The Killing Age

We have ignored a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history – with dramatic consequences for our age of polycrisis.

The years we most associate with human progress – the Enlightenment, the birth of democracies, the Industrial Revolution – were at the same time catastrophically destructive.

In this trailblazing work of revisionist history, Professor Clifton Crais argues that the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s should be seen not as the Anthropocene, but the Mortecene: the Age of Killing. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering merchant warriors committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia and the Americas. This new network of global connections and economies killed tens of millions of people and sparked an environmental crisis that remains the most pressing catastrophe facing the world today.

Drawing on years of scholarship and a range of new sources, 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 present we inhabit today.