As his title suggests, Carl Abbott's synthesis is driven by the argument ‘that urban settlements did “win the West” in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as spearheads, anchors, and organisers of conquest and settlement carried out in many European languages’ (p. 11). This is an important point, often lost on those whose conception of the West is still locked into one dominated by rural spaces rather than urban ones, although it is a mainstay of western urban historians. Abbott's synthesis covers admirable geographic range – ‘from the Gulf of Alaska to the Mississippi River, from the bi-national metropolis of San Diego/Tijuana to the Prairie Province capitals of Canada’ (p. 11). Yet despite the claim of the subtitle, only one chapter deals in a sustained manner with the West before the nineteenth century, and the book itself is heavily weighted toward the twentieth century.

A synthesis of this sort provides an opportunity to offer a fresh interpretation of a field based on the most significant recent insights that have pushed it forward. Abbott has chosen to organize the scholarship he has brought together around three themes. The first has to do with how ‘western cities grew as central and centralizing points’ (p. 4) in the growth of trade, commerce, regional economies and continental exchange. The second emphasizes ‘the cumulative rebalancing of western North America’ and the transition from the ‘dependency of the West in the nineteenth century and its maturation as an independent source of economic and cultural change in the later twentieth century’ (p. 8). Abbott's third theme stresses ‘the accelerating transition of western cities from imitators of eastern culture and outposts of eastern capital to innovators that compete with Boston, New York, Washington, Toronto, and Chicago' (p. 10).

Unfortunately, while Abbott's bibliography is filled with cutting-edge work, his organizing framework encapsulates this scholarship in old questions and issues that are not fully reflective of current trends. In a 1996 essay in the Journal of Urban History, Abbott himself concluded that US urban history had been consumed with the same central questions for the last 150 years and that these basically boiled down to issues of urban growth and community institution building. This synthesis fails to move very far away from this old ground. While new scholarship forms the basis for the interior chapters, old categories have not been challenged or re-examined. So, for example, Asian, Latino, Native American and Black historical actors make regular appearances but a thorough analysis of race and gender in urban economies and systems of power does not. In recent years, urban western history has moved beyond the confines of questions of urban growth and community institution building – and also of urban rivalries, big economic and geographic forces, policy, and planning – that narrowly defined the field for so long. While the geographic range of Abbott's synthesis is impressive, the limits of his organizing questions make the book feel disappointingly out of date, especially in comparison to Eugene P. Moehring's sophisticated synthesis from 2004, Urbanism and Empire in the Far West, 1840–1890, which uses insights drawn from post-colonial theory to rethink the intersection of colonialism and urban networks in the American West.