Empire's Tracks

"Challenges existing scholarship and fields of study in profound ways. He transforms what, on its surface, appears to be a national American story into one of international, imperialist, and colonial history by reading contingency against assumed outcomes; decentering national creation myths; and foregrounding alternative Indigenous, Chinese, and other voices. In this, Karuka offers a case study for scholars of diplomatic history or international relations to turn inward to national histories they might otherwise overlook and consider new ways of bringing their expertise to seemingly domestic stories."

— H-Net

"This fascinating, sophisticated book on the transcontinental railroad will produce more critical thinking on the part of readers than any railroad history they have ever read. Manu Karuka exposes the pageant of American exploration, expansion, engineering, and entrepreneurship as an imperialist project fueled by disturbing historical processes—Indigenous land expropriation, immigrant labor exploitation, and a “war-finance nexus”—but mythologized for a century thereafter as national destiny and Yankee ingenuity."

— Journal of Arizona History

"Empire’s Tracks is impressive in its complexity, ambition, and ability to intertwine multiple processes in nineteenth-century continental history."
 

— Western Historical Quarterly

"Empire’s Tracks serves as an invitation to recontextualize colonial narratives within the silences and erasures inherent in these narratives, uncovering and decolonizing communities of knowledge and relationship through the careful study of archives, rumors, oral histories, literary representations, maps, and collective memories."

— Great Plains Quarterly

"Karuka provides an essential critique of U.S. political economy, adding layers to Asian settler colonial history and the Chinese railroad worker narrative."

— Journal of Asian American Studies

"Karuka’s account refuses the more familiar liberal historiography of American exceptionalism that promises freedom through liberal democracy and progress through capitalist development, and in doing so, the author advances a number of bold arguments."

— Native American and Indigenous Studies