Food Cultures
Salt: the mineral that organised trade routes
A substance people cannot live without, unevenly distributed, and essential for preserving food — which made it one of the most politically consequential commodities in history.
Topic
trade
Every Kohopoho article tagged trade — 5 pieces across 2 sections.
Food Cultures
Noodles, dumplings and the long argument about who was first
Filled and stretched dough appears across Eurasia in forms that are clearly related and whose relationships are much harder to trace than the confident stories suggest.
Places
Border towns: places that exist because of a line
A frontier creates its own economy, its own vocabulary and its own kind of settlement, and moving the line rarely removes what grew along it.
Food Cultures
Coffee left Yemen and never went back
A plant from the Ethiopian highlands, cultivated in Yemen, spread through the Islamic world and then everywhere else, taking a set of social institutions with it.
Places
The weekly market and the town it built
A great many towns exist because someone was granted the right to hold a market there, and the physical shape of those places still shows it.