Barbed Wire. Reviel Netz

car, they were guarded by boxes of ice and brine; a ventilation apparatus blew frozen air into the compartment. These new cars created a buffer zone between a polite urban world, where animals were seen more and more as nothing more than meat, and a violent rural world, where the killing of animals became more and more profitable.⁸⁵ Now that the American killing of cows was nearly all concentrated in Chicago, killing and processing could benefit from the concentration of capital. Huge factories were built, based on what came to be known as the “disassembly line.” Living animals were transformed into so many products, for although iron replaced so many organic resources, such resources were never discarded. The animal that was not eaten had to be used. Some of it went into products used by humans—buttons, for instance, made of bone. These would ultimately be replaced by synthetic products such as plastic; more significant in the long run was, so to speak, the recycling of the animal, that is, using its carcass for such purposes as fertilizer and animal feed.⁸⁶

      At the two ends of the carcass trains, worlds were disengaging. Agriculture was intensifying, and the lives of plants and animals were now spent in worlds created by the agronomists’ manuals, far from the imagination of the city. This, in turn, drew away from the animal. Muscle power was reduced in value, especially as the millennia-long tying of the horse to the wagon was giving way, by century’s end, to the forces of steam and electricity. The streets saw fewer horses. They also saw fewer animals brought to be killed (once a typical urban sight). The town butcher became a dealer of packed meat, and killing was relegated to faraway meatpacking factories.

      Which is all to say that control over space was ever more perfected. Raise in Texas; kill in Chicago; eat in New York. Or raise on the Pampas; kill in Montevideo; eat in London. The northern Atlantic had now truly dominated the spaces of the plains. Let us not forget the true order of causes. To begin with, the inhabitants of the northern Atlantic shared a dietary heritage that prized the flesh of bovines.⁸⁷ (In the next chapter, I will explain why this was the case.) In the early nineteenth century, Americans liked to eat beef à la mode, which was ground cow flesh, incised and stuffed with bread crumbs, spices, and butter (of course also a product of the milk of cows). Most common was the fried steak, often served—in affluent northern cities—for every meal, breakfast included.⁸⁸ This breakfast steak was the ultimate cause of all we have seen so far. In America, it was not the West that shaped the eastern diet; it was the eastern diet that shaped the West. The same elsewhere: that so much of the globe was now given over to growing cows was an expression of how much the world was governed from Boston, New York, London, and Berlin. No rice eaters, there.

      No sentimentalists, either. Americans embraced the violence of barbed wire, just as they embraced the violence of competition to which it gave rise. In the dynamic years of the American steel and iron industry, barbed wire was crucial—the spur that pushed the industry in its most significant development. We have seen how half the rights in Glidden’s patent were bought already in 1876 by the Massachusetts iron producers Washburn and Moen. But with the technology being so simple and lucrative, it was easily pirated. In the ten years after its invention, at least 114 companies were formed for the purpose of barbed wire production. All they needed to do was to buy a wire-stranding machine, invest in plain wire from some of the big companies in the East, and hope for good marketing in the West. Unable to drive the competitors out of the market, Washburn and Moen finally succeeded, in 1880, in making them all into licensed producers for Massachusetts itself. There were still many producers, but they had agreed to set production quotas and pay royalties to the holders of the patent. During the following decade, however, competition between the many producers did drive the price of barbed wire down—and so drive many producers out of business altogether. Price of plain wire was falling much more slowly, and margins in the industry reached critical levels. The patent expired in 1891. To stay profitable now, the few remaining barbed wire producers had an enormous incentive to reach arrangements with plain wire producers. We have met John W. Gates already, in 1876 on the plaza in San Antonio, a barbed wire salesman goading bulls into being gouged by barbed wire. He went up in the world. Now he was gouging the industry, in 1892 creating the Consolidated Steel and Wire Company, a 4 million holding company with two wire mills and three barbed wire manufacturing concerns. The years after 1893 were a period of depression. Now it was the wire mills themselves that felt the squeeze. For the wire industry to survive, it had to consolidate so as to cut its costs. Gates easily convinced more and more wire mills to consolidate with him. In 1897, finally, he approached J. P. Morgan in person. Morgan, one of the wealthiest American capitalists, was asked to underwrite a huge conglomerate encompassing most of the American wire business. Morgan nearly agreed the following year, when a war with Spain broke out over the island of Cuba (I will return to this war later). Not the time to invest in wire, Morgan considered. Gambling, Gates went ahead on his own and formed the American Steel and Wire Company of Illinois. Quick success in the Cuban War created a buzz of optimism, investment flowed into the new company, and now Gates could buy more and more steel and wire companies, incorporating, in 1899, the U.S. Steel and Wire Company.⁸⁹ The new corporation had a capitalization of 90 million, and the world had never seen its like. The company dominated the entire steel and wire industry of the United States and hence the world. Gates was now as powerful as Morgan, a leader of American industry—a giant career built on the wounded bulls of San Antonio.⁹⁰

      Everywhere industries were centralizing. When trusts along the American lines could not be formed, companies reached together to form syndicates that oversaw production and prices. Consider Provoloka (Russian for “wire”), formed in Russia in 1908, controlling the entirety of Russian wire production from Poland to the Urals.⁹¹ Also consider the much more important Deutsche Draht-Verband GmbH, formed in Düsseldorf “as the result of a contract entered into June 6, 1914 [whose] object was to improve the manufacture of wire and to further its sales at home and abroad.”⁹² (German foreign policy would soon take care of that.) But nothing compared to U.S. Steel and Wire. The Federal Trade Commission was justifiably enthusiastic: “In 1913 this company had 268 foreign agencies, in about 60 countries. It also had 40 foreign warehouses, situated in Antwerp, Johannesburg, Sydney, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Singapore, Valparaiso, Rio de Janeiro, and other places. It ordinarily had under charter 35 to 40 steamers for the transportation of its goods, which are sold as far north as Iceland and as far south as the Straits of Magellan and the South Sea Islands.”⁹³

      Such concentrations were a typical feature of this age of capitalism, but so was barbed wire itself. The urge of the period was to concentrate, quite literally, to bring space under control. The initial urge can be located on the prairies themselves, as entrepreneurs sought to bring land and cattle under control. This nineteenth-century capitalism was already based on the need for mass markets and mass products and therefore needed to have control on a vast scale. Hence the new kind of colonialism over an area, and the fencing of the plains. As the century ended, the fencers were fenced, and a few trusts reached everywhere—indeed, from Iceland to the South Seas. The entire structure of control over space—now global in nature—was firmly in position, and the ultimate locus of control was clearly seen to be at the center of capital, the Atlantic seaboard.

      Maps 1 and 2 may be instructive in this respect. Map 1 indicates, in a rough way, the North American areas where barbed wire was chiefly distributed.⁹⁴ Map 2 indicates, with greater accuracy, the North American areas where barbed wire was chiefly produced.⁹⁵ We see, in this comparison, the phenomenon of spatial concentration. Because barbed wire is characterized by its relatively light weight, it makes economic sense to concentrate its production where the means of production are already available and then to distribute the product elsewhere. The main sites of production were the steel areas of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois; distribution was much wider and effectively covered the whole of the United States (and as the disproportionate role of seaports indicates, distribution