HISTORY: In the iconography of political terror, barbed wire provides a grimly perfect synecdoche for the implacable viciousness of warfare, genocide and segregation: the most horrifically apt part-for-whole image of the deadly borders that traverse modern history.
Despite its apparently innocent agricultural origin and the curious aesthetic commodification of its infinite variety by collectors and museums (Alan Krell's book takes its title from one such Texan institution), it delineates a lethal combination of real and abstract violence.
In 1933, Walter Benjamin, contemplating the "poverty of experience" after the first World War, located its origin in the mechanisation of that conflict. Soldiers, who had gone to school on horse-drawn streetcars, were stranded, obscenely vulnerable, in a landscape where only the clouds were untouched by technology: "beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body". But the prodigious flowering of military technology took place, as both of these books acknowledge, in a metallic thicket woven from the most primitive of inventions. A 19th-century innovation with a 20th-century destiny, barbed wire could easily have been invented centuries earlier; as industrial triumph and military terror, it responds to the simplest of requirements.
Both Razac and Krell trace its early history in the American West (while a simultaneous French patent provides the prickly metaphor of "artificial bramble"). Following the Homestead Act of 1862, barbed wire sprouted across the plains as livestock and land were enclosed; the ensuing "barbed-wire wars" between settlers and mobile cattle-herders gave rise to much of the mythology of the nomadic cowboy and the open range of the "wild" West. But it was the real nomads who suffered: native Americans who could legitimately cry "don't fence me in" as their lands were reduced to euphemistic and useless "reservations" by the encroaching wire.
The expansive geometry of the first widespread use of barbed wire shrank to a coiled, knotted chaos on the battlefields of the first World War. The blank statistics advanced here are simply atrocious in scale: 1,300 miles of trench were dug during the war; a square mile of trenches would typically contain 900 miles of wire; on a more intimate scale, each metre of wire held 14 barbs. While it encloses and entraps, barbed wire also opens up here a whole new kind of geopolitical territory: "no-man's-land" is a new space, a non-place governed by a new and deadlier kind of power.
We could think of the concentration camp - the ultimate form of this new space - as simply a sort of dungeon: a dark, secret place hiding unspeakable horrors. But it is also a kind of city, a paradigm for a new mode of spatial government, organized, thanks to barbed wire, through segregation and surveillance: a chamber of horrors that no longer needs walls.
At Buchenwald, the wider perimeter contained a smaller camp, inside which a barbed-wire cage known as the "rose garden" allowed a solitary prisoner to be starved to death in plain view.
The camp is a perverse mirror image of sacred space, the "rose garden" a monstrous tabernacle in which the human body undergoes a grotesque transformation. Visibility is the key. In the end, says Razac, power can dispense with the wire altogether: other, subtler technologies, for example, now track the movements of refugees.
Razac, willing to extrapolate from technical detail to wider political significance, is the more reliable guide to the territory opened up and shut off by his subject. Krell's book, covering much of the same ground more expansively but less adroitly, constantly snags itself on the limits of his merely "cultural" methodology (he also habitually misreads his visual evidence at the most basic level, at one point mistaking real for artificial thorns).
Both books, however, offer fascinating insights into a simple invention that has carved up the modern world in the most complex ways.
• Brian Dillon teaches English and American Literature at The University of Kent
Barbed Wire: A History. By Olivier Razac, translated by Jonathan Kneight. Profile, 128pp. £6.99
The Devil's Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire. By Alan Krell. Reaktion Books, 240pp. £16.95
