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The Killing Age
How Violence Made the Modern World
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
A bracing account of how our current planetary crisis emerged from the worst cataclysmic destruction in human history, which Clifton Crais terms the Mortecene—the killing age.
We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slavery, and imperialism that has devastated the natural world and led us to our present moment. As historian Clifton Crais shows in this magisterial work, the period that we most associate with human progress—which gave us the Enlightenment, the rise of democracies, the Industrial Revolution, and more—was at the same time catastrophically destructive.
In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.
Drawing on years of scholarship and marshaling myriad sources across world history, The Killing Age turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror—how it shaped who we are, what we value and fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.
We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slavery, and imperialism that has devastated the natural world and led us to our present moment. As historian Clifton Crais shows in this magisterial work, the period that we most associate with human progress—which gave us the Enlightenment, the rise of democracies, the Industrial Revolution, and more—was at the same time catastrophically destructive.
In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.
Drawing on years of scholarship and marshaling myriad sources across world history, The Killing Age turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror—how it shaped who we are, what we value and fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.
Reviews
“Crais’s stroke of inspiration is to reread the history of the world, 1759–1900, 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 nonhuman 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 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“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“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. Numerous regional histories come to look different within this global frame: particularly the expanding and industrializing United States. This vital book will be widely discussed and productively debated for years to come.”
— Kenneth Pomeranz, University of Chicago“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“Combining brilliant storytelling with rich and deeply researched evidence, The Killing Age is essential reading for anyone seeking a global history that reexamines the past on a massive scale while also illuminating the processes that gave rise to many of today’s fault lines and crises.”
— Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Legacy of Violence"The Killing Age provides an urgent corrective to grand narratives that naturalize the role of violence in human history. Crais strips the modern 'civilizing' project of intellectual camouflage, obliging 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."
"We normally think of the 20th-century as the Killing Age, but Crais firmly locates this 200 years earlier by showing how the proliferation of European–especially British–guns and gunpowder around the world led to massive destruction of human life and wildlife, disrupted societies and ecologies on a continental scale and laid the ground for the nightmares of the 20th-century and the looming environmental catastrophes of the 21st. Our understanding of the global history of the last 300 years will never be the same again."
— Peter Furtado, editor of Revolutions"Crais offers a sweeping and immensely learned condemnation of Anglo-American greed and slaughter. He brings environmental and political history together to support his provocative argument that killing--of both people and animals--became the West's most profound contribution to world history."
— J.R. McNeill, author of The Webs Of Humankind“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. 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"This is the most urgently important book I have read this year or in many years. With the perfect blend of passion and clinical precision, 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“A vast, unsparing world history from the 1750s on, Crais chronicles the rise of industrial technologies of death able to kill at horrific scale from the battlefield to the slaughterhouse. It is a book about how monstrous actions became normalised parts of the global economy, and are the root of our current environmental crises.”
— History Today“Clifton Crais, a historian at Emory University, uses Thistlewood’s ghastly story—and many more like it—to illustrate a striking argument. In his view, brutality like Thistlewood’s was not merely a scar on the modern world but essential to creating it. In The Killing Age, he claims that ‘without…globalised violence, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened’. . .The Killing Age is deeply researched and contains some fascinating passages about who killed whom and who stole what in parts of the world to which too little attention is paid, from Darfur to New Zealand.”
— The Economist“[Crais] argues that rapid and decisive shifts in the propensity and capacity to kill powered capitalism, imperialism, and climate change. The Killing Age chillingly evokes how distinctions between warlords and statesmen, empires and bands of robbers, slip and blur when we consider organized robbery and mass murder.”
— Jacobin“This is not simply a provocative reinterpretation of modernity; it is a bracing moral reckoning. By placing organised violence at the centre of development, he does more than revise a narrative. The Mortecene is not a metaphor but a structure of history. After this book, it becomes impossible to invoke the rise of the modern world without hearing the echo of gunfire behind it.”
— Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Indian ExpressTopics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
ix -
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Figures, Maps & Tables
xi -
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Note on Language, Place-Names & Measures
xv -
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Dramatis Personae
xvii -
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Chronology
xxi -
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Preface
xxix -
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Introduction
1 -
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PART ONE The Business of Death
29 -
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PART TWO African Holocausts
85 -
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PART THREE Pirates, Indians & Gentlemen Warlords
155 -
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PART FOUR The American Ways of Killing
203 -
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PART FIVE Lands of the Dead
287 -
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PART SIX Empire
361 -
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Acknowledgments
533 -
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Appendix 1
539 -
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Appendix 2
547 -
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Appendix 3
553 -
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Appendix 4
557 -
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Appendix 5
565 -
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Notes
569 -
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Index
655
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 25, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780226827421
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9780226827421
Keywords for this book
death; genocide; war; murder; homicide; Mortecene; colonialism; anthropocene; global; capitalism; mass; slaughter; profiteering; warlords; environmental; crisis; Africa; Asia; America; human; progress; destruction; catastrophe; connection; economies; historical; perspective; imperialism; exploitation; animal; extinction; industrialization; resource; depletion; ecological; impact; cultural; erasure; trade; technological; advancement; warfare; rights; biodiversity; loss; climate; change; revisionism; societal values; modern consequences; ethical reflection; global inequality; power dynamics; historical legacy; environmental awareness; Anthropocene; environment; climate crisis; capitalism; finance; guns; imperialism; slavery; colonial violence
Audience(s) for this book
For a non-specialist adult audience
