BONES OF CONTENTION
The Industrial Exploitation of Human Bones in the Modern Age
Published by the Belgian State Archives (Studia 176), 'Bones of Contention: The Industrial Exploitation of Human Bones in the Modern Age' has finally been published. A groundbreaking and influential anthology of which I am very proud. What you will have read about our research into the 'Missing Bodies of Waterloo' is just the tip of the iceberg. Grim details below:
From the early 19th century, bones became a sought-after raw material. Scientists had just discovered its usefulness in agriculture, while the burgeoning sugar industry used it to produce the bone charcoal needed to bleach its coveted product. The high demand that resulted from these technological advances had one major unexpected consequence: the plundering of cemeteries and battlefields. Now, two centuries later, this book brings together for the first time the grim details of the trade in and exploitation of human bones in several countries: Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Algeria and the United States. It shows that not only were the bones of those killed at Waterloo and on other late 18th and 19th century battlefields across Europe exploited, but that this little-known phenomenon also affected the human remains of wars both ancient and modern, including the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. The fact that human bones, not only from battlefields but also from archaeological sites, cemeteries and other sources, were a highly traded industrial commodity was well known, and it was not until less than a century ago that it faded from public memory.
I am ordering this book. Nearly 25 years ago, my mentor John Bellamy Foster observed that Marx grounded his ecological view based on soil scientist Justus von Liebig's "soil exhaustion" thesis which he attributed to capitalist agriculture's robbery of nutrients from the soil.
Marx expanded on Liebig's argument documenting the grave robbing from European battlefields and the international trade in bone meal as well as guano obtained through colonialism and slave labor in Peru. I hope the authors drew on materialist science while writing this book and recognized both Justus von Liebig's'and Karl Marx's contributions to this account.