A riveting history of the Enlightenment figures who shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.

In the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its jurisdiction over the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly “processed” by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the human. By century’s end, naturalists and classifiers had divided the human species into racial categories using methods that we now associate with the Enlightenment era.

In The Race Makers, prize-winning biographer and specialist of the Enlightenment Andrew S. Curran retells this story through the medium of group biography. Written more like a detective story than traditional history, the book traces the emergence of race through the lives of 14 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 ultimate Promethean quest intertwined with systems of oppression and empire, but also offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the era’s most famous luminaries.