Necropolis

Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom

Necropolis
Kathryn Olivarius
RRP:
NZ$ 68.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 58.64
Hardback
h235 x 156mm - 352pg
29 Apr 2022 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780674241053
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Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism. Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America' s slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses-and meager public health infrastructure-a person' s only protection against the scourge was to "get acclimated" by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans' s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms "immunocapital. " As this highly original analysis shows, white survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrue to their white owners. Whereas immunity conferred opportunity and privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor. The question of good health-who has it, who doesn' t, and why-is always in part political. Necropolis shows how powerful nineteenth-century white Orleanians-all allegedly immune-pushed this politics to the extreme. They constructed a society that capitalized mortal risk and equated perceived immunity with creditworthiness and reliability. Instead of trying to curb yellow fever through sanitation or quarantines, immune white Orleanians took advantage of the chaos disease caused. Immunological discrimination therefore became one more form of bias in a society premised on inequality, one more channel by which capital disciplined and divided the population.
A brilliant book. Olivarius' s insightful reading of sources and beautiful writing give us a new and important way to think about slavery, race, health, and hierarchy. This transformative work is a pivotal addition to the scholarship on American slavery. -- Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth Olivarius delivers a stunning account of ' high-risk, high-reward' profiteering in the yellow fever-ridden Crescent City. Nineteenth-century New Orleans appears as a world in which a deadly virus altered every aspect of a brutal social system, exacerbating savage inequalities of enslavement, race, and class-inequalities that will have readers pondering the choices we make as a society in epidemics of our own. -- John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 A real page-turner. Necropolis propels the reader along, not least because the parallels to our coronavirus pandemic are impossible to ignore. Olivarius is convincing in her argument that disease was an important way to wield power-political, economic, and racial. This fresh, beautifully written book makes original contributions to the literatures on medicine, capitalism, politics, and welfare. -- Leslie M. Harris, author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 In flowing prose, Olivarius offers an intriguing account of the systematic relationship between yellow fever and power in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Her innovative term ' immunocapitalism' brings together multiple threads to show the ways in which yellow fever was not simply a natural phenomenon, no matter how much those who profited because of its inequitable impact tried to naturalize it. Deeply researched, extremely well written, and provocatively argued, Necropolis is a rich and fascinating book. -- Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism The remarkable thing about Necropolis is that its subject has been hiding in plain sight all along. In nineteenth-century New Orleans, yellow fever was more than an episodic worry; it saturated everyday consciousness, splitting the world between those who had gained immunity and those who had not. No effort was spared to prove that the scourge' s supposedly deterministic properties not only necessitated African enslavement, but also produced the foreign exchange that kept the urban economy humming. Olivarius unpacks this story with skill and feeling in a book of truly impressive research and scope. -- Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans Captivating. . . 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. * Publishers Weekly *
Kathryn Olivarius is a prizewinning historian of slavery, medicine, and disease whose writing and research has been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American, and the Washington Post. She is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780674241053
Published: 29 Apr 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: The Belknap Press
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 352

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