NATURE'S METROPOLIS : THE GHOST DANCE OF CHRISTALLER AND VON THUNEN

William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991) is a wonderful book, on a par with Fernand Braudel’s erudite tomes on European history. This book is a standing brief for a thoroughgoing geographical reworking of American economic history. We welcome its appearance wholeheartedly, even as we admit its ambiguous meaning for geography: a triumphant assertion of the geographic perspective that is energizing western history, urban history and environmental studies, but an opportunity missed by geographers to have written it first. Nevertheless, there is much left to do. While saluting Cronon, geographers must take him to task for the substantial shortcomings of the treatment of Chicago and the American west. For Cronon has reproduced a style of geography that is, for all its narrative brilliance, analytically limited and thoroughly out of date. Nature’s Metropolis explores the relationship between Chicago and its vast western hinterland of the 19th century, and in so doing masterfully reveals the environmental basis of Chicago’s economic expansion: the abounding products of nature flowing into the city like a torrent. The centerpiece of the book is the section ”Nature to Market,” consisting of “a series of stories, each tracing the path between an urban market and the natural systems that supply it.” (p. xvii). In three enthralling chapters on grain, lumber and meat, Cronon examines in detail the mammoth resource extraction orchestrated by Chicago merchants. Their challenge was to reduce the diverse and living products of nature to