Werezi Books

A gripping reassessment of the Enlightenment, exploring how leading thinkers who championed liberty also shaped modern racial ideologies – tracing their lives across empires, plantations, and palaces in a powerful story of ideas, power and exclusion.

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 Makersoffers a sweeping and unsettling account of how modern concepts of race were born – and why they still matter.

‘An illuminating intellectual biography of ''race'' ... Curran reveals the fascinating stories of the men who crafted it into being, and the impact of their actions on the lives of millions.’ Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

‘Andrew Curran, one of the foremost authorities on this subject, offers a necessary and illuminating exploration of eighteenth-century debates on race. Composed of a series of insightful biographies, this highly readable work uncovers the complexities and contradictions that shaped the views of the Enlightenment’s major thinkers. A clear-eyed book that challenges caricatures on all sides.’

‘In this immensely informative and highly readable inquiry into the origins of Enlightenment thinking about race, Curran demonstrates that ideas cannot be understood apart from the people who produced them. This is intellectual biography performed at the very highest level.’

‘This book is urgently needed. It restores vitality to the story of how race became a dominant political and scientific idea, extending familiar narratives with provocative new detail. The Race Makers energizes a critical history of the idea of racial hierarchy – and shows that alternatives to raciality exist.’ Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack

‘As wonderfully accessible as it is meticulously researched, Andrew Curran’s The Race Makers relates the birth of the modern concept of race through the personal stories of the Enlightenment figures who helped shape it. The book is a true gift for readers who seek to understand this complicated story.’

‘Cleverly crafted and well executed. Curran provides a collection of unflinching portraits of complex figures from the “Enlightenment Era” who have contributed to the troubling and troublesome concept of race. Readers are treated to a careful recounting and reconstruction of the contexts and contingencies that shaped each figure’s life, as well as candid assessments of their investment into systems that oppressed and denied the humanity of so many. This is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived at our present understanding of race. It is sweeping, it is stunning, and hard to put down.’

''The story of an idea as dangerous as race is one that few are brave enough to tell. In thirteen sparkling biographical cameos, Andrew Curran – sharp-eyed intellectual historian and large-hearted storyteller – takes us on a journey to the dark side of the Enlightenment, introducing us to the men whose ideas contributed to unimaginable suffering, but whose ideals still infuse our hope for change.''

‘In this penetrating and elegant study, Andrew Curran goes beyond the world of disembodied ideas, delving into the lives of the flesh-and-blood men whose actions and writings forged modern racial thought. Following thirteen race makers across Europe and its American colonies, this first and much-needed biographical history of race reveals the Enlightenment’s deepest contradictions and enduring legacies.’

‘The Race Makers further cements Curran as one of our greatest scholars. In this vitally important, beautifully crafted book … which reads more like a novel than most works of history, is essential reading for our own fraught times.’ Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race

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