Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

by Tim Harford

So barbed wire spread because it solved one of the biggest problems the settlers faced. But it also sparked ferocious disagreements. And it’s not hard to see why. The homesteading farmers were trying to stake out their property—property that had once been the territory of various Native American tribes. And twenty-five years after the Homestead Act came the Dawes Act, which forcibly assigned land to Native American families and gave the rest to white farmers. The philosopher Olivier Razac comments that as well as freeing up land for settler cultivation, the Dawes Act “helped destroy the foundations of Indian society.” No wonder those tribes called barbed wire “the devil’s rope.”