Thorns for Revenue

India salt tax history begins with a cruel simplicity: make necessity expensive, then police the poor for resisting it. This book examines the Great Hedge not as an oddity, but as a bureaucratic machine. Customs posts, patrol routes, reports, fines, and maps turned the East India Company's fiscal logic into a landscape of coercion. The barrier's power lay less in its plants than in the administrative world behind them: clerks measuring losses, officers chasing smugglers, and colonial law redefining survival as evasion. Through the Inland Customs Line, British India becomes visible as a system where paperwork and violence depended on each other. The result is a restrained account of how imperial government learned to extract obedience from daily need.