The Nature of the Firm

David Igler. Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xiv + 267 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50.

Business history and environmental history have not been closely allied endeavors. Despite a shared concern with the historical dynamics of capitalism, these fields have developed almost completely distinct historiographies. Business historians have typically taken the firm as their focus, paying careful attention to the economic environment of money and markets as well as to the different phases of capitalist development. The hallmark of environmental history, on the other hand, has been its careful attention to the ways in which human actions, including capitalist development, have altered particular landscapes. Whereas most business historians pay little heed to the physical spaces in which a firm operates, environmental historians—for all their interest in indicting capitalism as the cause of so much environmental change—have rarely scrutinized the operations of capitalist enterprise. Instead, they more typically render capitalism as an abstract structural force. In this well researched monograph, David Igler deftly demonstrates what can be gained by bringing these disparate fields together in a single narrative.

Industrial Cowboys blends business history's focus on the particularities of the firm with environmental history's careful focus on physical space. Igler brings what traditionally might be considered external to the firm to the center of his story, showing us how attention to the natural environment in which a firm operates can enrich a Chandlerian model of business history. In fact, this book nicely fulfills the recent call by the editors of a special volume of the Business History Review to "restore crucial materialist dimensions to the field: not just the concreteness of money and markets, but of fire, rock, dust and smoke." ¹ One of Igler's central points is that as much as markets, it was land and water that shaped the story of business, in this case the cattle-ranching and meat-packing empire of Henry Miller and Charles Lux that dominated Pacific Coast markets from the 1850s until the 1920s.

Igler positions his work as a corrective to classic stories of nineteenth-century industrialization that emphasize the development of factories and the vertical integration of business enterprise. Arguing that these stories derive from the experience of the eastern U.S. and ignore the equally relevant experience of the West, Igler both broadens and complicates our understanding of industrialization by adopting a self-consciously regional focus. This is the best kind of western, or for that matter regional, history. It is neither parochial nor essentialist; instead, Igler embeds his story of the West within a national story of industrialization, while still paying close attention to the significance of regional difference.

The story of Miller & Lux's meatpacking business offers evidence of familiar national trends including vertical integration and the segmentation of labor, but Igler points out that the firm itself cannot be understood apart from the physical spaces in which it operated. Following the work of other environmental historians, Igler emphasizes how the extremes of the regional climate have repeatedly threatened and often ruined farmers, and have thus contributed to the economic restructuring of rural California. For instance, when a severe drought followed a devastating flood in the 1860s, many farmers were forced to sell their land and livestock for a pittance; however, the better capitalized Miller & Lux took advantage of depressed prices to increase both their acreage and their herds. In other words, nature itself created conditions that furthered the process of corporate consolidation in the countryside.

What allowed Miller & Lux to succeed in nineteenth-century California was their recognition that the natural environment was as important to their firm as the domination of markets and the reorganization of labor. Accordingly, they set out to amass large amounts of land and water as a kind of insurance policy. For Miller & Lux, controlling the landscape was not merely a way of shutting out competition, but a...