The Killing Age

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