Industrial slaughter in the machine age Flash Cards

Flashcards for key vocabulary and concepts from the Violent Geographies lecture.

War as a machine

Warfare as programmable and controllable as industrial machinery.

Railways, telephony/telegraphy, and timetables

Enabled coordination and made Total War scalable.

First Industrial War

American Civil War, 1861-65

Scorched-earth tactics

Burning farms, etc.

Barbed wire

Settlement nearly scuppered by the lack of fencing materials led to its invention.

Anglo-Boer War, South Africa, 1899 – 1902

Conflict between British and descendants of Dutch colonizers over control of gold mines.

Concentration camps

A policy of population 'concentration'.

Technological innovations during WWI

Military tractors (code name: tanks) developed to defeat barbed wire.

Shelling during WWI

Estimated 1.45 billion shells fired on Western Front

Wounding vs. Killing

During the war, the aim became to wound rather than kill in order to create logistical problems.

Motorcars

Saved the day during the Great Horse Manure Crisis.

Baron Haussmann

Tasked to modernize Paris, concentrating butchery into La Villette.

Chicago

“Hog butcher for the world”.

Cincinnati, 1830s: Porkopolis

First industrial slaughter, disassembly line: 120,000 pigs/year.

Mechanized Meat Factories in Chicago

Reflected the ambivalence of modernity: comfort vs cruelty.

Venice Arsenale

First industrial assembly line

Marx, 1866

Warfare = “human slaughterhouse industry”.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Humans became raw material for slaughterhouses located on an important railway line.