Barbed wire cuts across more than just property, war and politics. This most vicious tool of control has played a critical role in the modern experience, be it territorial expansion and settlement or local and international conflict. However, it has other histories; those constructed through image and text in the arts, media and popular culture. These representations - in painting, photography, poetry, personal memoirs, cartoons, novels, advertisements and film - have never before been critically examined. In this book, Alan Krell investigates the place barbed wire holds in the social imagination. Invented in France in 1860, it was developed independently in America where it was used to control livestock on the Great Plains; both to "keep out" and "keep in". Promoted as the "Ideal Fence", barbed wire's menacing qualities were soon manifest. The epithet, "The Devil's Rope", anticipated its transformation into a tool of war in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henceforth, it would become synonymous with repression, the loss of liberty and murder.
Barbed wire's conflicting character makes it an appropriate symbol of modernity, captured memorably in Amnesty International's logo of barbed wire encircling a candle. It has powerful associations with Christ's crown of thorns, and Krell examines the use of such symbolism in contemporary art. He also refers to literature and popular culture - "The Avengers, for example - to explain how it has become part of our everyday life and imagination. Finally, Krell shows how barbed wire has acquired meanings outside the purely historical and political realm and is now increasingly regarded as a commodity, acquiring a status as a collectable.