The Small Farm Future Blog

The Country And The City: From London to Chicago

Posted on March 19, 2014 | 2 Comments

Well, the rains have ceased for now, the waters are receding, and the tractor is primed for its 34^th season (God willing). But perhaps I’ve just got time to share some thoughts on two classic books of a similar vintage to my trusty Ford. They’ve languished for too long in my in-tray, but the idleness enforced by the sodden early spring has enabled me to catch up with them at last. Both of them as it happens are on the subject of the country and the city. One of them, appropriately enough, is The Country And The City (1973) by the English (OK, Welsh) cultural critic, Raymond Williams. And the other is Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) by the American historian, William Cronon.

I’m not going to attempt any kind of précis of these two great books. With all due apologies to Messrs Williams and Cronon, I’m just going to go magpie and steal a few of their shiniest points in order to line a few positions of my own – positions on history, urbanisation and technology which I’ve possibly over-worked a bit on this blog in recent months. Ah well, one more turn of the crank before moving onto some new themes. And so to work.

City vs country?

‘City’ and ‘country’ are too easily invoked as polar opposites, typically enchaining a whole series of other metaphorical contrasts: wealth/poverty, future/past, optimism/nostalgia, social mobility/social stasis, hi tech/manual labour, down-home values/loss of cultural identity etc. Such contrasts are singularly unilluminating – partly because the country and the city create each other (consider the cowboy, the epitome of non-urban rugged individualism, as a servant of the industrial meat-packing business), and partly because a more complex historical reality lurks behind the metaphorical contrast. As Williams puts it: “Between the simple backward look and the simple progressive thrust there is room for long argument but none for enlightenment. We must begin differently: not in the idealisations of one order or another, but in the history to which they are only partial and misleading responses.” Amen to that.

From rural capitalism…

In the case of England, that more complex history basically involved the rise of an agrarian capitalism which progressively destroyed the character of pre-capitalist rural life. And good riddance to it – let’s say that loud and clear, because there’s a fine line between defending the old country ways and defending the old aristocratic order that underpinned it. Nevertheless, the couplet of the old, repressive countryside stuck in its customary ways versus the new, forward-looking, liberating city which has plagued analysis over the last couple of centuries really must be rejected.  Certainly, for those able to transcend the derision of the rural shared by metropolitan intellectuals across the political spectrum, in British history there can be found a “precarious but persistent rural-intellectual radicalism…hostile to industrialism and capitalism; opposed to commercialism and to the exploitation of the environment; attached to country ways and feelings” (Williams, p.36). Also awaiting discovery are rural working class traditions involving a love of country work, wildlife and the life of the fields, which feel no sentimental need to invoke past golden ages in the manner of more genteel writers (Williams, p.262).

Capitalism is not an inevitable economic form, nor is it the only alternative to landlordism or communism; it does not emerge ‘naturally’ if its path is not ‘blocked’¹. Therefore, rural-intellectual radicalism combined with rural working class mobilisation in Britain could conceivably have taken the country in a wholly different direction. But the fact is, it didn’t. Agrarian capitalism in the countryside allied with the growth of London as a trading and, later, an imperial city, drove a relentlessly accumulative and class-conscious economic system. Arthur Young, whose Annals of Agriculture had been a major force in the consequent improvement of agricultural productivity, expressed his second thoughts thus: “I had rather that all the commons of England were sunk in the sea, than that the poor should in future be treated on enclosing as they have been hitherto”².

…to urban meta-capitalism

And then there was Chicago. The farmers, loggers and labourers of the American west whose predecessors left a Europe caught between a dismal rural landlordism and a dismal rural capitalism became functionaries to a city empire that took the process started in London to a wholly new level. Chicago turned grain from a palpable foodstuff of the fields into an abstract liquid flow, first through the technology of grain-handling (railways, elevators) but more importantly through the conceptual innovation of derivative markets. It likewise turned meat from a product of local farmers and slaughtermen-butchers into prairie-raised, industrially-processed, globally-exported canned and packed meat products. And it potentiated the agricultural colonisation of the prairies by acting as an entrepôt for timber from the Great Lakes to make farming possible in the treeless plains.

The late 19^th century debate over timber in Chicago is an interesting mirror to our own times. Having logged out the easy white pine, a debate arose about the sustainability of Midwest lumber, but the industry scornfully dismissed its detractors, using new technology (railways) to access the more recalcitrant reserves. Nevertheless, the industry indeed collapsed shortly thereafter. This was only a minor problem for Chicago, which by then was wealthy enough to diversify its economy and import lumber from further afield – caring little, presumably, for the sustainability of those reserves. As Cronon demonstrates, one of Chicago’s founding myths was its conquest of nature (“We will build a city where men and women in their passions shall be the beginning and end. Man is enough for man”³), entirely effacing its dependence upon ‘natural capital’ for its survival.  Writing of such 19^th century concerns with progress, the overcoming of natural constraint and infatuation with technology, Cronon says “Our own faith in technology has been so chastened by our knowledge of Faust’s bargain – also magical, but finally hollow and self-destructive – that we may find it hard to take seriously the rhetoric of wonder as applied to so profane an object as a railroad locomotive”⁴. Personally I’d have to say: nope, the rhetoric of technological wonder is alive and kicking – take an effusive technological booster of the 19^th century, transplant them to the present day, and what would they write? I’d suggest something like “Why dense cities, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, restored wildlands, radical science and geoengineering are essential”. And they’d be feted by legions of wishful-thinking acolytes.

In their different ways, London and Chicago dramatised what it meant to be a ‘global city’ in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries: I’ll tip my hat to their breathtaking self-confidence, opulence and achievements, even as I’ll look to the likes of Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair to inform me of their darker reaches. But it’s not just the darker reaches in the cities themselves, as explored by these writers – the point is that their tendrils gripped both ‘human capital’ and ‘natural capital’ throughout the world. This was the real secret of their opulence.

All the world’s a city

Bring it on, say the latter-day urban boosters. As Williams incisively points out, ‘the city’ has now become a metaphor for the whole world – the ‘developed’, ‘metropolitan’ nations are metaphorical cities to the rural backwaters of the ‘under-developed’, ‘peripheral’ nations⁵. Modern day technological boosterism believes we can all become middle class city-dwellers globally, while an automated agriculture does the hard work for us, and simultaneously protects nature (“Why dense cities, nuclear power, genetically modified crops…” etc etc), much as the boosters of 19^th century Chicago believed its urban economic development brought benefits to all with no disadvantages. They were wrong then, and I think their descendants will be proved wrong again. It would help if they undertook serious analysis of urban economies, instead of the skin-deep platitudes offered by the likes of Stewart Brand⁶, which fall squarely into the ‘city on a hill’ rhetoric so expertly skewered by Williams. But that’s a topic for another post…

A new populism

Well, what’s the alternative? Certainly not what Williams calls a “false conservationist and reactionary emphasis which would…have the developing societies stay as they are, picturesque and poor, for the benefit of observers”⁷ (such a position informs, I think, the common and usually ill-directed accusation that opposition to contemporary capitalist development is ‘elitist’ or ‘reactionary’). In my view, an important alternative tradition is agrarian populism, and I’ll write more about this in another post. A sub-theme of Cronon’s book is the career of agrarian populism’s American variant, as embraced by many of the prairie farmers who fed the city’s markets. These farmers considered themselves to be the real producers of the city’s wealth, yet denied its fruits by a cabal of middlemen – railroad companies, grain traders, merchants and suppliers. They wanted a piece of that city magic, hankering after a rural agrarian life of technologically-enhanced leisure through scientific agriculture, learning and rural development. Like the British radicals, they failed. Well, maybe not entirely – they got the ‘scientific agriculture’ but not the rural development, as the 19^th century American countryside emptied into the city and the suburbs. Which brings us back to the boosterism of our own era that I’ve already discussed, and its vision of an ecologically benign global suburbs.

For reasons documented on this blog and in many other places, I believe that vision to be flawed in numerous respects. I think the vision of the agrarian populists has considerably more promise, for all that it needs a thorough modern makeover – which I’ll start trying to get to grips with in another post. I don’t underestimate the difficulties of creating an agrarian populism for the modern day (some of which I touched on here). For one thing, as Patrick Whitefield pointed out on this blog a while ago, there aren’t too many agrarians around any more in countries like the UK and the USA and, undeniably, it’s hard to build a mass ‘people’s’ movement out of 1% of the population. Is the undermining of local agrarian economies by cities and larger trading networks of the kind described by Williams, Cronon and Geert Mak inevitable? Possibly. I want to reflect on that further, but I’m not wholly convinced by Cronon’s (albeit nuanced and critical) reliance on the rather mechanistic approach of central place theory to suggest so. In any case, I prefer a politics of the long haul over one of short-term expedience – maybe even politics as the ‘art of the impossible’. I can’t say that the emergence of a mass left-green agrarian populist movement of the kind I think we need to tackle global questions of social justice and environmental sustainability seems especially likely, but I can find a few reasons for cautious hope. And at this time of the year, cautious hope is about as much as any farmer ought to be harbouring as they look to the future.

References

1. Ellen Meiksins Wood (1999) The Origin of Capitalism, Verso.

2. Williams, p.67.

3. Cronon, p.15.

4. ibid. p.73.

5. Williams, p.279.

6. Brand, S. (2010) Whole Earth Discipline,  pp.25-73.

7. Williams, p.287.