Synopsis
The Enlightenment. Democracy. The Industrial Revolution. What if the movements that built the modern world were more destructive than we ever imagined?
‘Brilliant . . . essential reading’ – Caroline Elkins
‘Urgent, courageous and highly readable’ – David Wengrow
‘Richly detailed and memorably vivid’ – New Statesman
‘Gripping’ – Jacobin
‘A bracing moral reckoning’ – Indian Express
In this radical history of modernity, Professor Clifton Crais argues that the era between 1750 and the early 1900s was not primarily an Age of Reason, but an Age of Killing: the Mortecene.
Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as violence and finance converged to create a new and terrible world order. Profiteering warlords left a trail of devastation across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, slaughtering humans and animals by the millions and sparking the catastrophic environmental crisis we face today.
Drawing on decades of scholarship, 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.
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Reviews
“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 scale”Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Imperial Reckoning and Legacy of Violence
“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
“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
