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

manu karuka's Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad is an original history of the building of the transcontinental railroad that examines entangled colonialisms of the past and provides an anticolonial prospectus for the future. Empire's Tracks does not rehearse a triumphalist story of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad monopolies carving through the wilderness but centers instead the histories of Native Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne peoples whose lands and lifeways the railroads defaced and the immigrant Chinese who razed the mountains and laid the tracks. Separate chapters on the Lakota, Chinese, Pawnee, and Cheyenne communities demonstrate that Native and migrant people did not experience violence, dispossession, and exploitation in identical ways but that all were challenged and endured destruction by the railroad monopolies.

Karuka's account refuses the more familiar liberal historiography of American exceptionalism that promises freedom through liberal democracy and progress through capitalist development, and in doing so, the author advances a number of bold arguments. First, Karuka's analysis contributes to the work on racial capitalism by deepening our appreciation of the centrality of settler colonialism to the building of U.S. economic development. As Cedric Robinson explained, there was never a "pure" capitalism separate from the racial, gendered, and colonial differentiation of subjects and collectivities; actually existing capitalism operates precisely through these uneven formations and is lived and challenged through acknowledging them. Karuka emphasizes that the building of the railroads exemplified the "differentiated unity" of racial capitalism, and because it operated through interrelated modes to dispossess some, destroy others, and extract labor from others, it must be addressed and countered through historically differentiated modes of relation as well (xii). Karuka's work rereads a key chapter in the longue durée of racial capitalism in which the multiple contradictions of settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty and of forced migration and racialized labor converge and come to the fore.

Second, Empire's Tracks not only puts the history of Chinese railroad workers in relation to Native Americans but also provincializes North American railroad colonialism by placing it within the context of global nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, which was taking place across the imperial core in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery. Building on the spoils of racial colonial slavery and utilizing unfree Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, and Native labor, railroads were laid across the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia from the 1850s through the 1870s, accelerating the global expansion of capitalism through settler-colonial dispossession and racialized unfree labor.

Third, Karuka traces the emergence of the U.S. railroads with the U.S. military, which needed to transport army supplies and personnel. This convergence of the priorities of capitalism and militarism solidified collaborations between state and corporate industry in a formative moment that Karuka terms the "war-finance nexus" of U.S. empire, which begins continentally but extends globally (82). The building of the transcontinental railroad marked the wedding of state powers of war and corporate capitalism and enabled a systematic reordering of global relations through colonial war and appropriation, industrial capitalism, racialized labor, and finance capital, whose aftermaths and catastrophes we struggle against today.

In Empire's Tracks, Karuka consults an impressive range of archival materials, from corporate archives of railroad companies to military archives and Indian Bureau papers and from consular archives to oral histories. He also draws significantly from Indigenous women's work, and in one of the most inspirational chapters, he thinks with Ella Deloria, Sarah Winnemucca, and Winona LaDuke to examine the ways that railroad capitalism was a gendered expropriation that interrupted Indigenous relationships to land, water, foodways, and kinship and transformed Indigenous resources into capitalist revenue. While railroads "revolutionized" U.S. industrial production, for Indigenous people, the railroads transformed abundance into scarcity and interdependence into isolation. Karuka pays respects to Deloria's, Winnemucca's, and LaDuke's ideas of intergenerational collective relationships that sustain modes of relationship and counter colonial warfare.

Empire's Tracks...