Railroad Colonialism
Slavery
In the United States, core institutional forms of plantation, corporation, and frontier post often blended in the same entity. The construction of a rail network in the southern United States relied on enslaved Black women, children, and men. The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, in 1856, would have ranked the sixth largest plantation in Virginia, and the Southwestern Railroad in 1850 would have been the third largest plantation in Georgia. The enslaved, for their part, responded to the situation with the full ensemble of actions in plantation settings, including running away. In addition to cotton, trains shipped captives for the internal slave trade. Train depots across the Upper South were places of terror, violation, and grief for Black people being wrenched southward. Jacob Stroyer remembered a train arriving at a depot, “when the noise of the cars had died away, we heard wailing and shrieks from those in the cars.” On the train itself, enslaved people were often forced to ride in the dangerous, hot, noisy car behind the engine. Brazilian rail projects relied on slave labor through the 1860s, and British-controlled railway companies continued to purchase slaves decades after the British abolition of the slave trade.[1]
Turtle Island
The first phase of railroad colonialism began in 1812, lasting until 1855, primarily in North America and South Asia. The United States granted its first railroad charter, for a line linking the Delaware and Raritan Rivers, less than a month after the Battle of New Orleans. Over the years of railroad expansion, the United States would organize twenty-four states, half before the Civil War, the other half, prior to large-scale settlement, after the war. The vast bulk of the space claimed as domestic territory by the continental United States was incorporated during the era of railroad building.
The earliest technical labor for U. S. railroads originated in the U. S. Army. Amid a shortage in engineers, U. S. railroad companies turned to engineers from West Point, who surveyed more than twenty railroads between 1827 and 1838. Many of these engineers would leave the army to work directly for railroad companies, some of them moving on to supervise railroad construction in other empires. The U. S. Army is one place to look for the rise of management bureaucracies and administrative hierarchies, both understood as hallmarks of the industrial corporation. The history of the corporation cannot be separated from the history of colonial warfare. By the early 1840s, amidst debates about the support of frontier garrisons, railway promoters in the United States began sketching out railway networks for the occupation of Indigenous lands, blending military and real estate logics. Railroad promoters anticipated the exchange value of Indigenous lands, even before the onset of colonial jurisdiction.[1]
Fort Laramie Treaty
From 1873 to the late 1880s, an international financial crisis led to the direct management of railroads by imperial states. Bookended by insurgency on the North American Plains and in Sudan, it was a period of territorialization through military administration, in which railroad labor around the colonized world was organized in work gangs, using rudimentary tools. The onset of the Panic of 1873, triggering a five-year, systemic economic crisis, coincided with the collapse of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which had been sold to investors for its military utility, the railroad’s charter baldly contradicting the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Lakota military resistance to the illegal occupation of their lands triggered the collapse of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The resolution of the ensuing global financial crisis would lie in railroad construction in African colonies, followed by China. In 1871, the rival Southern Pacific Railroad had announced that it would employ Chinese laborers, spiking Southern Pacific bond sales, and the Crédit Mobilier scandal broke in 1872, exposing the capture of U. S. federal debt for Union Pacific Railroad construction by private interests. These investments remade the continent, isolating and transforming Indigenous places into productive spaces for capital accumulation. After the 1873 crash, Freedmen’s savings banks and cotton prices followed the tightening credit, hastening the concretization of debt peonage across slavery’s heartland.[1]
India
The late 1840s saw the beginnings of railroad colonialism in India, where, between 1845 and 1875, taxes levied on Indians guaranteed 5 percent returns on British investments of about £95 million in Indian railroads. “Public debts,” Hobson noted, “ripened in the colonies.” During these years, the East India Company inoculated its shareholders from risk through land grants and supplies of cheap labor alongside guarantees on investments, while claiming powers to supervise and control the railways. Railroads transformed India into a captive market for British capital. British manufacturers lobbied for state support of Indian railroads, to enable the shipping of mass-produced British textiles into the interior, pushing for cotton cultivation in western India in order to drive down U. S. cotton prices. After the end of the U. S. Civil War, British cotton manufacturers switched back from Indian short staple cotton to the long staple cotton of Alabama and Louisiana, prompting financial collapses in Bombay. Through 1924, colonial railroad policy in India stipulated the purchase of rails, locomotives, and nonspecialized track fittings from British manufacturers, providing a sphere for the circulation of idle British capital. Railway debts alone made up over half of Indian debt. While railways in India played a major role in the destruction of artisanal industries, especially in textiles, the colonial monopoly also arrested the emergence of machine and heavy industries in India.[1]
Militarism
From the late 1850s through the early 1870s, corporate management began to cohere from military origins, to oversee the movement and containment of people in colonized space. Railroad building in North America and South Asia occurred through the war-finance nexus, breathing life into imperialism. War over slavery’s futures took place on railroads. The U. S. Civil War primed the pump for railroad expansion in North America, both in financial and spatial terms, with the U. S. rail network expanding by almost 35,000 miles by the end of the war. Northern railroads posted regular and secure profits over the course of the war. This was the first war to regularly employ railroads for massive and rapid troop movements, using rails to supply troops deep in enemy territory. By the end of the war, rail sabotage by retreating soldiers, haphazard repairs, and occupying forces left the southern rail network in massive disrepair. Rebuilding this infrastructure would be a key task of reconstruction, an arena of struggle over the meaning of emancipation.
The development of a managerial class and the expansion of a bureaucratic and professionally administered state, in the years afterwards, reflected lessons of using railroads for war. The war facilitated the rise of a generation of military leaders, such as Grenville Dodge and William Sherman, who would deploy railroads for the invasion and occupation of Indigenous lands in the coming decades. While military officials looked to railroads for control over territory, U. S. railroad corporations drew upon military resources in the pursuit of financial profit. U. S. officials were keenly aware of how railroads remade Indigenous ecologies. Interior Secretary Jacob Cox remarked in 1870 that “the building of the Union Pacific Railroad has driven the buffalo from their former hunting grounds.” Significant post–Civil War railroad construction in the United States can be organized into two groups: five transcontinental lines that capitalized vast territories functionally under Indigenous control, and four “Granger” lines that transformed the Plains into a global supply center of pork, beef, and grain. Post–Civil War railroads extended U. S. jurisdiction on a continental scale through military occupation, remaking Indigenous prairie lands through an economy revolving around meat and grain exports, providing the caloric basis for imperialism.[1]