Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured empires across Europe and Asia, they have also inspired revolution - Gandhi's salt march in 1930 began the overthrow of British rule in India.

'An entertainingly anecdotal and lovingly partisan history.' Independent. Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlanksy so brilliantly relates in his world-encompassing new book, salt has shaped civilization from the beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. So valuable that it has often served as currency (and still does in places today), salt inspired the earliest trade routes across unknown oceans and the remotest deserts...