Upon discovering my interest in Barudel, Picketty, Fischer, Graeber, etc … more than one professional historian has suggested I read William Cronon's classic history of Chicago. While they may have Piled it higher and Deeper, these folks were not full of shit. The book is a fascinating, accessible, and yet rigorous history of Chicago from roughly 1840 to 1900. During this period, the city functioned as a gateway connecting the rural "Great West", as it was then called -- basically what we would now call the northern midwest area that stretches from the great lakes to the Rockies — to the urbanized Eastern seaboard of the country. By the end of the 19th century, Chicago's role in matching the easterly flow of commodities like meat and grain with the westerly flow of manufactured good and capital turned it into America's second largest city. Cronon's deepest thesis is that, because the city was a crucial crossroads during this unique period of expansion, the interdependent duality of city and country that emerged here shaped many of our later attitudes about urbanization, corporatization, and mechanization. The specific history of Chicago is part of what lent these processes the moral ambivalence they still carry in American life.
But of course there's much more to his history than this high level observation. Cronon begins by tracing the seeming inevitability or 'naturalness' of Chicago's position back to what was actually a fortuitous combination of circumstances. Originally promoted as a unique waterway linkage between the upper Mississippi valley and Lake Michigan (via the Illinois river and the Illinois and Michigan canal) most of city's growth was in fact due to the way it became the Eastern terminus of a rail network that gradually stretched further and further West. That is, from the beginning, its unique 'natural' advantages were relevant more as a pretext for the construction of what Cronon terms a "second nature" — the human infrastructure that gradually came to replace the original natural landscape so thoroughly that we take it with the same inevitability. Obviously, the notion of an 'original nature' is philosophically suspect. But by identifying a 'second' version, Cronon just aims to mark how the rails replaced the rivers as transportation conduits, the wheat replaced the prairie grass as the dominant flora, the domesticated cow and pig replaced the bison as ruminant herd animal, and the settlers 'naturally' replaced the Potawatomi.
Accordingly, he devotes chapters to the intersecting ecological and economic histories that created this new nature. We learn about the rise of the railroads that would eventually fan out from Chicago. We learn about the changing grain trade that would give rise to the futures markets that exist to this day at the Chicago Board of Trade. We learn about the forces behind the growth of Chicago's famous meatpacking industry and the way its less famous lumber industry eventually cut down every tree along every Lake Michigan bound stream in Wisconsin. Each of Cronon's stories is a fascinating and well documented business history by itself, but together they really convey the way the development of this central city reconfigured the entire ecology of the hinter-landscape surrounding it, turning it into a resource 'destined' for market exploitation.
Finally, there are also two very interesting chapters on Chicago's relation to the East, and particularly to New York. The city's growth depended not simply on its Western hinterland, but on the enormous Eastern capital invested in turning it into a transfer and processing point for commodities as they flowed towards the East. This position halfway between Western commodities and Eastern manufacturing markets also made Chicago the perfect distribution point as finished manufactured products moved back towards the West. The railroads, grain elevators, and giant ice-cooled meatpacking plants could not have developed without New York capital. Likewise, business model innovations like Montgomery Wards' or Sears' mail order catalogs could only have grown out of this environment.
It's truly a terrific history that I would recommend to anyone interested in the era, and mandate for anyone suffering from either of our great 21st century maladies: frontier nostalgiaitis, and eco-apocalyptic derangement syndrome. Thanks to CV and Dr. Mei for the recommendation!
But of course there's much more to his history than this high level observation. Cronon begins by tracing the seeming inevitability or 'naturalness' of Chicago's position back to what was actually a fortuitous combination of circumstances. Originally promoted as a unique waterway linkage between the upper Mississippi valley and Lake Michigan (via the Illinois river and the Illinois and Michigan canal) most of city's growth was in fact due to the way it became the Eastern terminus of a rail network that gradually stretched further and further West. That is, from the beginning, its unique 'natural' advantages were relevant more as a pretext for the construction of what Cronon terms a "second nature" — the human infrastructure that gradually came to replace the original natural landscape so thoroughly that we take it with the same inevitability. Obviously, the notion of an 'original nature' is philosophically suspect. But by identifying a 'second' version, Cronon just aims to mark how the rails replaced the rivers as transportation conduits, the wheat replaced the prairie grass as the dominant flora, the domesticated cow and pig replaced the bison as ruminant herd animal, and the settlers 'naturally' replaced the Potawatomi.
Accordingly, he devotes chapters to the intersecting ecological and economic histories that created this new nature. We learn about the rise of the railroads that would eventually fan out from Chicago. We learn about the changing grain trade that would give rise to the futures markets that exist to this day at the Chicago Board of Trade. We learn about the forces behind the growth of Chicago's famous meatpacking industry and the way its less famous lumber industry eventually cut down every tree along every Lake Michigan bound stream in Wisconsin. Each of Cronon's stories is a fascinating and well documented business history by itself, but together they really convey the way the development of this central city reconfigured the entire ecology of the hinter-landscape surrounding it, turning it into a resource 'destined' for market exploitation.
Finally, there are also two very interesting chapters on Chicago's relation to the East, and particularly to New York. The city's growth depended not simply on its Western hinterland, but on the enormous Eastern capital invested in turning it into a transfer and processing point for commodities as they flowed towards the East. This position halfway between Western commodities and Eastern manufacturing markets also made Chicago the perfect distribution point as finished manufactured products moved back towards the West. The railroads, grain elevators, and giant ice-cooled meatpacking plants could not have developed without New York capital. Likewise, business model innovations like Montgomery Wards' or Sears' mail order catalogs could only have grown out of this environment.
It's truly a terrific history that I would recommend to anyone interested in the era, and mandate for anyone suffering from either of our great 21st century maladies: frontier nostalgiaitis, and eco-apocalyptic derangement syndrome. Thanks to CV and Dr. Mei for the recommendation!
