Transported to Botany Bay: class, national identity, and the literary figure of the Australian convict

Abstract

mated status prized and precarious. In other words, immunocapital was much like other forms of capital in the nineteenth century, inherently suspect and unstable. Similarly, Necropolis and the nineteenth-century residents of New Orleans side-stepped the oft-discussed contagionist debates of the era by simply ignoring any attempt to stop the ailment. Not only did New Orleans refuse quarantine (the contagionist approach) and sanitation (the anticontagionists’ favorite) but ridiculed those who tried to avoid the presumably inevitable disease. Those with proven immunity could leave during the epidemics but those like newly-arrived Sylvester Larned in 1819 faced harsh criticism for attempting to avoid the disease by leaving and refusing to face acclimation (Olivarius 2022, 71–73). No white newcomer could truly become part of the city without accepting the rules of immunocapitalism: acclamation, resistance to structural improvement, and support of race-based slavery. Throughout the book Olivarius implicitly and explicitly tells her audience that yellow fever mattered deeply in New Orleans, shaped notions of belonging, and created racial categories. The threat of sickness or death, survival, and racialized experiences around the virus shaped the city and its society. Understanding the power of immunocapital in New Orleans matters not only to historians of medicine or public health, but to anyone who considers the role of the city, cotton, or slavery in American history. Moreover, her inclusion of individual stories, clear narration, and general lack of jargon makes it an excellent example of a book that can successfully be read across subfields.