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In the 19th century, the British Empire undertook one of history’s most unusual construction projects.
It stretched for thousands of miles across India, required thousands of workers to maintain, and was designed to prevent ordinary people from obtaining one of life’s most basic necessities without paying a tax.
Despite its enormous size and the resources devoted to it, almost all traces of it have disappeared, and few people today even know it existed.
Learn more about the Great Hedge of India and why it was built on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
By the mid-1800s, the British East India Company had controlled much of India for more than a century. TheCompany had operated as a trading enterprise, granted a monopoly by the British Crown. It gained great wealth from fine Indian fabrics and its control over the spice trade.
A key turning point in the East India Company’s rule came after the 1757 Battle of Plassey, which secured its control over Bengal and dramatically expanded its power to collect land revenues and impose direct taxes on the Indian population.
To maximize revenue, the East India Company established monopolies and taxation systems over key commodities, particularly salt. These policies varied considerably across India, with particularly restrictive controls established in Bengal.
Under this system, the East India Company bought salt at rock-bottom prices and resold it to Indian and European markets at significant markups. It reserved some of the highest salt taxes for regions of India where it could not be harvested.
Salt is a necessity for human life, and the human body doesn’t manufacture it. In warm climates, particularly those of the tropics, salt is even more vital. In hot environments, the body cools itself by sweating. Human sweat is not just water; it contains salt. Without replenishing sodium and chloride, the body faces severe consequences, foremost amongst them dehydration.
These consequences also extend to livestock, particularly cattle, which are sacred in India. Cattle, foundational to India’s rural economy, require salt licks and blocks to live and work.
Throughout Indian history, leaders vigorously protested British efforts to weaponize salt taxation. Among them was Mahatma Gandhi, who criticized efforts to tax salt shortly before the Great Salt March of 1930: Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor. Cattle cannot live without salt. Salt is a necessary article in many manufactures….There is no article like salt, outside water taxing, which the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes therefore the most inhuman poll tax that the ingenuity of man can devise.
The battle lines were drawn: to the people of India, salt was a vital naturally occurring commodity that should be available to all without heavy taxes. To the British East India Company, salt was a lucrative lever of power, regardless of the human cost.
However, there was a problem. In the early 19th century, people commonly bypassed the tax by smuggling it across India, and smuggling cost the British enormous amounts of money.
With nearly 7,000 miles (11,000 km) of coastline on the Indian Ocean, coastal regions produced more salt than they could use, but farther inland on the Deccan Plateau, the need was acute. Smugglers bypassed the tax by illegally transporting salt across India to areas where demand was higher.
Recognizing the revenue lost to salt smuggling, the British East India Company had set up some barriers and outposts along roads as early as 1803. The result was a disorganized network of ditches and brush piles to disrupt salt-carrying carts.
These efforts failed, prompting the British East India Company to adopt a new strategy in 1840. Their plan was conceptually simple, if not a brute-force solution. They built…a hedge.
A very, very, very large hedge.
For those of you who don’t know what a hedge is, a hedge is a living fence formed by planting shrubs, bushes, and trees into a dense barrier. The British were familiar with hedges in their quaint gardens as a privacy barrier.
As one British colonial official noted: To secure the levy of a duty on salt… there grew up gradually a monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilized country. A Customs line was established which stretched across the whole of India, which in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a distance of 2,300 miles; and nearly 12,000 men guarded it… It would have stretched from London to Constantinople… It consisted principally of an immense, impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes.
The project was officially called the Inland Customs Line. To build an impenetrable hedge, the British East India Company selected trees and shrubs known for rapid growth and impenetrability. Formal work on the hedge began in 1843, and it was clear it would take decades to complete and would have to be much shorter than the original Custom Line.
Early work on the hedge went about as you might expect: confusing, disorganized, and costly. This was not the cultivation of a boxwood hedge between two country manors in England; this was a massive undertaking.
The early hedge often washed away with the monsoon rains, and seeding in the various climate zones required significant trial and error. Compounding the challenge of getting the hedge to take hold across such a dynamic climate was the fact that the British Raj’s borders in India were fluid, shaped by theEast India Company’s alliances and relationships.
That dynamic state ended abruptly in 1857 with the outbreak of the Great Indian Mutiny, which I covered in a previous episode. While the Great Mutiny did not directly affect the shrub’s physical structure, it diverted manpower and resources from developing the hedge and from suppressing the smuggling it was designed to stop.
The Hedge changed most after the Mutiny was put down, as the East India Company lost its protectorate over India and the subcontinent became a Royal Colony.
The Hedge was now a British project.
The project was largely unsuccessful until botanist Allen Octavian Hume was appointed Commissioner of Customs in 1867. A gifted administrator and accomplished botanist, Hume is often credited with making the hedge viable.
In dramatic irony, Hume also advocated Indian self-governance, and his activism led him to co-found the Indian National Congress. The same Indian National Congress later helped lead India to Independence in 1947.
The hedge made significant strides in Hume’s first five years, expanding from the foothills of the Himalayas nearly to the Bay of Bengal. The changes came just in time, as the British expanded their control over India, and salt was a major revenue source driving the British administration.
Despite Hume’s success in guiding the growth of the new hedge, it wasn’t without its problems. The hedge offered distinct advantages over the hodgepodge barrier it replaced, but despite the dense thicket of Indian trees and shrubs, smugglers still found ways to target sections of the hedge in rural areas.
For example, where the hedge was sturdy and high, smugglers set up ladders and climbed it. If the hedge was lower in another section, they just threw smaller bags of salt over the top.
Accounts vary, but evidence suggests that as much as 20% of the poorest laborers’ annual salary went to pay for salt. A breakdown of those prices suggests that the taxes consumed most of that.
According to hedge historian Roy Moxham: The barrier was a continual reminder of what Indians saw as unjust – British taxes. Nevertheless, it kept being strengthened.
The greatest challenge to the hedge came from natural forces and not the ingenuity of India’s salt smugglers. Maintaining the wall against nature took a heroic effort.
Customs officials constantly filled in the hedge to keep it intact. It was not the low-maintenance barrier many people thought it would be as it required officials to constantly shore up the hedge.
British records suggest the hedge was as thick as 250 tons of thorny trees per mile, and each year it required adding 100,000 tons of plant matter to maintain proper density.
Poor growth wasn’t the only problem; parts of the hedge developed such a severe rat infestation that the British government unleashed an army of feral cats to control the rodents.
British customs officials were also stimied by parasites, monsoon rains, drought, and locusts.
After several years, officials finally abandoned efforts to maintain the hedge in 1879. Few people on either side mourned its passing.
Over time, smuggling declined, leaving behind an arcane relic. Prompted by the horrific famine of 1876, the British changed the salt tax policy as part of their efforts to alleviate some of the misery.
But in 1882, the British Viceroy, under direction from London, declared the India Salt Act of 1882, giving the British a monopoly over the manufacture and trade of salt.
The need for the hedge ended after the British seized the territory around the Sambhar Salt Lake and built a salt works capable of massive production. Controlling production at one of the world’s largest salt lakes allowed the British to impose tariffs at the point of production, ending the need for smuggling and the large hedge meant to prevent it.
The Hedge gradually disappeared from history. Modern historians found it intriguing how thoroughly it disappeared.
Roy Moxham, perhaps the foremost expert on the hedge, found obscure records of it in British archives and tried to locate remnants. Armed with 19th-century maps of the customs line and the hedge, he found his quest to rediscover the hedge very difficult.
Locating remnants of the hedge was bound to be difficult, given that many of the trees that made up the hedge have a lifespan of only 60 years. After three separate expeditions to India throughout the 1990s, Moxham finally tracked down a surviving trace of the hedge in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, in 1998.
Guided by an elder resident, Moxham found a long hedge nearly 20 feet high in a region that the Great Hedge would have covered. Whether this botanical relic is a long-lost piece of history or replanted seedlings is unknown.
The Great Hedge of India was one of the most extraordinary and largely forgotten constructions of the British Empire. Stretching across thousands of miles, it required enormous resources and thousands of workers, all to enforce a tax on something essential to human survival.
Although the hedge itself disappeared after the abolition of the Inland Customs Line in 1879, the salt tax survived for decades. In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi would make that same tax the focus of his famous Salt March, transforming an everyday necessity into a powerful symbol of resistance against British rule.
The Great Hedge may have vanished from the landscape, but its history remains a remarkable example of the extraordinary lengths governments will go to collect taxes, and the burdens those policies can impose on the people they govern.