The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World

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'Synoptic in its reach, overwhelming in its detail, The Killing Age leaves one feeling like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, who came to prefer the company of peaceable horses to membership of humankind' - J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace 'Combines brilliant storytelling with rich and deeply researched evidence . . . essential reading for anyone seeking a global history that reexamines the past on a massive scale' - Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Imperial Reckoning and Legacy of Violence -------------------- A bold, trailblazing history that asks: what if the movements that built the modern world - the Enlightenment, democracy, the Industrial Revolution - were more catastrophic than we ever imagined In this radical rethinking of modernity, Professor Clifton Crais argues that the era between 1750 and the early 1900s - seen by many as the birth of the Anthropocene - should instead be known as the Mortecene: the Age of Killing. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as violence and commerce converged to create a new and terrible world order that drove the growth of global capitalism. Profiteering warlords left a trail of devastation across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, committing mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals, and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most pressing threat facing the world today. Drawing on decades of scholarship and a range of new sources, The Killing Age turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror: how it has shaped who we are, what we value, what we fear, and the precarious planet we must now confront.

Reviews

Clifton Craiss stroke of inspiration is to reread the history of the world, 1750-1900, through the lens of the simple question, Where are the guns The guns turn out to be everywhere we look, empowering the men who own them to satisfy their every desire, from black bodies to pick their cotton to whale-oil to light their steps to buffalo hides to spin their machines to elephant tusks to make billiard balls for their recreation; their guns enable them to devastate the planet and decimate its non-human herds, leaving it to us, their descendants, to clean up the mess. The fuel on which the almighty engine of Progress runs thus turns out to be nothing more complicated than gunpowder. Synoptic in its reach, overwhelming in its detail, The Killing Age leaves one feeling like Jonathan Swifts Gulliver, who came to prefer the company of peaceable horses to membership of humankind, the most pernicious little race of odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. -- J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace
Combines brilliant storytelling with rich and deeply researched evidence . . . essential reading for anyone seeking a global history that reexamines the past on a massive scale -- Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Imperial Reckoning and Legacy of Violence
The Killing Age is a broad-ranging, provocative look at how interlocking and far-reaching processesexports of Anglo-American guns, enslavement, land-grabbing, and genocideshaped the emergence of the modern world . . . This vital book will be widely discussed and productively debated for years to come -- Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence
A tour de force that puts humans' capacity for both violence and invention at the center of world history. With impressive narrative scope, The Killing Age draws readers into a world of trade forged in blood, challenging us to understand the origins of our era in a new and deeply disturbing light -- Kerry Ward, author of Networks of Empire
A bracing, unflinching history of how violence selling it and dealing it created the carbon-intensive economy that is now transforming our planet. Crais has redefined the Anthropocene as the age of bloodshed -- Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast

Author Bio

Clifton Crais is Professor of History at Emory University specializing in African and comparative history. He has previously held teaching positions at Johns Hopkins, Stanford University and Kenyon College. He has published numerous award-winning books on slavery, empire, colonialism, inequality, violence, climate change and the environment, including The Politics of Evil, Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa, History Lessons and Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.