Barbed Wire. Reviel Netz

wire makes it into a cheap way of controlling space on the ground; it also makes it possible to produce this control over space from a few centers, so that Chicago and Pittsburgh, in this indirect way, come to control the space of America.

      At this stage, two further comparisons should be made to complete this North American map. Upward, the financial and industrial control of Washburn and Moen, and then the American Steel and Wire Company, should be brought into the picture as well. Now we see the control of midwestern production by eastern capital, typical to this historical period.⁹⁶ Downward, and most important, one should add the animals themselves, all around the continent, ever more effectively surrounded and controlled by barbed wire. Now extend the picture globally, to appreciate the system just sketched, including arrangements such as those obtained with Felten and Guilleaume and with Johnson and Nephew. The resulting picture is that of the life of animals, throughout the globe, brought under human control through violence and pain, gain being extracted from this new form of control; and then control leads to control, until we reach the centers of control by capital, where violence and pain are no longer suffered or meted out, in places such as Mulheim, Germany; Manchester, England; and, above all, the American Northeast. It is unfortunate that Marx did not comment on this process, which is perhaps a mere accident. Invented in 1874, barbed wire’s economic role would become obvious only in Marx’s last years. Barbed wire was destined to play a prominent role not so much in the theory of Marxism as in its practice (more on this in chapter 3).

      MAP 1 Centers for delivery of barbed wire, United States, 1888.

      Data from Roberts Wire Company, of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, in the American Steel and Wire Company Archives (Baker MSS: 596 DcB 1119).

      MAP 2 Centers for production of barbed wire, United States, 1881.

      Data from files relating to Washburn and Moen in the American Steel and Wire Company Archives (Baker MSS 596: DcC 827).

      Capitalist concentration itself, rather than the produce of the Great Plains, would be the true economic significance of barbed wire. The promise of the Great Plains gave a push to an industry of a certain tool of violence, and this industry gave a push to the concentration of capital. But the promise of the Great Plains remained deceptive. Of course, American capital did eventually develop intensive agriculture even in that arid land. Windmills brought water from beneath the surface; tractors tilled it over. In World War I and its aftermath, the production of Kansas, Oklahoma, and neighboring areas would be crucial in helping America to feed the world. But all the while, native vegetation was being destroyed, the soil overturned. Quite simply, the soil was not ready for intensive agriculture. Years of good rainfall helped the land from turning into dry dust, but when drought hit in the 1930s, the plains had already been denuded. Heavy winds always raged across the plains. Now they lifted up the soil, creating biblical clouds of black dust. Throughout the dry 1930s, these dust storms never completely ceased in the so-called Dust Bowl (an area encompassing parts of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma). A storm could have a thick front of dust reaching up for a mile or more, weighing hundreds of tons per square mile, running across hundreds of miles on the open plains. Visibility disappeared, breathing was difficult—many people died of lung-related complaints—and everything, plants as well as animals, could be buried in the ensuing debris. The same would happen to people who had the bad luck to stray outdoors when a storm hit: “On March 15, 1935, a black blizzard struck Hays, Kansas, catching a seven-year-old boy away from home. The next morning a search party found him covered with dust and smothered. A hundred miles to the west, the same storm stranded a nine-year-old boy; a search party found him the next morning alive but tangled in barbed wire.”⁹⁷ (We should recall Dorothy, another native of Kansas, having her own narrow escape.) In the traumatized ecology, rabbits suddenly proliferated, eating away the little produce that remained. Here, in the mid-southern part of the Great Plains, American colonization ensued in a terrible ecological blunder that in a sense never healed. Intensive efforts at soil conservation, as well as better luck with the rain, helped the Dust Bowl out in the 1940s, yet the area never did regain its place in the American economy.⁹⁸ Kansas, we can say, was a harbinger not of future development but of future underdevelopment. Throughout the Third World, through the twentieth century, modernism would bring the illusion of rapid development. The temptation would be to go down the path of an environmentally irresponsible monoculture, designed for the consumption of distant, rich lands. Early successes would typically lead to ecological and economic disasters. Unlike other Third World farmers, however, Kansans could vote for the U.S. Congress, and so they got their subsidies and somehow managed to extricate themselves from the legacy of the Dust Bowl.

      So it is not in agriculture that the Great Plains formed a modern success story. Their significance lies in concentration, in control over space itself. This significance, however, is considerable, and it ushered in a special kind of modernity. For several decades, the plains were the prize of colonialism and an engine for historical change. At this cutting edge of history, barbed wire was created. By the end of the nineteenth century, the cutting edge of history was pulling away from the Great Plains, and barbed wire would soon make history elsewhere.

      2 CONFRONTATION

       Barbed Wire on the Battlefield

      It was remembered as a period of peace and civilization. War was somewhere else; one could combine the thrills of warring with those of sightseeing. Let us follow, for instance, Winston Churchill, a youthful journalist-soldier. We join him in 1895 as he sails to Cuba (merely twenty-one years old, he works for the Daily Graphic, writing back on an insurrection against the Spanish). We catch him again in 1896, on India’s mountainous Afghan border (he is a young officer, himself fighting now on the side of the colonial power). In 1898 he sails up the Nile and deep into Sudan; he is with the British army that crushes—at last—the revolt of the Mahdi. Sudan is pacified, but there is yet another revolt, yet more travels. In 1899 he is in South Africa, where the Boers try to keep their independence from the British. And here we may stop following him: Churchill’s reports from South Africa, as well as his exploits there, would launch his political career, and the warlike experience of three continents would prove useful when war would—not much later—come back to Europe itself.¹

      In this global history, we need, as it were, to synchronize our historical watches. So I will start with 1873—the year Henry Rose was experimenting with wire attached to a cow’s collar. In the same year, you could go to the Gold Coast in Africa to participate in Britain’s Ashanti war, or you could take the silk road with the Russian armies on their way to subjugate the great Uzbek oasis Khiva (central Asia was being colonized, as part of the so-called Great Game pitting Britain and Russia against each other). Now move on to 1884. The German firm of Felten and Guillaume obtained its worldwide barbed wire distribution contract; to travel the world in that year, you should have joined the French. You could go with them either to the western Indian Ocean, where they took over the huge island of Madagascar, or to the Far East, for the Tonkin War (the French fought to carve out a sphere of French supremacy in China, to border on their colony, Vietnam). Finally, 1899—the year U.S. Steel and Wire was formed. In that year, besides going with Churchill to South Africa, you could also go with the Americans themselves—victorious over Spain—to either Cuba or the Philippines (the United States was trying its own hand in transoceanic colonialism). The year 1899 already marks a turning point: as we will see, the Boer War was about to channel barbed wire into human history itself.²

      Is such a synchronization meaningful? That is, was there, in fact, a connection between the peaceful economic growth of the center (with inventions such as barbed wire coming out of it) and the wars overseas? Clearly there was, but not in the