Empire’s Tracks begins with a rather invigorating promise to deliver a political economy of the colonial American West, one that staunchly refuses to give in to “phenomenological” accounts of pre-colonized life. In a sense, this is true – when Karuka actually gets into the historical registers of the Pawnee, Cheyenne, Paiutes, and Lakota nations, along with Chinese laborers on the Central Pacific spur of the transcontinental trunk line, the sheer amount of historical information assembled here is impressive, especially given the difficulty in uncovering this information (for the usual reasons: what colonizer is writing down anything of note about the populations they’re genociding?). Additionally, Empire’s Tracks is to be celebrated for never losing site of the fundamentals of private property creation in the frontier context. The railroads, for Karuka, are less about transportation than common wisdom may hold, and more an advancing army, quick-and-dirty surveying machine, and finally money printer. The common practice of the railroads of receiving federal grants for railroad building (commonly, 200 feet on either side of the line itself to accommodate stations and necessary plant) provided not just a boom in land speculation for the railroads but also a de facto expropriation of native lands in areas where, legally and militarily, the federal government had no authority whatsoever. Karuka is concerned a great deal with what he calls “countersovereignty” as a practice, best displayed in the sense shown here, as a colonial and reactionary claim which only mutely acknowledges existing claims in order to float other, more defined, and more forcefully backed claims of private property. Another example can be found in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty between the Lakota and the United States, updated in the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, in which the US representatives effectively argued to make Lakota lands “public” and thereby gift them to the Pacific Railroad for the construction of a rail line through Lakota territory. There is an implicit acknowledgement required on the part of the federal government of an initial ownership, in some sense or form.
However, one wonders what the point actually is. Karuka is not clear on whether this is supposed to be indicative of some true relational ownership on the part of the Lakota, acknowledged only to be swept away, like a sniper sighting his victim. This gives over to broader concerns about method and concept that act as ballast on the work’s overall prodigious approach to history. “Countersovereignty” is one of these, and in my opinion, by far the weakest. The second is “modes of relationship”, intended to be read in the form of the classic Marxist “modes of (re)production” catechism, likewise intended to indicate some primordial social truth enjoyed and experienced and regularly developed by native nations prior to its interruption by colonial invaders. It is here, in fact, I think the promise of an aversion to the phenomenological is truly broken, and while stammering in a Marxist vein no less. It is telling that here Karuka retreats into a literary critique, or more literary celebration, of relevant fictional novels to illustrate his modes of relationship, intended to “[shift] emphasis of a critique of political economy from the production and reproduction of capital to the production and reproduction of relationships”. Here, we get a rather classic distinction between the ordered, ghastly reign of capital and a supposedly diluvian, raucous lifeworld now lost – exactly the truck of phenomological approaches. In a more practical sense, when he hearkens to the Lakotas’ modes of relationship as the “strongest obstacle to the expansion of capitalism and US sovereignty on the Plains”, this is at best misleading and at worst insulting. The Lakota did not meet the genocidal military force of a nascent empire with peace and community! They met it on the battlefield! And, by most accounts, they won, and the Treaty of 1868 can be seen as an attempt for the US government to buy time by suing for peace, requiring the government, the railroads, and a horde of rapacious white settlers backed by the guns of empire and the capital of Europe to pursue other avenues for the Lakotas’ destruction.
Finally, Empire’s Tracks derives quite a bit a mileage from the political economic concept of the “war-finance nexus” which is, you’ll imagine, exactly what it sounds like. Here, my quibble is much smaller – while, reading charitably, we may say that war and finance are the undisputed speartips of frontier advance across the continent (the former in the sense of the US Army, the latter in the sense of the speculative bonds and stocks employed to pay out credit for the railroads’ project of vast fixed capital outlays), but I fail to see the utility in pulling these away from a) capitalism understood as a totality, to be considered in complementary isolation and b) as activities without motors, agents, institutions backing them up. The US state prosecuted the war with relish. Corporations and capitals made their new territorial holdings worth something, quite literally. This was a period of a grandiose, perfectly-oiled working relationship between the corporation and the politician (and one man may occupy both roles many times in his life), both desperate to realize the vast continental interior as a plaything for imperial might by way of capital accumulation undertaken on a scale that was, perhaps, historically unprecedented. But what falls out of the insistence upon the existence of a discrete war-finance nexus is the embeddedness of both within capitalist entities during their imperial phase. At no point were both ends in themselves – they were simply strategic options, two trophies in the near-infinite imperial armory – but the end was, and always is, capital accumulation. This appears between the lines throughout the book, most especially in the account of Chinese labor – where a unity between Chinese merchants/labor recruiters in mainland China may collude with the railroads to provide labor, and Chinese headmen and cooks collaborate with white overseers to starve out strikers in July 1864, and where these same interests unite to influence US immigration policy, the officials of San Francisco ports, the Pawnee and other native nations staring down the barrel of the advancing transcontinental line, and finally, where Chinese laborers are commanded by the hundreds to their deaths in catacombs in the Sierra Navadas. If accumulation is missing from the war-finance nexus, this goes double for the driver of accumulation: labor.