The first transcontinental railroad in North America, built between 1863 and 1869, drove the territorialization of the U.S. West, accelerating the velocity of westward expansion in the aftermath of the Civil War. Railroad tracks from Omaha to Sacramento sutured the Union and settled the ground for the spread of industrial capitalism. Trains moving on these tracks propelled social and economic revolutions in the relationship between space and time. If the transcontinental railroad was the engine of this history, this dissertation argues that American Indian dispossession and Chinese migrant labor constituted its motor.;This dissertation reframes the production of the transcontinental railroad through Chinese, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne histories, revealing the experiences of indigenous peoples and racialized migrants as centrally productive of expanding industrial capitalism, unsettling American Studies and the history of capitalism at the core. This perspective recasts the relationships between North and South, White and Black, and Capitalism and Slavery, which organize these fields, instead foregrounding questions of political and economic autonomy across imperial encounters. Moving beyond the confines of a national frame, these chapters follow the development of U.S. westward expansion in relation to histories of imperialism in Asia and North America.;The railroad, as a vehicle of industrial colonization, generated crises of social reproduction in each of these communities, and their navigations of these crises shaped the ultimate production of the railroad itself. The industrial capitalism that coursed across the Plains along railroad tracks was always, already, racial capitalism. In this analysis, international diplomacy, military policies, and labor control in the nineteenth century U.S. West were forged in response to the lives and struggles of displaced and excluded peoples, leaving an indelible imprint whose traces continue to endure, long after the first trains crossed North America.
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