The Race Makers: A History of the Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Legacy

Andrew S. Curran Hardback, 512 pages 9781908906632 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. Contents PART ONE: RACE BEFORE THE ADVENT OF RACE 1. Louis XIV: King of the Slaves 2. Jean-Baptiste Labat: The Priestly Ethnographer PART TWO: THE NEW ANIMAL: MAN 3. François Bernier: The First Classifier 4. Carl Linnaeus: The Botanist Who Transformed Man into an Animal PART THREE: RACE GETS A HISTORY 5. Buffon: The Man Who Put Humans in Time 6. Voltaire: The Philosophe Who Made Racism Dröle 7. The Scots and Stage Theory: David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and William Robertson PART FOUR: RACE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 8. Kant and Blumenbach and the German Definition of Race 9. Thomas Jefferson: Nation Builder, Race Builder EPILOGUE: ENTER THE ANTIRACISTS