'Synoptic in its reach overwhelming in its detail The Killing Age 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 Disgrace '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 Imperial Reckoning and Legacy of Violence
-------------------- 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? 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. 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. Drawing on decades 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 planet we must now confront. '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 The Dawn of Everything
