Professor Selda Altan (Randolph College)
Selda Altan is Associate Professor of History at Randolph College. She specializes in labor history, colonialism, and comparative empires. Her research examines the experiences of Chinese workers in transnational and imperial contexts, with a particular focus on labor markets, migration, and capitalist development.

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.