The Killing Age

<p><b><big>‘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 <i>Imperial Reckoning</i> and <i>Legacy of Violence</i></big><br><br>''Synoptic in its reach, overwhelming in its detail, <i>The Killing Age</i> 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 <i>Disgrace</i></b><br><br><b>--------------------</b><br><br><b>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?</b><br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>Drawing on decades of scholarship and a range of new sources, <i>The Killing Age</i> 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.<br><br><b>''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 <i>The Dawn of Everything</i></b></p>