Replanting a Slave Society: The Sugar and Cotton Revolutions in the Lower Mississippi Valley by Patrick Luck (review)

Abstract

all. Slavery itself, and not Blackness, they insisted, had conferred immunity on enslaved people. There is much to admire about Olivarius’s book. She shows how a circle of acclimated white male politicians timed elections to coincide with the yellow fever season, ensuring that a larger percentage of voters would be acclimated themselves (and thus would have little interest in using public funds to control the disease). She demonstrates the ways elites took advantage of a deadly disease to maintain a strict social stratification among acclimated whites, unacclimated whites, and nonwhites. A somewhat puzzling omission in this other wise elegant book is the lack of explanation or analy sis of the images in its pages; attention to these images would have added to the richness of the book. That aside, Necropolis is an excellent addition to the lit er a ture on disease, politics, and power, and makes impor tant contributions to each of these areas.