Immunocapital: Biological Reality or Cultural Myth?

The concept of immunocapital (Olivarius, 2022) enriches our understanding of social and geographic mobility in the antebellum United States. Yellow fever was endemic in port cities of the Deep South and especially prominent in New Orleans which earned a sinister reputation as the “headquarters of Death.” Death occurred in about half of all severe case of yellow fever, but those who survived enjoyed lifelong immunity. Among white men, “immunity translated into economic capital,” Olivarius argues, because it increased access to credit, lucrative employment, and elite partners in business and marriage (25). Leveraged for economic gain, immunity to yellow fever was “virtually required” to enter the social elite of nineteenth-century New Orleans.

Olivarius’s book is a valuable addition to new studies of capitalism and cleverly builds on slavery studies that present enslaved bodies as embodied capital. Yet the argument tends to overstate the role of yellow fever in social mobility and generalize trends that existed for a limited time. This paper offers a critique of immunocapital through several case studies over a fifty-year period, from 1790 to 1840.

It begins by reviewing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital and situating Olivarius’s concept of immunocapital at the intersection of social and symbolic capital. Then it examines the social dynamics of New Orleans recognizing changes in immigration from the time of the Haitian Revolution to Europe’s Hungry Forties. Building on this context, the paper considers yellow fever’s influence on the lives of select immigrants and literary representations of New Orleans. It concludes that yellow fever had more symbolic than material power. While immunity did often coincide with upward mobility, it did not eclipse family networks, personal history, and language skills –in other words, traditional forms of social and cultural capital – in stratifying New Orleanians.