Barbed Wire. Reviel Netz

the peace of the center and the war of the periphery. Both resulted from the enormous control over space enjoyed by the people of the center.

      Europeans and North Americans had acquired tools of globalization: trains, steamships, and the telegraph. Hence both the internal peace and the external war. The Europeans had peace because of their interdependence; they knew that their prosperity relied on commerce crossing borders, and under such conditions, European war was seen to be so dangerous as to be impossible. Capital was invested everywhere so that the obstruction of capital flow across borders—an immediate consequence of war—would have to lead to universal financial collapse. This financial balance of terror was the main reason why everyone assumed peace in Europe would hold indefinitely, and why indeed it had held for so long.³ At the same time, the same tools of spatial interconnectedness that made war inside Europe so undesirable made war overseas both desirable and possible. Troops could be assembled and sent everywhere with great ease, hence expansion’s possibility. And once you got your hands on distant resources and labor, you could in theory (not always in practice) produce huge profits, all based on the extension of the investor’s colonialism to new territories. Hence expansion’s desirability. The same territories over which Felten and Guillaume reached their agreement were the scenes of fighting itself. This fighting was designed—just as in the Louisiana territory—to clear the way for the exploitation of space.

      Still, from the perspective of the history of barbed wire, colonial war was almost too simple. The asymmetry between Europeans and non-Europeans—fundamentally, the asymmetry between iron and flesh—was such that no subtle uses of violence were called for. As famously summed up by Hillaire Belloc, “Whatever happens we have got / The Maxim gun and they have not.” No need for barbed wire, then. As soon, however, as both sides had similar access to iron, the simplicity evaporated. The truly bloody conflicts—as far as Europeans were concerned—involved not the fighting of “us” against “them” but the fighting of “us” against “us.” At the turn of the century, colonial powers overreached and met each other, especially in the meeting of old colonialists and new ones. In 1898, Spain, the founder of American colonialism, met its heir—America itself—in Cuba; from 1899 to 1902, Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers, clashed against British interests; in 1904 and 1905, finally, Russia—an ancient empire—met the rising empire of Japan. These three wars made colonial war, finally, into a serious challenge, calling forth new solutions. We will see the significance of the Spanish-American War in the next chapter. In this chapter, we will see how, in the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War, barbed wire was brought into warfare, leading the way to World War I itself.

      Why was barbed wire important for military applications? For an obvious reason: in war no less than in peace, barbed wire could enhance human control over space. My argument in this chapter is twofold. One part of it is that the ecological background we saw in the previous chapter explained, as cause and effect, the military developments we will see in this chapter. Because barbed wire became widely available as a tool for controlling agricultural space, it also came to be used by armies. The second part of the argument is more subtle: that the ecological and military changes are related not only as cause and effect but also as two aspects of a single phenomenon. Land was being brought under more control, and this would be seen simultaneously in agriculture and in war—both can be considered, at a certain level of abstraction, as expressions of the same relations: space being brought under control; flesh being brought under the violence of iron. I have argued this already for Louisiana: agriculture and war are two species belonging to the same genus. In this chapter, we will see more examples of this family relationship.