laborers of the See Yup and Teng Wo Companies” included “several hundred” combatants. Rival Chinese work crews clashed, in what the San Francisco Bulletin reported on May 6, 1869, was a “Chinese Tong War.” This “battle between two rival companies of Chinamen. The days leading up to the Golden Spike ceremony offered an instance of the “yellow peril” to America. They invested in the futures of colonialism.
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Investors on colonial railroads invested in more than the futures of railroad corporations. Worker’s struggles developed alongside armed insurgencies and campaigns of industrial sabotage, sometimes blending into struggles for self-determination and freedom. The racial organization and management of industrial labor saw some of the earliest and most significant forms of struggles over wages, technology, and the working day. Railway building, in many parts of the colonized world, augured the introduction of new, hierarchical systems of management tying wages and skills to racial distinctions. In some places, each mile of railroad cost upward of a thousand human lives. Catastrophic death rates littered railroads across the colonized world. British and French imperialists employed horrific work conditions and a wanton carelessness with worker’s lives, categorized as “public works,” to build railroads for the profits of engineering, construction, and steel corporations, and for the reorganization of African societies around cash crop exports. By the early twentieth century, infrastructure development in African colonies involved the impressment of “political labor” to build rail lines in Nigeria and Kenya, two months of forced labor authorized in Uganda to build rails, and compulsory labor on public works in Kenya and Nyasaland. Railroad colonialism was produced through great suffering. Railways enabled the circulation of colonial commodities throughout the imperial core, and even more importantly, they made the large-scale export of financial and industrial capital to the colonies a central feature of global capitalism. Infrastructure, in other words, played a police function, materializing not through liberal universalism, but proliferating distinctions and comparison along the lines of community, nation, race, gender, caste, and respectability. Imperialists across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia built railroads as infrastructures of reaction, as attempts to control the future.
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North American railroads linked with railroads elsewhere in the colonized world. The Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads are manifestations of a broad historical process that I call railroad colonialism. The United States of America is profoundly unexceptional. To understand the transcontinental railroad in terms of continental imperialism is to understand the development of the United States of America as an imperial state. The following adapted excerpts from Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad and Ryan Dearinger’s The Filth of Progress:Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the Westsalvage stories often omitted from the triumphant railroad narrative by focusing on the suffering and survival of the workers who were treated as outsiders. The story of the Transcontinental Railroad cannot be told without recognizing the workers whose labor helped turn the nation’s dreams of a continental empire into a reality.
#Asian build san francisco railroad story series
As we commemorate the 150th anniversary, follow our #TranscontinentalRailroad blog series all week for untold stories of this iconic event. On May 10, 1869, the presidents of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific met in Promontory, Utah and drove a ceremonial last golden spike into a rail line that connected their railroads, linking the United States from shore to shore. history: the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. This May marks 150 years of one of the most pivotal events in U.S.