From Acorns to Warehouses

Thomas C. Patterson’s large-scale history of the Inland Empire of Southern California traces the social political and economic changes in this region from the first Native American settlement 12000 years ago to the present. Framing his discussion of this region in the general growth trajectory of California’s socio-economic history he is able to connect landscape resources wealth labor and inequality using a Marxian framework for many key periods of the region’s history. In moving between large scale historical changes regional adaptations and resistance to those changes and a framework that places those responses in theoretical context Patterson’s work allows the reader to see how inland Southern California developed into the warehouse empire of the 21st century and its prospects for the future.