A01=David Igler
agriculture
american west
Author_David Igler
beef markets
business
butchers
california
Category=KCVG
Category=KNBW
Category=KND
Category=KNX
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=WQH
economics
environment
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnicity
frontier
history
immigrants
immigration
industrial enterprises
industrialism
labor
land acquisition
land reclamation
land rights
landscapes
meatpacking
miller and lux
monopoly
natural resources
nature
nonfiction
rags to riches
rancheros
san francisco
segregation
water politics
water rights
waterscapes
western industrialism
Product details
- ISBN 9780520245341
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jan 2005
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Few industrial enterprises left a more enduring imprint on the American West than Miller & Lux, a vast meatpacking conglomerate started by two San Francisco butchers in 1858. "Industrial Cowboys" examines how Henry Miller and Charles Lux, two German immigrants, consolidated the West's most extensive land and water rights, swayed legislatures and courts, monopolized western beef markets, and imposed their corporate will on California's natural environment. Told with clarity and originality, this story uses one fascinating case study to illuminate the industrial development and environmental transformation of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The process by which two neighborhood butchers turned themselves into landed industrialists depended to an extraordinary degree on the acquisition, manipulation, and exploitation of natural resources. David Igler examines the broader impact that industrialism - as exemplified by Miller & Lux - had on landscapes and waterscapes, and on human as well as plant and animal life in the West.
He also provides a rich discussion of the social relations engineered by Miller & Lux, from the dispossession of Californio rancheros to the ethnic segmentation of the firm's massive labor force. The book also covers such topics as land acquisition and reclamation, water politics, San Francisco's unique business environment, and the city's relation to its surrounding hinterlands. Above all, Igler highlights essential issues that resonate for us today: who holds the right and who has the power to engineer the landscape for market production?
David Igler is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.
