He's written some of the most thoughtful, careful, and eloquent pieces I've read, and moreover things with great impact on how I see the world. If he had used some more modern work in urban development from someone like Ed Glaeser or Paul Krugman (who later wrote an excellent paper on this very book) I think readers would have benefited, but otherwise it was genius.Ĭronon is an American treasure. Cronon spends a great deal of time using Von Thünen's concentric circle model as a foil to show how cities don't just accrete in a vacuum but develop symbiotically with the hinterland they create, but it feels like he strawman's this very simple and very old model unnecessarily.

Basically the only thing I didn't like about the book was that it could have been longer and included more insight from urban development economics. The book touches mainly grain, lumber, and meat out of the hundreds of goods that Chicago shipped, stored, refined, or revolutionized, but it does a fantastic job of showing not only why Chicago is one of the great cities of the world, but how America has evolved and innovated over time. 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. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and Kansas City the sections where he traces the rail and financial linkages between them are awesome), the settlers at the frontier never would have managed a living for want of markets without the farmers producing goods for consumption and distribution, Chicago would have no reason for ever existing. Without Chicago (and to a lesser extent similar cities like St. 1 spring wheat'), and futures trading at the Board of Trade revolutionized how farmers sold their goods, to the extent that Chicago is a world center of commodities trading to this day and the Midwest is some of the most productive farmland on the planet. For example, he explores how the holy trinity of the grain elevator, grade standardization (a pile of wheat became 'no. Cronon's copiously researched opinion is that city and country, far from being opposed, critically depend on each other. On the highest level, this is sort of a refutation and extension of Frederick Jackson Turner's 'frontier hypothesis' (short version: the old countries of Europe never had the Wild West's unique conflict between the 'individual freedom' of society's rejects on the frontier and the 'law and order' back in the Eastern cities, which helped explain why America was so different than its transatlantic ancestors). I've been really into economic histories lately, and this analysis of Chicago's development and its relationship to the Midwest it came to dominate was both staggeringly detailed and elegantly well-written.

Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon