| Abstract: | In a seminal work on the evolutionary structure of wholesale trade published in 1970, Vance sharply attacked the mechanistic application of ahistorical central place concepts in efforts to explain the evolved form of urban systems in economically advanced regions. 1] As an endogenic model of highly localised tertiary interaction, Vance claims that central place theory is difficult to apply in old culture regions where the feudal inheritance provides some basis for cellular administrative organisation of small territories; moreover, as a paradigm for newly settled lands he sees it as historically inappropriate. 2] In regions such as North America, mercantilism forged powerful links between distant locations well before surrounding territory was well integrated in bureaucratic terms, and urban networks displaying central place characteristics arose only with later regional development and then only in selected areas of relative economic homogeneity. Thereafter, forces elaborating both mercantile and central place networks operated together, but central place systems always nestled within the larger-scale exogenous mercantile system.This reinterpretation of settlement history in new lands promises a fertile frame-work for understanding the complex historical layering of urban systems that still dominates their functional and locational structure. Vance's general proposition, however, needs evaluation in the light of empirical analyses of particular regions and time periods. This paper explores one aspect of transport provision (passenger service) in the American Midwest in the second half of the nineteenth century in an effort to assess the degree to which patterns of increasing spatial interaction and interdependency within the settlement system of the region can be interpreted in terms of Vance's mercantile model. |
