The Killing Age How Violence Made the Modern World

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 birth 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 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 marshalling 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.

Contents

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Note on Language, Place-Names, and Measures
Dramatis Personae
Chronology
Preface

Introduction

Part One: The Business of Death
1. Guns
2. Financing the Mortecene

Part Two: African Holocausts
3. Lands of the Dead
4. Gods of War
5. Amerikani

Part Three: Pirates, Indians, and Gentlemen Warlords
6. Asian Waters
7. “Going after the Flesh”

Part Four: The American Ways of Killing
8. Deepwater Genocides
9. Extinguishing Nature
10. Death on the Great Plains

Part Five: Lands of the Dead
11. American Slavery
12. Castes of Another Name
13. Farming War

Part Six: Empire: Twilight of the Warlords
14. Conquering Africa, Part One
15. Conquering Africa, Part Two
16. Savageries of the New Imperialism in India
17. The Terrors of Free Trade in China
18. New World Empires
19. The Great Lands of the Dead
Epilogue: The Modern Age

Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: Weapons, 1700–1900
Appendix 2: Human Deaths and Loss, 1750–1914
Appendix 3: Wild Animal Deaths, 1750–1900
Appendix 4: Climate in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Appendix 5: Global Distribution of Wealth, 1750–1900
Notes
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. He is the author or editor of eight other books, including the memoir History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain, and Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, coauthored with Pamela Scully.