The Killing Age

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.

Clifton Crais is Professor of History at Emory University specializing in African and comparative history. He has previously held teaching positions at Johns Hopkins, Stanford University and Kenyon College. He has published numerous monographs on slavery, empire, colonialism, inequality, violence, climate change and the environment, including The Politics of Evil, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, and The Killing Age.