Barbed Wire. Reviel Netz

side wild animals as well as cows belonging to blacks, fenced out of the best lands. Barbed wire was a tool in the white landgrab, with the blacks removed to marginal, unfenced land. This could still feed all animals in good years, but when the rains failed, disaster would strike. No one can tell the exact impact on wild animals, but the impact on the black economy was obvious. By the century’s end, more and more blacks were forced to become farmhands on white farms, a major step toward white ascendance. A new way of controlling the land, designed to make more efficient use of it, transformed the relations not only between humans and animals but also between different human groups—distinguished by their different access to the new technologies of control over space.⁷⁵

      Everywhere, the world system was building up its stocks of barbed wire. The center was casting its net wider. Even American producers came to rely more and more on export. The dominant American producer from 1899 onward, American Steel and Wire Company, produced 34 percent for export in the first eight years of its activity (1899–1906), but 44 percent in the following eight years (1907–1914). Taking into account foreign production, it is likely that at the end of the nineteenth century, the point had already been reached where more barbed wire was installed outside the United States than within its borders. But still, the absolute importance of the American market should not be lost from sight: with more than 100,000 tons consumed annually, the United States was, throughout, the mainstay of demand for barbed wire.⁷⁶ It remained a leading net exporter well into the twentieth century. As late as 1932, barbed wire imports into the United States did not exceed more than 20,000 tons. About half of these came from Germany.⁷⁷ The very existence of barbed wire export from Germany into America was in fact significant: the Old World would not allow the New World to monopolize barbed wire.⁷⁸

      Even Europe, a growing barbed wire producer, was itself grudgingly becoming a consumer for its own domestic consumption (and not just that of the colonies). In the decades following Glidden’s original cautious estimate, barbed wire returned to reshape old, established agriculture. J. Bucknall Smith, an engineer, sounded a note of alarm in 1891, writing from the perspective of British wire production. “Our American friends may run locomotives and trains through their public highways [but should we?]. . . . Similarly, although barb-wire fencing is admirably adapted to the protection of landed property, and for enclosing live stock, in a large portion of the States or our colonies, &c., nevertheless we should scarcely be pleased to see it applied to our parks or promiscuously along our public roads.” Smith had a deep insight into the historical process around him. The world was diverging—centers of polite society, where violence was now viewed with unprecedented disgust,⁷⁹ and, away from them, areas of economic expansion where unprecedented violence and power provided the profits to sustain polite society itself.

      There is a paradox about the modern reshaping of space. Capitalism is based on spatial division of labor, assigning entire domains to a specific kind of production that cannot survive without interacting with the world economy as a whole. Thus it leads simultaneously to two opposing processes: as parts of the world become mutually dependent, they also diverge from each other. Barbed wire, contributing to the integration of the animal industries of the world with the world’s urban centers, also formed part of the growing divergence between urban and rural. This had two aspects. First, the rural world was being unified; across the globe, different rural economies became part of the same system (as, of course, was happening at the same time to the cities themselves). Second, the rural world was, as a whole, pushed out of sight of the urban world, creating a major cultural divide.

      The globalization of the rural world was keenly felt on the Great Plains themselves: they were now part of a world system, based on the urban centers of the northern Atlantic. This world system was not merely financial but also biological. I have mentioned the growing domination of the cow industry in the West by eastern breeds. This gave rise to concerns. It should be understood that historically, Texas was very different from the truly intensive cow districts of the world. In places such as, say, England, cows lived next to urban centers so that their milk could be transported and consumed by city dwellers. Thus a much more dense population of cows could be profitable. With its growing density—as well as its greater motion, a commodity in a world connected by rail and steamboat—this Old World of cows was also susceptible to new outbreaks of disease. A major epidemic of rinderpest in 1865 shook everyone in the cow economy. Shivering, frothing at the mouth, refusing all food, cows died in the millions—sometimes as many as half the herd.⁸⁰ The epidemic began to be monitored in Britain, quickly traveled on to the Continent, then to New England.⁸¹ Texas, however—its cows herded much less intensively, and, in this period, almost a cow world unto itself—was spared. As Swabe has shown, the 1865 rinderpest epidemic was a major event leading to the new veterinary regime of the 1870s. In Europe, an attempt was made to control the motions of cows on the basis of science, the old practice of the quarantine applied with great force.⁸² This, then, was the background for the alarm of the United States Treasury Cattle Commission, expressed in Chicago on August 23, 1881: “That a very large proportion of our country has, up to this time, remained exempt from [rinderpest] is owing chiefly to the fact that the current of our cattle traffic has heretofore been mainly from the west toward the seaboard; but the business of purchasing calves from the eastern dairy districts and scattering them throughout the western states and territories, which has, within a year or two past, assumed such mammoth proportions, has augmented the danger . . . tenfold.”⁸³ It should be noted that the commission had no regulatory power, and anyway, the commissioners had missed the point. What had saved the Texas cows was the isolation of the plains, but their very economic value now ended that isolation. Soon they would have (on top of the screwworm) all that cow flesh is heir to: rinderpest, anthrax, tuberculosis, foot-and-mouth disease—and many other diseases, filling the journals of veterinary science, for decades to come, with useless medications.

      All of this was being segregated from the urban sight. A crucial development was the invention, in the 1870s, of refrigerated train cars. Refrigeration along a distance, for the first time, made it possible to build a spatial separation between the killing of animals and the life of humans. It should be understood how Sisyphean a task it is to kill an animal. You stop its heart beating, and still, billions of organisms go on thriving inside. You think you have gained full mastery over the animal by slitting her throat, but all you have done is to start a new battle, now for domination over the dead body. So now the dead animal has to be boiled, frozen, inundated with minerals—everything to kill the microorganisms. (More recently, radioactive exposure has been added to the arsenal in this fight.)⁸⁴ Ultimately this is a losing battle, and the longer you take between killing the animal and consuming it, the more likely it is there will be nothing left for human consumption at all. This is very unfortunate for the manufacturers, for, as I have mentioned already, profits are always proportionate to distance. Historically, the animal industry could produce such distance-based profits only by severely limiting itself. Hides and other tissues of the body (such as horn), already semidead, can be used as something more akin to mineral resources. Hence the original killing of the bison. But this leaves out most of the animal’s body. Heavily salting the animal is another solution, but this gives up the most lucrative business of the more upscale, raw flesh. That is the sadness of it, you see: people like the taste of blood. So sausage is not the best source of profit. As an alternative, you can let the cow grow in a faraway place (to profit from cheap land, resources, and labor) and then transport it, still alive, somewhere near a center of consumption, to be killed there. But this implies investment in slaughterhouses on prime real estate (in the American context of the 1870s, this meant property in New York). There is also the wasteful need, already mentioned, to revive animals somewhat after transportation with expensive feeding near urban centers. No: a way had to be found to make the dead flesh of animals a raw commodity and to make it participate in the new network of transportation.

      This network itself provided the solution, and once again, the American West led the way. Chicago became the meeting point for two commodities: cows from the plains, and ice from northern lakes and rivers. Cows would now be killed in Chicago and transported to the East. This invention, evolving simultaneously with barbed wire and reaching perfection in the late 1870s, ensued in a new, macabre railroad car architecture. The passengers were dead carcasses, closely packed together as they dangled from the center of the car like tuxedos