Читать книгу Barbed Wire - Reviel Netz - Страница 13

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 British cows, fenced in, on the other 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 on a huge coatrack. From both ends of the 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 was global). The light weight of barbed 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.