Synopsis
'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
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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.
Details
19 February 2026
9781035013418Reviews
Clifton Crais’s 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 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
Combines brilliant storytelling with rich and deeply researched evidence . . . essential reading for anyone seeking a global history that reexamines the past on a massive scaleCaroline 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 comeKenneth 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 – lightKerry Ward, author of Networks of Empire
