Natures Metropolis – Chicago & the Great West (Paper): Chicago and the Great West

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Chicago's rise depended largely on its position as a hub, transit point, and eventually a market for grain, lumber, meat, and other product flows.

Reading this book so soon after The Box brought home a lot of lessons on how miraculous our current standard of living is: in some ways the Industrial Revolution has never ended, and the great wave of commerce that stretches back to the early 1800s has only begun for most of the world. With grain, too, Cronon talks much about how the changing demand and structure of the grain market changed nature—this book is, after all, titled Nature’s Metropolis. Cronon (1991) takes on the project of explaining how first nature and second nature mutually shape each other in example of nineteenth century Chicago.A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. This is figured in the history of Chicago, primarily in the nineteenth century, as the city grew from the commodification of the produce of its rural environs. This focus on commodities, distance, time, speed, and abstraction means that people are the least memorable part of the book. If Cronon has an overriding theme, it is that a sharp distinction between city and country, or between humans and nature, is an illusion, and a damaging one.

Focusing on Chicago, he shows how the rapid growth of this city fueled economic, social, and environmental changes in the Great West in the late 19th century. For Cronon, the most productive question to ask was not whether or not men forged in the liberty-loving furnace of the Wild West had the sort of impact on America that Turner posited, but the quite different one of how capitalism and political economy had combined to drive the westward expansion of the US.

Cronon repeatedly refers to, and reacts to, “central place theory”—attempts to systematize and base in mathematics the growth of urban-rural systems such as Chicago. Louis on moving sack loads of grain from ships to warehouses through “the labor of probably two or three hundred Irishmen, negroes and mules” (112).