Barbed Wire - Reviel Netz

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harder than flesh; pressed against it, iron will first push the flesh inward and then (particularly if the iron’s surface, like that of a barb, is sharp) cut through the skin to impact on the nerves. The nerves send a report to the brain, and there the report undergoes some process—we do not know quite what—that leads to something else—we cannot explain quite what. This is what we call pain, and apparently it is something truly universal, cutting across species, places, and times. A useful tool of globalization, then.

      Joseph Glidden was not so sanguine. A cautious capitalist, worried that his invention might fail through bad marketing, he kept sending anxious letters to his agents. On September 15, 1875, he was admonishing Sanborn (who had shown signs of straying from the plains marketing strategy): “we do not expect the wire to be much in demand where farmers can build brush and pole fences out of the growth on their own land and think the time spent in canvassing such territory very nearly lost even if some sales are made.”62 Sanborn should stick to his domain, the plains of Texas. Glidden’s perspective, writing from De Kalb, Illinois, was defined by the plains, but as soon as production moved to Massachusetts, the perspective widened dramatically. New England had an experience of world commerce; barbed wire now was to join this global trade. Already in 1877, Ferdinand Louis Sarmiento was working in the South American continent as an agent for Washburn and Moen, busily seeking outlets for barbed wire.63 In December of that year, for instance, he managed a public relations coup: Carl Glash, director of the Imperial Botanical Gardens in Rio de Janeiro, issued an endorsement of a barb fence erected there that he found “exceedingly complete and useful.” This fence, probably one of the first to be erected anywhere outside the United States, “was erected to enclose a collection of rare water and wild fowls and animals brought home by H.I. Majesty Dom Pedro II from his late North American and European trips.” It did not take long for barbed wire to reach beyond the botanical gardens. Essentially, barbed wire was used, at first, wherever conditions approached those of western America. The most obvious parallel was Argentina, where the huge plains of the Pampas were held by semiferal and feral animals, as well as by Indians. The Argentinean Indians were totally destroyed by 1879, and throughout the 1880s, fenced cattle—and wheat fields—covered the Pampas.64 Parallel historical circumstances made the Pampas similar to the Great Plains. This similarity could now be exploited by American producers, who moved in to supply the Pampas with the technologies of the Great Plains. Soon barbed wire defined the Pampas just as it did the plains. It was estimated that by 1907, barbed wire in Argentina was already sufficient to surround the perimeter of the republic 140 times.65 Everywhere, Washburn and Moen were aggressively seeking the prairie lands of the world, sending out powers of attorney in 1880 to diverse places such as Tasmania and the other Australian provinces, New Zealand, Cuba, Ceylon, and Russia.66 In their correspondence, they repeatedly stressed how much further growth could be expected as a function of the global area covered by plains throughout the territories to which they had extended their patents. In 1884, when Washburn and Moen were working on a global arrangement with Felten and Guilleaume, from Mulheim, Germany, they claimed that they had already obtained patents “covering [Australia], New Zealand, India, Italy, Sweden, Austria and Denmark, representing a territory in the prairie countries only of those named . . . of 5,470,952 square miles in which no barbed wire can be sold without direct infringement . . . a territory compared with the territory of the United states as two is to one, or ensuring as soon as barbed wire is properly introduced in said countries at least 300,000 tons of sales per annum.” (It would seem that Washburn and Moen had, somewhat disingenuously, measured Siberia as an equivalent of more fertile prairie land, ultimately revealing an almost prophetic vision for the future of barbed wire.)67 In the end, Felten and Guilleaume obtained the following arrangement, which I will spell out so as to give a sense of the massive amounts involved—and how these were to be calculated across the globe. Felten and Guilleaume were to produce in the United States up to 1,000 tons per year, to be sold outside North America. They were also to produce, without limits, anywhere in Europe (or in other countries where they owned rights), paying Washburn and Moen two dollars for every ton sold in Britain and one dollar for every ton sold elsewhere, except for the amounts of 250,000 tons in both Germany and France, which could be produced and sold for domestic consumption free of charge to Washburn and Moen. Try to concentrate on that figure—a quarter million tons, almost as many miles—sold in Germany and France alone! This arrangement was continued in 1889, with the Germany/France clause changed to allow the sale of up to 1,000 tons anywhere in Europe, for domestic consumption, free of charge.68 Yet at this stage Felten and Guilleaume were already Washburn and Moen’s minor global partners. In 1891, Felten and Guilleaume’s royalties paid to Washburn and Moen came to a little less than half those paid from Johnson and Nephew in Britain.69 Johnson and Nephew’s factories at Manchester and Ambergate, with about a thousand workers,70 were among the largest producers of barbed wire at the time—American production, as we will soon see, was rather more dispersed during that period. British producers were, however, rightly concerned: German products were now dominant in Europe, while America had become a net exporter of iron products rather than a market for them. The huge production of Johnson and Nephew was thus based on export to the British Empire, with important consequences for colonial war—as we will see in the next chapter.

      An important area for the introduction of barbed wire was Australia and New Zealand.71 These continental areas were now opened for settlement, calling for some of the most radical ecological transformations Europeans effected anywhere in the world. Barbed wire reached Australia at a stage comparable not to the American cow but to the American bison: where human domination over other animals calls for extermination. Barbed wire’s violence could easily be extended to extermination as well—simply by fencing water sources.72 As for control over domesticated animals, the Australian tendency, at first, was to rely on plain wire. This was a sheep economy, based (as is usually the case with geographically marginal animal economies) not on the export of flesh but on that of other, less perishable animal parts—in this case, wool. Already in the 1860s farmers realized that wire fencing could be cheap and effective against such animals, and sheep and a radical transformation of the Australian ecology resulted with wire alone, barbs being introduced only gradually, later in the century, when the price of barbed wire was no longer higher than that of plain wire (in the twentieth century, of course, it was all barbed wire). Now that sheep could be perfectly controlled without an investment in the unreliable labor of shepherds, their numbers skyrocketed. From 6 million sheep in 1861, New South Wales had 57 million by 1894, now clearly the dominant animal on the land, with wire fencing the dominant land feature.73

      South Africa—as usual—was even a more special case. Unlike other major areas of European colonization, it already had established agricultural practices, all based on animals. Black agriculture used the ox as the major source of muscle power and the cow as the major source of food. The Boers—descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers—had already adapted European agriculture to South Africa. They gradually reverted to a form of low-capital agriculture with strong dependence on pastoralism and hunting. All of this was now coming more and more under the power of the British Empire; Boer resistance to it would lead to important consequences for the history of barbed wire (to be seen in the next chapter). But even before formal British domination, Johnson and Nephew were taking over the land with their barbed wire. The land was ready for the change. In 1886, mines were discovered in the Witwatersrand—legendary treasures of gold. Almost instantly came the railroads, new immigrants, new cities. In the countryside, it was now more profitable to produce wheat for the urban market. The many governments of South Africa supported the new intensive agriculture; in 1890, for instance, the Orange Free State—a Boer government—made fencing a legal obligation. Relations of humans and animals were quickly changing. In 1892 the Friend of the Free State, an Orange journal, painted a vivid picture of the new methods of hunting game: “The modus operandi is to drive all the game against a farmer’s fence and then shoot them down, regardless of course of the cost of the fence.” These hunters were very inconsiderate, the journal suggested, but there was some hope in the future: “When fencing is more general, however . . . [they will have] to give up their favourite pastimes.”74 Soon an animal apartheid took shape: on the one side Boer and

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