cities

JCWisc at aol.com JCWisc at aol.com
Sat Sep 7 22:49:22 PDT 2002


Dddddd0814 at aol.com wrote:


> You guys keep forgetting that, until the turn of the 20th century, the vast
> majority of all agricultural production was *in* cities, and on their very
> periphery. They had to be because the transit system wasn't as complete or
> complex as it is now. "Urban agriculture," as it is called now, was the
norm.
> This meant that millions of acres outside of cities did not have to be
plowed
> just to send things by trucks and rails to the metropoli....


> This is not true. For most of human history the vast majority of people
> didn't live in cities they lived in rural areas - which is also where
> the majority of food production occured.
>
> --
> Joe R. Golowka

Well, yes. In North America, the cities and the countryside were connected, beginning in the 1850s, by a rail system, which wove farms producing staple foodstuffs like wheat into a complex network of exchange that bound cities and countryside together. The cities and towns were where the grain elevators and packing houses were, and where the buyers and brokers and exchanges were located. Farms were not located in or on the periphery of cities, but were spread out across the land, and produced products for distant markets in exchange for cash. The products of the land were graded, marketed, and distributed by a host of middlemen. Why do you think that there were such enormous political battles between farmers and the railroads in the 19th century over issues like rates and monopolies and regulation? What do you think happened to the North American prairie? It was plowed up so that farmers could produce cash crops. One smallish Wisconsin town I studied was shipping over 300,000 bushels of wheat by rail annually just 17 years after the first white settlement. Even in the 18th century, North American farmers were connected to distant markets through transportation networks. Eastern seaboard farms, for instance, shipped tremendous quantities of dairy products to the West Indies.

Markets for agricultural products have been on a national scale, and to some degree "globalized," for a very long time. To take one example, by the early 1880s Chicago meat packers dominated the east coast market for pork and beef; they drove most local wholesale butchers out of business because of economies of scale and the invention of the refrigerated rail car.

On early North American agrarian history, two good places to start are James Henretta's collected essays, _The Origins of American Capitalism_ (Northeastern U Press, 1991) and Christopher Clark, _The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860_ (Cornell UP, 1990). For the 19th century, William Cronon's vast study of Chicago and its economic relationship to the vast hinterland of the midwest and great plains is essential. It's called _Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West_ (Norton, 1991).

As for the physical nature of food production in rural areas, it was gradually mechanized in the US during the second half of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th. A lot of people were still mainly reliant on animal power through the 20s and 30s, though, and for much of this period, some of the basic farm implements that most people used were really not very different from those known in antiquity. I have actually plowed behind a team of oxen. It is backbreaking work. It's a great blessing for millions that no one in the US has to do it any more.

Jacob Conrad



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