Nick's Reviews > Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

This is a very thought-provoking book. It seems limiting to place it in the context of the increasingly dysfunctional American political discussion, but even if you must do that there is a lot to chew on. The author has a view of the fake rural vs. urban dichotomy which strikes me as very Obama-first-term-acceptance-speech (it is about Chicago after all). It's not rural American or urban America, it's all of America. Still, the implications of his argument resonate. The description of how the "Great West" was rapidly converted into Chicago's hinterland (he uses that word a lot) reminded me a lot of the current idea of the Anthropocene Epoch (a comparison the author does not explicitly make). The argument made by free market and growth-oriented climate change contrarians that the activities of little old Man could never have such a strong impact on "nature" starts to look very pallid indeed.

There's a lot of great historiography here - a solid explanation of how the Chicago Board of Trade (i.e., the commodities market) works, and a very impressive analysis of, wait for it, 19th century bankruptcy records. The discussion of the grain, meat, and timber industries is a little less abstract and forms (to me) the heart of the book.

The author starts the reader on the storyline of how farming became more mechanized, thanks in part to Chicago's McCormick reaper. He touches on the rural radical movement (i.e., the Grange). I'd like to read more about that...by the time of The Grapes of Wrath the situation resembles the fully mechanized, depopulated oligarchies that many ag regions seem to be today. Many of the small farmers and laborers who were driven to the cities probably have exurban and suburban descendants for whom "Chicago" is still a dirty word, because of that city's (racialized) reputation for urban lawlessness...the idea that the city has a different morality than the country is a key theme of Nature's Metropolis.