The Race Makers

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, Christianity began to lose its jurisdiction over the European story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. Instead, raw material was increasingly processed by thinkers with a secular mindset who claimed the right to rethink the category of the human. Why did so many of these pivotal thinkers, who championed tolerance and civil liberties, become intent on dividing the human species into racial categories and limiting natural rights to Europeans?

In The Race Makers, noted biographer Andrew S. Curran explores the evolution of these ideas through telling the lives of fourteen pivotal figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant and Jefferson. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, this sweeping narrative not only reveals how the Enlightenment's Promethean quest intertwined with systems of oppression and empire, but also offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the era's most famous luminaries.