Necropolis

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 I term “immunocapital.” 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 Black people, 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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Awards and Accolades

2023 American Historical Association’s Prize in American History, given biennially for the Best First or Second book in American history (formerly the Dunning Prize).

2023 Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the Best First Book in US History from the Organization of American Historians. (Honorable Mention Merle Curti Social History Award for the Best Book in US Social History).

2023 Humanities Book of the Year Award, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities

2023 James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

2023 Francis B. Simkins Award, co-winner, awarded biennially for the Best First Book in Southern History from the Southern Historical Association

2023 Kemper and Leila William Prize for the Best Book in Louisiana History from the Louisiana Historical Association and the Historic New Orleans Collection

2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Humanities, Association of American Publishers

2023 PROSE Award in North American and U.S. History, Association of American Publishers

2023 Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, co-winner, for an outstanding first monograph on any historical subject from the PCB-AHA

2024 Louisiana Literary Award from the Louisiana Library Association

Immunocapitalism

  • “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

  • “Briskly interweaving the economic, environmental, social, and medical aspects of this story, 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.”

    ―Publisher’s Weekly