Necropolis
Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Winner of James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, SHEAR
Winner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History
Winner of the Humanities Book of the Year Award, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
“A brilliant book…This transformative work is a pivotal addition to the scholarship on American slavery.”
—Annette Gordon-Reed
“A stunning account of ‘high-risk, high-reward’ profiteering in the yellow fever–ridden Crescent City…a world in which a deadly virus altered every aspect of a brutal social system, exacerbating savage inequalities of enslavement, race, and class.”
—John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions
“Olivarius’s new perspectives on yellow fever, immunocapitalism, and the politics of acclimation…will influence a generation of scholars to come on the intersections of racism, slavery, and public health.”
—The Lancet
In antebellum New Orleans, at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms, epidemics of yellow fever killed as many as 150,000 people. With little understanding of the origins of the illness—and meager public health infrastructure—one’s only hope if infected was to survive, providing the lucky few with a mysterious form of immunity. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans’s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, a form of “immunocapital,” as white survivors leveraged their immunity to pursue economic and political advancement while enslaved Blacks were relegated to the most grueling labor.
The question of health—who has it, who doesn’t, and why—is always in part political. Necropolis shows how powerful nineteenth-century Orleanians constructed a society that capitalized on mortal risk and benefited from the chaos that ensued.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stanford University historian Olivarius debuts with a captivating account of how endemic yellow fever terrorized early 19th-century New Orleans, killing some 150,000 residents and intensifying social inequality in ways that remained long after the virus and its mosquito vector came under control. Even though roughly half of those who contracted yellow fever died, residents of the bustling port city sought "acclimation"—the liberty gained by surviving the disease and achieving permanent immunity. White survivors used this status to bolster their social advancement, framing successful acclimation as proof of their racial superiority. The false claim that Black people were naturally immune to the disease was made to justify their continued use as enslaved workers on sugar cane plantations and other places where the virus was known to lurk. According to Olivarius, white elites profited from the "chaos and personal horror" caused by yellow fever and suppressed information about the disease in order to "keep attracting men of capital, talent, or wealth to the Gulf Coast." Briskly interweaving the economic, environmental, social, and medical aspects of this story, Olivarius illuminates the complex workings of "immunocapitalism" and paints a vivid picture of antebellum New Orleans. This is a timely and thought-provoking look at how disease outbreaks have exacerbated inequality in America.
