![]() ![]() government in the region in the capitalist state's increased police powers and its move to monopolize organized violence and in rising public and private investment in Such expansion manifested itself in a variety of ways: in state formation and in the build-up in the administrative capacity of the U.S. This is not to suggest that Chicago qua Chicago was foreordained or inevitable, merely that, given American capitalism's nineteenth-century trajectory, the development of an urban center such as Chicago somewhere in the southern Great Lakes region of the Midwest is readily understandable.īy the early nineteenth century an expanding capitalism was transforming the area economically from a site of irregular or intermittent cross-cultural trade in resources and “preciosities” to a site of regular, routinized production and exchange of agricultural commodities and manufactured goods conducted and organized under Euro-American auspices. When viewed in this way, Chicago's development after 1830 seems less sudden and abrupt and less implausible. Speculation, and the marketing of farm products, however prosaic and seemingly petty, are all viewed as expressions of the region's gradual, piecemeal and incremental, but ultimately inexorable incorporation into capitalist financial and product markets of extraregional, indeed, national and even international scope. Military installations, public investment in Today most students of the economic development of the southern Great Lakes region, including Chicago and environs, embed the area from the start in the context of an expanding capitalist market in the Western world. The same scholars then argue that during the 1830s Chicago experienced a wild period of boom and bust, based on furious but ultimately unsustainable land speculation, before establishing a firm foundation as a trading center in the 1840s. Until recently few scholars viewed Chicago's early development in a fully commercial framework, arguing instead that slow, desultory, rather aimless economic encounters among traders, frontier farmers, Indians, and government contractors of one type or another characterized the area's economy until the 1830s. Site on what is now Michigan Avenue in the period between 18. The intensity of European and African commercial penetration increased markedly in the early nineteenth century, illustrated in stylized form by the establishment, destruction, and reestablishment of the Throughout the eighteenth century, the area's marshy grounds were traversed by various trappers, traders, “projectors,” and “adventurers” from Europe and elsewhere in the Americas. most notably Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette-had explored the area along the southwestern shore of By the late seventeenth century, numerous Region began relatively early during the socalled Age of Discovery. Indeed, with its increasingly diversified economy, metropolitan Chicago appears well poised to continue as the economic powerhouse, if not the growth engine, for the greater Midwest. Chicago's economic performance since that time has been less impressive, but the city, having adjusted to a series of economic shocks and dislocations in the 1970s and 1980s, remains the most important economic and business center in the interior of the United States. ![]() After an initial period of settlement and environmental/economic accommodation, the city entered into a remarkable phase of economic expansion between about 18. Although there is no truth to the story thatįor “let's make a deal,” economic and business concerns have not merely shaped but determined Chicago's destiny for almost two hundred years. Business and Chicago have been inextricably bound since the city's beginnings in the early nineteenth century. ![]()
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