Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad by Manu Karuka (review)

The completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 is a powerful master symbol, open to competing interpretations that often reveal the aspirations, attitudes, and anxieties of a given age. For many contemporary Americans, the meeting of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines at Promontory Point embodied the spirit of Manifest Destiny that had carried their exceptional nation across North America. The golden spike that joined the tracks also seemed to promise prosperity and unity after many years of division and war over slavery. This view still holds in popular histories and in commemorative organizations such as Spike 150, which recently marked the sesquicentennial with celebratory events across the West. Today, however, scholars are more inclined to associate the transcontinental railroad with Indigenous genocide, environmental destruction, economic excess, political corruption, and social inequality. In Railroaded: The Trans-continentals and the Making of Modern America, Richard White told "the story of the opening up of a continent that could easily have been opened up more slowly, more gingerly, and more humbly."¹ Manu Karuka, in Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, goes even further, concluding his impassioned, interdisciplinary critique of "railroad colonialism" with an open call to dismantle the "co-constitutions of the modern imperial state and finance capitalism" that it enabled during the latter half of the nineteenth century (xiv).

In organization and purpose, Empire's Tracks resembles a mixed freight train—part history, party theory, part manifesto—sometimes moving at breakneck speed and frequently switching tracks en route to a destination somewhere in the borderlands between historiography and cultural politics. As Karuka states in his preface, the book "is not a work of historical recovery, nor does it focus on 'encounters' between Chinese migrants and Indigenous peoples" (xiv). It also contains relatively little labor history, though Karuka does include the work of Chinese railroad crews, Lakota hunters, Pawnee scouts, and Dakota and Cheyenne women in his analysis of the political economy. The bulk of his intellectual cargo is conceptual, and delivered for the express purpose of unsettling a dominant narrative in which the US nation-state and American capitalism "incorrectly appear as fixed end-points whose preeminence is both obvious and permanent" (xiii). Much of what Karuka argues will not seem new to scholars familiar with the historical literature on these subjects, but he pointedly rejects the academic expectation of "novelty and uniqueness" in favor of "a practice of liberation: an effort to realize questions and capacities that have been here all along" (xv).

Three core concepts form the bed, rails, and ties of Karuka's provocative argument: continental imperialism, countersovereignty, and modes of relationship. The first concept holds that the modern United States is not a nation but an empire, a series of colonized territories built and maintained by the violence of the "war-finance nexus" (52). Colonial domination is further bolstered by "the prose of countersovereignty" (1), which Karuka defines as a form of discourse (including much historical scholarship) that undermines Indigenous modes of relationship to place and reifies settler sovereignty over colonized lands and bodies. Drawing on the thought of three Native women authors (Ella Deloria, Sarah Winnemucca, and Winona LaDuke) as well as Karl Marx, Karuka characterizes Indigenous relations of production as collective, interdependent, and reciprocal. Capitalism, by contrast, "transforms abundance into scarcity, interdependence into isolation" through the expropriation of natural wealth and the exploitation of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous labor (25). The transcontinental railroad facilitated this transformation, in the US and across the colonized world, by marrying corporate capital to imperial power. Thus, writes Karuka, "to understand the transcontinental railroad in terms of continental imperialism is to understand the United States of America as an imperial state" (33).

The historical chapters of Empire's Tracks serve primarily to illustrate these concepts by showing how "railroad colonialism" (40) affected three Indigenous nations (Lakota, Pawnee, and...