A review by mattrohn
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

informative slow-paced

4.0

This book is what it says at the start of the intro - a history of Chicago's role in the development of the American midwest told largely through commodity markets. A lot of non-historian readers, and even some of the historians, will not be willing to wade through the extensive discussions of the grain, lumper, pork, and rail industries which were essential to Chicago's rise as America's second metropolis, and which facilitated the development of futures trading, monopoly regulation, and shaped capital flows in the surrounding states. The author is very interested in how the 19th century midwestern economy was made by and remade nature. I don't find most of the theorizing here to be very impactful, but still think that the book does much useful, and others may find his frameworks about the natural and the urban more illuminating