Details

ISBN-10: 0674295552
ISBN-13: 9780674295551
Publisher: Belknap Press
Publish Date: 04/01/2024
Dimensions: 0.00" L, 0.00" W, 0.00" H

Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom

Paperback

Price: $21.95

Overview

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.

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Reviews
This book is prescient for the questions it provokes about our experiences of COVID-19...Necropolis shows how elite white people exploited disease in this uniquely unhealthy space for their own personal gain...Olivarius's new perspectives on yellow fever, immunocapitalism, and the politics of acclimation are a powerful addition to this important body of scholarship that will influence a generation of scholars to come on the intersections of racism, slavery, and public health.–Richard M. Mizelle, Jr. "The Lancet" (10/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)
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Details

ISBN-10: 0674295552
ISBN-13: 9780674295551
Publisher: Belknap Press
Publish Date: 04/01/2024
Dimensions: 0.00" L, 0.00" W, 0.00" H
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