"Wood, Wire & Empire" (1 Viewer)

[PolarBear]

The Bombay Sappers & Miners Telegraph Section pose for a photograph while setting up lines of communication on the North-West Frontier.

Figures by Wm. Hocker from NWF set 124

 

[PolarBear]

This completes my series of dioramas depicting the Telegraph Section of the Bombay Sappers and Miners of the Anglo-Indian Army during the late 19th Century wars on the North-West Frontier. My title "Wood, Wire & Empire" was influenced by a very interesting book entitled: Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity by Rievel Netz. The book examines the creation and evolution of barbed wire in the 19th Century in the context of colonialism, capitalism, warfare and globalization. In the book Netz views barbed wire as one of three components of Empire in the 19th Century that utilized wood and extruded metal: the telegraph wire, the railroad, and barbed wire. The telegraph and railroad helped the 19th C imperial powers such as Great Britain span long distances across the globe connecting the periphery (e.g. Bombay) with the center (e.g. London) of Empire. These may be viewed as early instances of globalization. Barbed wire invented on the Great Plains of the United States during the 1870s to fence in cattle and large tracts of land had the purpose of closing in or confining space rather than expanding it as the telegraph and railroad did. The two opposite purposes worked together, however, to provide the means of controlling space in the era of what has been described as the "High Renaissance" of Imperialism (1870s-1905). This era included the Plains Indian Wars, the Anglo-Zulu War, the Anglo-Sudan Wars, the Afghan Wars on the North-West Frontier, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Spanish-American War, and the Boxer Rebellion. During the American Civil War the first known recorded use of wire in warfare occurred in 1864 when smooth wire was salvaged from a nearby telegraph line and entwined between posts and tree stumps at the foot of Stockade Redan at Vicksburg. The first use of barbed wire in warfare was during the Boer War in South Africa. The trench warfare of World War I was the high point of the military use of barbed wire. That conflict also utilized the railroad to transport troops and the telegraph and early telephone to maintain lines of communication. As someone whose career as an information specialist depended upon the global reach of the Internet, the exploration of the 19th Century telegraph as represented by the Bombay Sappers & Miners has been an enjoyable way to play with my soldiers.

1. Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity

2. 1860s American Civil War Telegraph poles and wire

3. 1895 Railway Workers, India/NWF

4. 1900 British soldiers setting up barbed wire in South Africa during the Boer War.