Decolonization has reached many fields, expanding its traditional boundaries beyond European empires in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the developing world. Still, few studies link decolonization's historical processes across empire's nation-bound spaces. Manu Karuka's Empire's Tracks is an ambitious, provocative work that addresses this gap by arguing that Native Americans, Chinese migrants, and transcontinental US railroads produced significant imperial connections and anticolonial contestations across nineteenth-century North America and the Pacific Rim. While Empire's Tracks falls short of its ambitions, it offers insights that should be of interest to its main audience in ethnic and American studies, as well as historians, anthropologists, and scholars in related fields.
Reframing the United States’ transcontinental railroads as “railroad colonialism” practiced by the US state and railroad corporations, Karuka's book, which explicitly takes on an “anti-imperialist imperative,” hinges on three concepts (pp. xiv–xv). First, there is “continental imperialism,” the notion that the United States is best approached not as a national territory, but as an imperial one whose boundaries are constantly renegotiated across US, Native American, and Chinese sociopolitical lines. Second, the book subverts US state and corporate authority by analyzing them as reactive agents of “countersovereignty”: military counterinsurgency, coercive labor regimes, and other defensive responses to actual Indigenous sovereignty over the United States’ claimed periphery. Finally, the book explores the transcontinental-spoked West as “modes of relationship” (p. 20). Adapting Marxist theory, Karuka emphasizes that Native Americans, Chinese workers, US soldiers, and other white railroad actors’ social relations were mediated by competing Indigenous and US approaches to capital, broadly defined as land, nature, and people—from the Great Plains, bison, and Indigenous communities to railroad concessions, cattle, and white settlers.
Empire's Tracks proceeds in nine chapters. Scaffolding the book, at its front and back, are four chapters that advance its theoretical claims through discourse analysis, based on scholarly literature, settler memoirs, legal rulings, and Indigenous feminist and left-wing intellectual writings (including Sioux ethnographer Ella Deloria, environmental activist Winona LaDuke, and Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin). At the core of Empire's Tracks are five narrative-driven chapters, deploying the book's concepts in separate case studies: US railroads, the Lakota, Chinese, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Harnessing the book's findings, Karuka concludes by critiquing and substituting US-centered imperial notions of territory, governance, and capitalism—“shareholder whiteness” (p. 149), Karuka coins this counterhegemonic analysis—with Indigenous-centered ones. Instead of Frederick Jackson Turner's classic thesis positing the Western frontier as a democratic civilization-making process, Karuka argues that the West requires reimagination around “Indigenous nationhood”–centered diplomacy, self-determination, community, and other forms of Indigenous internationalism reaching out to Asia and other colonial spaces (pp. 184–86).
Part manifesto, part monograph, Empire's Tracks has several strengths. Its framing is conceptually and geographically bold. By reading Native Americans in the same frame as Chinese diaspora and global empire, the book recasts the transcontinental railroad and its human actors in fresh, suggestive ways. Confronting the imperial nature of US archives, resulting in the erasure and distortion of Indigenous and Chinese perspectives, the book relies creatively “on speculation as a method” (p. 3). Aligned with new scholarship stressing the precarity of US political authority in the West's diverse, intractable territories, Empire's Tracks at its best reads against the grain of official and popular records to expose the anxious presence, and contrary perspective, of Native American and Chinese peoples living and working with railroads which were “joint project[s]” (p. 145) of US nation building, capitalist development, and military occupation of native lands. Karuka's close readings of popular rumors, business concerns, and social perceptions (and misperceptions) among Native Americans and other actors vividly portray both sides of the capitalist-imperialist divide along long-mythologized US railroads.
At its least convincing, however, Empire's Tracks is empirically thin and theoretically gimmicky. Its constant pleas to see “countersovereignty” and other theoretical entities strain credulity. Such flaws reflect the book's difficult source base; but they also arise from its highly self-referential, rigid analytical framework, which often seems awkwardly imposed on the shifting, complex historical realities at the heart of Empire's Tracks.
These weaknesses stem from the book's ambitious scope and its historiographical assumptions. Rather than a monograph, it resembles a set of discrete essays that deal unevenly with its broad subject. Strongest on US military encounters with Native Americans, it is less attentive to the state, railroad firms, and social connections among Native Americans and Chinese. The book's transpacific links are its weakest. Aside from a few anecdotes on Chinese–Native American convergences through trade and war, Chinese migrants figure distantly as capitalist pawns, victims of racism, and working-class enemies. Though hardly Karuka's intention, Empire's Tracks’ transpacific thinness relates back to its relentlessly anticapitalist and anticolonial interpretations. Chinese selling medicine to Paiutes, Paiutes protesting Chinese immigration; Native Americans gone “white” and white soldiers gone “native”; US-trained Pawnee scouts killing Lakotas and anti-treaty Cheyenne killing pro-treaty Cheyenne—these examples, trotted out by the author though well known in the larger historiography, indicate more fluid, vexing categories and actors than the book's overarching claims of “indigenous nations” engaged in “anticolonial insurgency” (p. 147).
Still, Empire's Tracks is a welcome addition to a new literature. It should be especially instructive for those seeking to connect Native Americans, Chinese, and transpacific actors in new, intersectional ways. That it raises questions only speaks to its acute questioning of official narratives and sources—and the field's need for more work on the many unpredictable paths that empire and decolonization took within and across national boundaries.
