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INTRODUCTION

Define, on the two-dimensional surface of the earth, lines across which motion is to be prevented, and you have one of the key themes of history. With a closed line (i.e., a curve enclosing a figure), and the prevention of motion from outside the line to its inside, you derive the idea of property. With the same line, and the prevention of motion from inside to outside, you derive the idea of prison. With an open line (i.e., a curve that does not enclose a figure), and the prevention of motion in either direction, you derive the idea of border. Properties, prisons, borders: it is through the prevention of motion that space enters history.

Abstract topological structures—closed, open lines—need to be implemented. Their physical (and social) implementation may vary. We may have absolute material barriers, whose function is to make motion impossible: such are walls, in aspiration. Or there may be more subtle obstacles, whose function is to make motion inconvenient and therefore undesirable: these, in general, are fences. Finally, there might be purely symbolic definitions of limits—a yellow line painted on the pavement—respected solely by virtue of the habits of social practice. Yet as with all other forms of coercion, even the symbolic definition of space relies ultimately on the potential presence of force (where there is a yellow line, there are usually also police nearby).

The ubiquitous presence of potential force is indeed a universal of history. Force, brute or refined, is what societies and histories are built of. Note, however, that with the prevention of motion, force—in the most literal sense, of applying physical pressure to bodies—assumes a special kind of necessity. Quite simply, being in a place is something you do with your body—nothing else—and therefore, to prevent your motion from one place to another, your body must be affected. The history of the prevention of motion is therefore a history of force upon bodies: a history of violence and pain.

Facilitation of motion is another important theme of history. In this book, I will often have occasion to mention not only dividing lines but also connecting lines: sea-lanes, trails, railroads. It should be seen, however, that the prevention of motion is in a sense more fundamental than the facilitation of motion. A train is worthless unless you can prevent some people—those who did not buy your tickets—from boarding it. Like all property, the train becomes valuable only when access to it can be controlled, and so the system of the railroad—lines that connect points—is anchored by the system of stations, buildings whose walled lines enclose space and control motion. A world where the railroad exists without the station is unthinkable, because without control over motion, value cannot be formed. Value arises from lines of division—even when they happen to enclose lines of connection. To understand history and its motions, then, we must first understand the history of the prevention of motion.

This book follows one of the major threads of this history. I show the conditions for the invention and spread of a simple but highly significant technology: barbed wire. Starting with a description of its origins in the colonization of the American West, I move on to describe its eventual role in modern warfare, and then in the modern forms of human repression, offering finally some remarks concerning the general lessons that may be derived from the growth of barbed wire. Throughout the book, I glance beyond barbed wire to the space it has enclosed. Around the strand of history made of barbed wire, I weave a chapter of modernity. Barbed wire allows us to see a more fundamental ecological equation, whose main protagonists are flesh and iron. Here is how modernity unfolded: as iron (and, most important, steel) became increasingly inexpensive and widespread, it was used to control motion and space, on a massive scale, exploiting its capacity for mass production and its power of violence over flesh. This massive control over space was the defining characteristic of a certain period of history: the eighty years from 1874 to 1954—from the invention of barbed wire to the downgrading of the Gulag. Throughout this period, barbed wire constructions were at the forefront of the major events of world history. This was not an accident; barbed wire was what this period required. This book tries to explain why. Thus the book is about what may be considered the age of barbed wire: the period of the coming of modernity.

This history took place precisely at the level of flesh, cutting across geographic as well as biological boundaries. It was not humanity alone that experienced barbed wire. The tool was created to control animals by inflicting pain on them. The enormous sweep of barbed wire through history—ranging from agriculture to warfare and human repression, encompassing the globe—is due to the simple and unchanging equation of flesh and iron. The first must yield to the second, followed by the inevitability of pain. The history of violence and pain crosses species, and so, as a consequence, did the history of modernity.

It is only by considering reality at this level, going beyond humans alone, that history can make sense. Indeed, although much has been written about some technical aspects of the invention of barbed wire, the particular thread followed in this book seems hardly to have been noticed at all. Some authors have written about barbed wire in agriculture, many more about concentration camps, but few have even mentioned both in the same breath.¹ This is precisely what needs to be done if we wish to understand either concentration camps or agriculture. Both belong to the same world and follow the same history. This book is largely about the environment—literally—that gave rise to concentration camps: as it were, an environmental history of Auschwitz. It thus has to start where environmental history does, in the encounters between humans and other animals. For animals are always part of the social picture; their flesh, suffering and consumed, motivates human history itself. When we set out to offer a history that mentions animals, we should understand that the history of animals is not merely an appendix, a note we should add because it is missing in our present traditional, human-focused history. Rather, the history of animals is part and parcel of history—that reality where all is inextricably tied together, humans, animals, and their shared material world.