Selda Altan, "Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway" (Stanford UP, 2024)

New Books in Economic and Business History · May 21, 2025 · 53m

Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects. While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway (Stanford UP, 2024) explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China through an examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898-1910. The Yunnan railway--a French investment in imperial China during the age…