The Killing Age

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What to expect

‘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

'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

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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.

'Crais obliges us to confront the naked reality of a modern world order spawned from the barrel of a gun . . . This is a courageous and highly readable work' – David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything

Critics Review

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, “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
An urgent corrective to grand narratives that naturalise the role of violence in human history . . . Crais obliges us to confront the naked reality of a modern world order spawned from the barrel of a gun. This is a courageous and highly readable work of scholarship, which lays bare a nexus of forces that – if left unchecked – will surely destroy the future of life on Earth
David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything
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 processes—exports of Anglo-American guns, enslavement, land-grabbing, and genocide—shaped 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
Our understanding of the global history of the last 300 years will never be the same again.
Peter Furtado, editor of Revolutions
A sweeping and immensely learned condemnation of Anglo-American greed and slaughter
J. R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun
A masterful global history that demolishes the idea that the “Better Angels of Our Nature” reduced violence and paved the way for a peaceful modern age. Clifton Crais convincingly demonstrates that killing, enslavement and environmental destruction instead birthed the modern world. This is an urgent book that is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how our conflict- and crisis-ridden age came to be, and the challenges that we will face as the climate continues to break down
Nicholas Radburn, author of Traders in Men
The most urgently important book I have read this year or in many years. With the perfect blend of passion and clinical precision, Clifton Crais shows how deeply our modern world has been built on violence. The Killing Age will provoke, enrage, and inform its readers – and it will change how they see the world. An epic masterpiece
Sunil Amrith, author of The Burning Earth

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