Empire’s infrastructures: racial finance capitalism and liberal necropolitics

Deborah Cowen has written an illuminating paper on the nineteenth-century making of rail infrastructure and the Canadian metropolis. She connects the dots between the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) and its nodal North American cities on the one hand, and transatlantic finance and its bankrolling by racial slavery and colonialism on the one hand. It is a significant enterprise to write on one topic or the other – that is, on the history of urban infrastructures or on racial capitalism. But Cowen writes into view a global panoramic through which flows of British imperial capital are seen to be connected intimately with the development of rail infrastructure and metropolitan space in settler-colonial Canada.