Overview

In the early eighteenth century, Christianity began to lose its hold on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance and emerging biological ideas did not simply disappear. Instead, secular thinkers reshaped them as they looked to redefine what it meant to be human. By century's end, naturalists and philosophers had divided humankind into racial categories using methods associated with the Enlightenment era. In The Race Makers, Enlightenment specialist Andrew S. Curran traces the emergence of race through thirteen pivotal figures, including Louis XIV, Buffon, Carl Linnaeus, Voltaire, David Hume, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson. From the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, and from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, Curran reveals how the pursuit of knowledge became entangled with and often drove systems of empire and oppression. The result is a bold reappraisal of the Enlightenment's most celebrated luminaries. Combining rigorous scholarship with vivid storytelling, The Race Makers offers a sweeping and unsettling account of how modern concepts of race were born and why they still matter.

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9781908906632

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Reviews

‘[A] brilliant study … Curran concludes by spotlighting Black intellectuals of the era in a fascinating counter-history. A thorough and eminently readable dissection of a pernicious lie.’ * Publishers Weekly, Starred Review *

Author Information

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. His work explores the intersections of race, science and Enlightenment thought, and has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Time Magazine. He is the author of The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment; Who's Black and Why? (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), nominated for an NAACP image award; and Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, named one of the best biographies of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, The Australian and The Irish Times.

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