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Necropolis - Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Hardcover)
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Necropolis - Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Hardcover)
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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.
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