Given the vital nature of poop to our lives, it is rather unsurprising that poop has had a massive influence on world history. That said, its influence is not something that has often been examined directly, and so the accounts of poop and its geopolitical importance have often flown beneath the surface. While this is only a short essay and by no means a large examination, it is meant to at least hint at the far larger stakes involved with the role of poop in shaping the destiny of nations and cultures up to the present day. As I write this essay, the view of cities like San Francisco has been greatly shaped by the unsanitary nature of the cities due to the inability of contemporary leftists to come to grips with the messiness and chaos of humanity. The cruel irony that one of the home cities of movements that seek to control the behavior and lives of hundreds of millions of humanity are unable to clean poop off of city streets and are unwilling to lift a hand to do anything about problems of homelessness that are often the direct result of government policies enacted by those same corrupt leaders (including hostility to the building that creates affordable housing, austerity that reduces the in-patient care received by those with mental illness, and the support of self-medication through the use of dangerous drugs) is a particularly painful one for those who want to see beautiful and clean cities with people in them who live orderly and decent, upstanding lives like bourgeois should live. Even in an age like our own that prides itself on being civilized and advanced, literal poop still has the power to shape our experience and our world.

It is likely due to the development of agriculture that poop came to have a major influence on world history. The impact of poop for beings who live in a nomadic or even semi-nomadic way is likely to be highly limited. That said, when people began to live in permanent dwellings surrounded by animals that they had domesticated and around their own food storage, while living at the same time in the midst of their own waste and the waste of their animals (sometimes, as we have previously noted, being used as fertilizer to increase crop yields), poop began to take on a decisive role in world history. At first, and for a long time, this role was extremely negative. The increasingly dense existence of settled farming populations in areas like Europe, the Middle East, and China (and perhaps the Indus River civilization as well) led to widespread plague and pestilence that opened such areas to attack from populations of herders and hunting and gathering populations who lacked such dense and deadly settlement. Over the course of thousands of years of living closely with others, various approaches were developed in order to manage the risks that such an existence could have on the well-being of civilizations. Despite this, just about any concentrated group of people suffered terribly from the spread of disease that it had little or no immunity to, extending all the way to the spread of cholera morbis from its base in India all around the world in the 19th century.

It is in the 19th century where we find the importance of poop in world history to take several unexpected turns. On the one hand, the discovery of guano as a source of immense fertilizing power had a dramatic effect on the history of the age. The United States, for example, passed laws giving it the right to annex any unclaimed guano islands so as to secure sources of this guano for a nation recently independent and seeking to expand its safety and security in a highly competitive world. Contrary to popular belief, America’s imperialism was stoked not by a search for dependent populations or markets for goods, but rather for the source of necessary fertilizer for America’s agricultural base. Other nations, like Chile, took their desire to control the sources of guano to even greater heights, to the point where the War of the Pacific in the 1870’s pitted Chile against a combination of Peru and Bolivia (for the second time in the 19th century) with the result that Chile’s victory led it to take over a rich area where nitrate wealth could be secured, thus ending Bolivia’s status as a coastal nation. Those nations who were able to secure sources of guano found themselves able both to secure nitrates for their own farms and factories–where nitrates soon became useful for weapons as well as fertilizer–while other nations fell behind because of their inability to secure means to ensure their farming and industry could keep pace.

There is another second-order effect of poop on world history that is also worth discussing at least briefly. We mentioned earlier that among the notable effects of poop on history was in the spread of cholera as a disease that afflicted people who used sewage-heavy bodies of water (like rivers) as sources of drinking water. In the mid-1800s there was a major cholera outbreak in London that was traced to a particular well where drinking water was taken from an area where cholera was in the sewage, thus spreading the disease to those who drank from that well. This particular story, the identification of the tainted well and stopping the spread of cholera thereby, has served as a foundational myth on the effectiveness of public health efforts to stop the spread of disease. It is remarkable that in the last 150 years or so of public health efforts that its main successes are mostly in the past and that more recent efforts of public health have been less successful and far more coercive in the nature. We would submit to you that the dramatic and horrific overreach of tyrannical government mandates in the Covid-19 era, including vaccine mandates, efforts to quarantine the healthy rather than the sick, and widespread double standards whereby elites in government refused to follow the rules they sought to enforce on ordinary people have dramatically affected public trust in governments as well as trust in public health efforts as a whole. This story of public health efforts over the past 150 years or so indicates that just as paying attention to poop and its effects gave public health efforts a substantial amount of prestige for some time, more contemporary screwups have degraded that longtime trust that public health institutions are truly looking out for the well-being of people rather than using outbreaks as a convenient crisis in order to implement social control and remove key freedoms from people. Poop has always has consequences, and it is no less true today than it has been throughout history.

When we examine the effects that poop has had on human history, even briefly, we see that poop is itself deeply embedded in other matters. Poop in public can be a sign of societal breakdown and the inability of people to properly restrain themselves. The health risks of human and animal poop in dense populations of humans and animals that has been typical of settled life for thousands of years in agricultural, industrial, and contemporary cities has created an environment where diseases frequently plague people and make life shorter and a great deal less pleasant. In addition, those who survive such conditions find themselves serving as carriers for those same diseases to other areas that have no resistance and find such diseases even more disastrous as a result. The profitability of poop can be a spur to imperialism and military operations to ensure control over the supplies of poop for either domestic use or international trade. Finally, efforts at dealing with poop as a matter of public health frequently involve political dilemmas and create situations where corrupt officials can seek to use crises to curtail or eliminate vital political and economic freedoms to the general population while avoiding enforcement of those same stringent standards on themselves and their fellow elites, thus threatening the legitimacy of public health institutions as a whole. So long as poop is itself involved in a great many other matters of life, we can expect poop to continue to shape human history for the foreseeable future, at least so long as we have to deal with poop.