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I enjoyed reading Parts II of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. His exploration of the process of grain, lumber, and meat becoming commodities was fascinating, especially when he showed the distinct roles grain elevators, fences, and stockyards played in those processes. I had never considered that animals (along with alcohol) are easier to transport than plants: “pigs (along with whisky) were generally the most compact and valuable way of bringing [farmers’ corn crops] to market” (226). Not only is this an interesting idea, it is also an example of the geography/transportation of capital. Cronon quotes from one source, “‘Corn thus becomes incarnate; for what is a hog, but fifteen or twenty bushels of corn on four legs?'” (226).
One of Cronon’s conclusions in Part II is that “once within the corporate system, places lost their particularity and became functional abstractions on organizational charts” (259). Cronon carries the theme of dislocation into Part III. After carefully connecting Chicago to its hinterlands/rural areas to their Metropolis through the three commodities in Part II, “Nature to Market,” Cronon commences a different investigation in Part III, “The Geography of Capital.” Through a clever investigation of individuals’ estates at bankruptcy or death, Cronon composes a series of maps that illustrate Chicago’s position as the “gateway city” and why it beat St. Louis for the title. A gateway, though, is hardly a place in itself because it isn’t a destination. As goods are entering and exiting, the gateway is a place of dislocation. The examples of Montgomery Ward and Company’s mail-order catalogs and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair further demonstrate the dislocation. The mail-order catalogs, Cronon writes, “offered its readers a map of capital, of second nature.” “The most remarkable thing about the catalog, like capital itself, is how thoroughly it obscures these relationships [between metropolis and hinterland]” (339). Similarly, Cronon refers to Henry Adams’s analysis of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Adams called the fair a “Babel of loose … unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts” (344).
Initially, I thought the book was only about Chicago, so I didn’t expect to encounter so much dislocation. Since the story is about the rise of Chicago and the West, it makes more sense: the whole thing is about dislocation. It’s weird that moving goods around was/is essential to the process of creating capital.
I, like Wade, am interested in the relationship between second nature and capital. I don’t think second nature (refresher: “the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature” [xix]) is the exact same thing as capital, but I wish Cronon would have clarified their relationship. Maybe the difference between second nature and capital is that there is a way to have second nature without creating capital, such as the example of a self-sufficient pioneer.