Thank you to everyone who helped track the background of the Justus von Liebig quote,
"England is robbing all other countries of the conditions of their fertility. Already, in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battlefields of Leipzig and Waterloo, and of the Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away the skeletons of many successive generations. Annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the manorial equivalent of three millions and a half of men, whom she takes from us the means of supporting, and squanders down her sewers to the sea. Like a vampire she hangs upon the neck of Europe, nay, of the entire world, and sucks the heartblood from nations without a thought of justice towards them, without a shadow of lasting advantage for herself."
Liebig published this in Agricultural Chemistry in 1862.
Brock had a somewhat different wording in his biography Justus von Liebig.
Erland Marald's article, Everything Circulates: Agricultural Chemistry and Recycling Theories
in the Second Half of the Ninteenth Century, Environment and History, vol 8 (2002) pages 65-84
sets the scene very well.
David Simpson, in his book 9/11 says that he found no further reference to this article (copied below) in the Observer for the rest of that year (admittedly, a few weeks).
This claim is also referred to by Alan Bennett in his play The History Boys
From The Observer (London) November 18, 1822
WAR AND COMMERCE.—It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighborhood of Leipzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders, who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery, for the purpose of reducing them to a granulary state. In this condition they are sent chiefly to Doncaster, one of the largest agricultural markets in that part of the country, and are there sold to the farmers to manure their lands. The oily substance gradually evolving as the base calcines, makes a more substantial manure than any other substance, particularly human bones. It is now ascertained beyond a doubt, by actual experiment on an extensive scale, that a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce; and, for ought known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread. It is certainly a singular fact, that Great Britain should have sent out such multitudes of soldiers to fight the battles of this country upon the continent of Europe, and
should then import their bones as an article of commerce to fatten her soil!
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