The Race Makers: A History of the Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Legacy

by Andrew S. Curran

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.

Kindle Edition

Published February 10, 2026

About the author

Andrew Curran is the author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019), named one of the best biographies of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews. Curran is also the author of The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Era of Enlightenment, which was A Choice Outstanding Academic Title and also received the 2018 Louis Marin Prize from the French l’Académie des sciences d’outre-mer). He has also published in the New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He is currently working on a project on the birth of race that is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Curran lives in Connecticut where he is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities and Professor of French at Wesleyan University.