The Race Makers

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 – they were reworked by secular thinkers seeking 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, award-winning biographer and Enlightenment specialist Andrew S. Curran traces the emergence of race through thirteen pivotal figures, including Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant and 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 Enlightenment’s pursuit of knowledge became entangled with systems of empire and oppression, offering a bold reappraisal of the era’s most famous luminaries.