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Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom - Paperback | Diverse Reads

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

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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.

ISBN-13: 9780674295551

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Belknap Press

Publication Date: 04-01-2024

Pages: 352

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.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Introduction: A Rising Necropolis 1

1 Patriotic Fever 28

2 Danse Macabre 71

3 Immunocapital 114

4 Public Health, Private Acclimation 154

5 Denial, Delusion, and Disunion 195

6 Incumbent Arrogance 231

Epilogue: Fever and Folly 259

Abbreviations 265

Notes 267

Acknowledgments 327

Index 331