“Clifton Crais’s stroke of inspiration is to reread the history of the world, 1759-1900, through the lens of the simple question, ‘Where are the guns?’ The guns turn out to be everywhere we look, empowering the men who own them to satisfy their every desire, from black bodies to pick their cotton to whale-oil to light their steps to buffalo hides to spin their machines to elephant tusks to make billiard balls for their recreation; their guns enable them to devastate the planet and decimate its non-human herds, leaving it to us, their descendants, to clean up the mess. The fuel on which the almighty engine of Progress runs thus turns out to be nothing more complicated than gunpowder. 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, ‘the most pernicious little race of odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.’”
“With The Killing Age, Crais masterfully examines the shaping of the modern world through the lens of violence, offering a devastating account of humankind’s destruction of bodies, landscapes, and minds in its march towards ‘progress.’ Combining brilliant storytelling with rich and deeply researched evidence, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking a global history that reexamines the past on a massive scale while also illuminating the processes that gave rise to many of today’s fault lines and crises.”
“A bracing, unflinching history of how violence – selling it and dealing it – created the carbon-intensive economy that is now transforming our planet. Crais has redefined the Anthropocene as the age of bloodshed.”
“A tour de force that puts humans’ capacity for both violence and invention at the center of world history. With impressive narrative scope, The Killing Age draws readers into a world of trade forged in blood, challenging us to understand the origins of our era in a new – and deeply disturbing – light.”
“The Killing Age is a broad-ranging, provocative look at how interlocking and far-reaching processes—exports of Anglo-American guns, enslavement, land-grabbing, and genocide—shaped the emergence of the modern world. Numerous regional histories come to look different within this global frame: particularly the expanding and industrializing United States. This vital book will be widely discussed and productively debated for years to come.”
“‘The Killing Age,’ by Clifton Crais, provides an urgent corrective to grand narratives that naturalise the role of violence in human history. Crais strips the modern ‘civilising’ project of intellectual camouflage, obliging 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 of scholarship, which lays bare a nexus of forces that – if left unchecked – will surely destroy the future of life on Earth.”
“We normally think of the 20th century as the Killing Age, but Clifton Crais firmly locates this 200 years earlier by showing how the proliferation of European – especially British – guns and gunpowder around the world led to massive destruction of human life and wildlife, disrupted societies and ecologies on a continental scale and laid the ground for the nightmares of the 20th century and the looming environmental catastrophes of the 21st. Our understanding of the global history of the last 300 years will never be the same again.”
“This is the most urgently important book I have read this year or in many years. With the perfect blend of passion and clinical precision, Clifton Crais shows how deeply our modern world has been built on violence. The Killing Age will provoke, enrage, and inform its readers–and it will change how they see the world. An epic masterpiece.”
“Clifton Crais’ The Killing Age is a seismic rethinking of modernity—a work so rigorously researched and morally urgent that I found myself pausing every few pages to grapple with its revelations. By reframing the 18th and 19th centuries not as the dawn of progress but as the Mortecene (the “Killing Age”), Crais exposes the blood-soaked foundations of our global order. This isn’t just history; it’s a reckoning.
What stunned me most was Crais’ forensic tracing of violence as currency. His analysis of how guns, slavery, and extractivism intertwined—from the whaling industry’s mechanized slaughter to King Leopold’s Congo rubber terror—reveals capitalism’s original sin: profitability through annihilation. The chapter on American bison genocide (Extinguishing Nature) left me gutted, while his global lens (linking, say, Bengal’s famines to Confederate cotton) shattered my sense of these atrocities as isolated events. Crais’ prose is academic yet visceral, particularly when detailing how warlords weaponized free trade. I’ve never highlighted so many passages in a history book—each one a stark mirror to our climate crisis and inequality today.
If there’s a critique, it’s that the book’s panoramic scope (spanning five continents across 150 years) occasionally dilutes its emotional punch. A deeper dive into individual voices—enslaved people, Indigenous survivors—might have humanized the staggering death tolls cited. But this is a minor quibble. Crais’ appendices alone (tracking animal extinctions, climate shifts, and wealth disparities) are worth the price of admission, proving his thesis with chilling data.
By the epilogue, I felt both haunted and galvanized. The Killing Age doesn’t just diagnose our planetary crisis; it forces us to confront how its architects were rewarded. This is history as antidote to amnesia—and a call to dismantle the systems it exposed.
Thank you to The University of Chicago Press and Edelweiss for the advance copy. For readers of [Sapiens] or [The Dawn of Everything], Crais’ work is essential: a masterpiece that redefines how we understand power, progress, and survival.
Summary thoughts about this book:
-A bombshell of a book—Crais proves that modernity was built not on ideas, but on corpses.
-The Silent Spring of history: an unflinching exposé of how violence became the world’s most profitable industry.
-Forget the Anthropocene. After reading The Killing Age, you’ll see the 19th century for what it was: the Mortecene—the era when slaughter went global.
-Crais doesn’t just recount atrocities; he follows the money, revealing how genocide funded the Industrial Revolution.
-If you think capitalism ‘civilized’ the world, this book will shatter that myth—and leave you rethinking everything.”
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