The Killing Age

How Violence Made the Modern World
A trailblazing history that reappraises the making of the modern world through the lens of mass violence – for readers of David Graeber & David Wengrow, Caroline Elkins and Amitav Ghosh.

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, author of Legacy of Violence
‘Urgent, courageous and highly readable’ – David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything
‘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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