The Yunnan–Indochina Railway, a French investment in imperial China during the age of “railroad colonialism,” was designed to link French-colonized Indochina to Chinese markets and to stimulate cross-border trade in tin, silk, tea, and opium. Yet this ambitious project came at a devastating human cost: thousands of Chinese workers lost their lives during its brutal construction.

In this talk, Selda Altan adopts a transnational perspective to situate the railway’s labor conflicts within the broader history of the post-emancipation coolie trade and the emergence of a global labor market. She argues that, long before the Chinese Communist Party cast Chinese workers as the vanguard of revolution in the 1920s, late nineteenth-century Euro-American competition for cheap labor had already given rise to the modern figure of the Chinese worker.