The Killing Age

‘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