in a debt trap.). Look I'm no Vegan but this? This is concerning. Thankfully there are dozens of movements made up of hundreds of thousands of Americans and more beyond our shores working to provide alternatives; from the backyard Chicken movement to producers working to convince the restaurant industry to go with a slightly more expensive chicken that is raised more ethically and tastes better than factory farm breeds, which are also pretty bland so low bar to clear here. Whether they'll matter in the grand scheme of things is something time will tell.

Now some of you may be asking why bother delving into all this historical or biological stuff about chickens of all things! Well, first of all, context matters, some of our biggest failures as a society or individuals are often linked to our inability to grasp that. Second of all, how can we really understand where we are if we have no idea where we've been? How can we see where we're going? Also, there is nothing more basic to society than what it eats. The history of your food is just as much the history of you (Literally, in a Ship of Theseus kind of way.), which is why learning about the history of the animals and plants you eat is something that can be incredibly helpful to understanding missing parts of history or cultural information. For that matter to stand up on my Anthropologist soapbox, perhaps to my editor's dismay because he's heard this so often, everything is a cultural artifact, everything, and your food and how you prepare it tells us a lot about your culture (No dismay.  It’s true.). I've often joked that I can tell you a lot about a culture just by looking at their booze, food, and weapons. I stand by that and Mr. Lawler's work makes me feel justified in doing so. Mr. Lawler's does a good job of informing us of the general history of chicken with a large number of amusing anecdotes while showing us the long westward march of the chicken as well as its journey from a bird mostly kept for religious rituals to the center of our diet, while at the same it the bird itself is increasingly exiled from our presence as a living animal and we increasingly come into contact with it as only a prepackaged commodity. That said, the organization of the book is rough and there are times where Lawler can't seem to decide if he's heading west or east, or if he wants to discuss the history of the bird and its cultural significance or the modern problem of factory farms and the state of opposition to it. I'm not saying the book can't do both but you should try to maintain a consistent direction from chapter to chapter is my advice. Still, I can excuse that because this is a book that informs you while also provoking you to start asking questions and that's invaluable. Why Did the Chicken Cross the World By Andrew Lawler gets an A- and a recommendation from me. Go check it out.

I do hope you enjoyed this weeks review, which was chosen by our ever-wise patrons! For just a dollar a month they get to decide what book I read next, discuss theme months and vote on future topics. If you would like to join their wise ranks consider dropping by https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads and signing up. Next week is another book they selected, Salt, a world history. Until then, stay safe and of course, Keep Reading.

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders