Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers and the Transcontinental Railroad by Manu Karuka (review)
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The Transcontinental Railroad's legacy is romanticized as stemming from dedicated migrant labor, free market, and U.S. courage to brave the western frontier. Manu Karuka's Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad is a sharp refutation of this narrative, critiquing it as a fallacy invisibilizing Indigenous presence, racializing migrant labor, and affirming the U.S. colonial project. Karuka labels this process as U.S. countersovereignty, the settler belief that their right to claim the western frontier land supersedes any previous Indigenous community presence.
Karuka argues that the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads' union symbolizes this countersovereignty fallacy, one built on the war-finance nexus and the intersection of militarism, capitalism, and state. He traces U.S. countersovereignty as a tool of free market capitalism and white supremacy that also delegitimizes Indigenous presence while flexibly racializing Chinese labor. Empire's Tracks demystifies any notion of the Transcontinental Railroad [End Page 516] being born out of brave pioneers navigating the free market. Karuka references multiple scholars in naming continental imperialism, the replacement of indigenous modes with colonial modes of relationship, and the rise of corporate personhood as foundations to U.S. railroad colonialism. He employs multiple theoretical lens, a wide range of community histories, and a rich archive of political, military, and business documents.
The first three chapters frame the book's historical and theoretical context. The first chapter warns researchers about complex obstacles when studying countersovereignty, a topic born out of "rumor communities" (14). Though Karuka cautions about researching through rumors, he recognizes these rumor communities as potential spaces housing marginalized Indigenous and migrant voices. The prose of countersovereignty plays a major role in invisibilizing communities, amplifying white narratives, and normalizing displacement. Karuka questions U.S. imperialism's dominance as settlers failed to eliminate Indigenous modes of relationship.
Chapter two centers on three key Indigenous feminist scholars discussing Indigenous modes of relationship being replaced with colonial modes of relationship. Karuka turns to Sarah Winnemucca, Ella Deloria, and Winona LaDuke in tracing this shift. Winnemucca theorizes a definition of colonial modes of relationship connected to sexual violence and war. Deloria offers an understanding of Indigenous modes of relationship as consciousness of place and community building across gender, generation, and species. LaDuke also proposes a shift from conquest focused modes of being towards one centered on survival (36).
Chapter three traces global railroad colonialism's genealogy. Karuka demystifies U.S. railroad expansion history as nothing special compared to the rest of the world, building a transnational perspective historicizing multiple moments of railroad colonialism (38).
Chapters four through seven focus on specific communities: the Lakota, Chinese railroad workers, the Pawnee, and the Cheyenne, and how railroad colonialism silenced, assimilated, stole from, and devastated these communities. Here, the book demonstrates its strength in balancing historic and political economy centered analysis while deconstructing how railroad colonialism racialized each community. In particular, chapter four examines the tension between the Lakota's modes of relationship and colonial modes of relationship under the context of militarization occupation, while chapter five covers the social construction of Chinese labor as an instrument of railroad colonialism, only to later be villainized as a threat to U.S. colonial modes of relationship. Karuka traces the Chinese workers' distinct positionality as mobile, fluid workers, a characteristic that deems them as neither free nor slave labor (69) [End Page 517] .
The final two chapters connect these community cases to an in-depth analysis of continental colonialism and how these infrastructures of power operate in support of and within the definition of whiteness. In chapter eight, Karuka analyzes U.S. railroad colonialism as built on the relationship between state and corporation. He deconstructs the rise of corporate personhood and its connection to shareholder whiteness, both upholding white supremacist racial hierarchies under continental imperialism. Chapter nine provides a fascinating examination of continental imperialism, working through W. E. B. Du...
