Читать книгу Barbed Wire - Reviel Netz - Страница 14

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 crude sense that European prosperity relied on the revenues of colonial expansion. Of course, it did so to a certain extent, but this can be easily exaggerated. The main source of European prosperity was in Europe itself. However, at the deeper level of space and mobility, there are important relations of the period that help to explain both 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.