The links between our excrement and our food have been fundamental to
human survival as long as our species has existed. In hunter-gatherer
and nomadic societies, human excrement nourished wild plants. The Book
of Deuteronomy instructed the Israelites, “when you relieve yourself,
dig a hole and cover up your excrement,” a measure that reduced disease
and recycled waste. In settled agricultural societies, the excrement of
humans and other animals helped maintain soil fertility and crop yields.
In early capitalist towns, many townspeople had plots of land or kept
animals, so using excrement continued to be part of everyday life. As
towns grew, so did urban-rural manure trade. Historian Leona J. Skelton
has shown that “dunghills were an immoveable fact of life for
pre-industrial urban dwellers” because excrement was/valuable/:
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many urban
inhabitants across Britain took responsibility for their own manure
and removed it out of town themselves to apply to their own arable
land, sold it directly to a local farmer or arranged for it to be
removed and sold by a middle man. Inhabitants were careful to heap
solid rubbish and manure separately because the latter was a
valuable fertilizer.^2
<https://monthlyreview.org/2018/07/01/cesspools-sewage-and-social-murder/#endnote-2>
As towns grew larger, circular trading arrangements developed: the boats
and barges that carried grain and vegetables to London’s markets
returned laden with manure purchased at Dung Wharf. An urban worker with
a cart, buckets, and some assistants could make a steady income by
emptying cesspools for a fee and selling the “night soil” to nearby
farms or to one of the 60 or more “night yards” located in the heart of
the city. The trade was so important to agriculture that a law passed in
the eighteenth century, and still in force in the 1870s, exempted wagons
of manure from paying tolls on turnpike roads.^3
<https://monthlyreview.org/2018/07/01/cesspools-sewage-and-social-murder/#endnote-3>
Although some urban-rural manure trade continued until the early
twentieth century, it declined sharply after 1815. It became less
attractive to buyers and sellers because large cities produced far more
excrement than nearby farmers could use, leaving the middlemen with
unsaleable surpluses; because the increasing distances between cities
and farms drove up transport times and costs; and because the growing
popularity of flush toilets in the homes of the rich diluted the night
soil and often sluiced it directly into city sewers.
https://monthlyreview.org/2018/07/01/cesspools-sewage-and-social-murder/
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