Empire's Tracks

Reviewed by: Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad by Manu Karuka Justin Shapiro (bio) Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad By Manu Karuka. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. 320. In Empire's Tracks, Manu Karuka reframes the role of the transcontinental railroads in the history of U.S. imperialism. For Karuka, it makes little sense to think of the transcontinentals as binding two halves of an expanding nation, because there is no natural territory of the United States, only colonized territories. The Indigenous nations of the Great Plains understood the transcontinentals as incursions into long established ways of relating to each other and the surrounding environment, replacing those with "ecological and social destruction through the market, constant war, and isolation from existing relationships" (p. 105). In this work, the railroads offer a powerful lens, bringing the intertwined development of imperialism and capitalism—the "war-finance nexus," as Karuka reiterates—into sharp focus. Karuka introduces three major themes to trace how the transcontinentals supported the colonial project. The first is continental imperialism. "There is no 'national' territory of the United States," Karuka writes in the introduction. By accepting the myth of a national territory or national political economy, we continue "to live and think in an ongoing situation of colonial occupation," which requires constant renewal to maintain. The second theme is countersovereignty, the imperial reaction to Indigenous nations, including tactics which undermine and subsume them. The third theme is modes of relationship. Capitalism is one mode of relationship that suppresses all other modes that had developed in specific social and environmental contexts in various Indigenous nations. [End Page 585] Empire's Tracks focuses on the Chinese laborers and Indigenous nations that had to contend with the full force of continental imperialism. The middle chapters describe the Chinese workers and three nations eventually subsumed into the U.S. Empire, detailing their varying relationships with the surrounding landscape, the environment, and each other. Readers will better understand the scale of violence and coercion inherent to the war-finance nexus through the transcontinental railroads. Readers will also learn about resistance to continental imperialism, such as the Cheyenne nation's destruction of railroad lines or the Chinese laborers' 1867 strike for better wages. Empire's Tracks is full of such historical accounts, which punctuate and enliven long sections of rich analysis. Historians of technology will likely ask basic questions about the technological (and perhaps environmental) outcomes of the transcontinental project, which Karuka does not emphasize. Resources that the railroads relied on expanded their reach well beyond the Indigenous nations of the Great Plains. They reoriented the forests and underground ore deposits of the Upper Great Lakes, the vast coal reserves of Appalachia, and other areas across North America towards the new markets created by the transcontinentals. There are clear parallels between Empire's Tracks and established literature in the history of technology, especially pertaining to the environmental and technological changes railroads engendered in the nineteenth century. Making those parallels more explicit would have added depth to an already strong argument and bridged some of the literature on Indigenous history and the history of technology. Empire's Tracks will provide historians of technology with a better understanding of the role of infrastructure, labor, and transportation in imperialism around the world. Karuka demystifies the U.S. imperialist project, thus making a case for the unexceptional nature of colonial infrastructure in the Great Plains. Chapter 3 opens with the sentence, "The United States of America is profoundly unexceptional." Karuka then compares U.S. efforts to control, territorialize, and colonize the Great Plains with similar projects in South America, Africa, and Australia. The transnational history of railroad construction—especially the strategies of countersovereignty shared by global powers—is fertile ground for historians of technology. This chapter points out directions for further research. Throughout this book, Karuka describes continental imperialism as a chain made up of weak links. He offers suggestions for how to challenge countersovereignty, calling for solidarity among the oppressed of the global north and south, pursuit of "infrastructures of decolonization," which can restore ecologically and socially sustainable relationships attuned to regional particularities, and renewed attention

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