The Killing Age
How Violence Made the Modern World
Book •
Clifton Crais's The Killing Age reframes the period of 1750 to the early 1900s as the Mortecene, an age in which large-scale human and ecological violence underpinned the development of global capitalism.
Drawing on scholarship across world history, Crais shows how weapons, finance, slavery, and ecological predation (whales, bison, ivory) interconnected to produce commodities, fuel industrialization, and accelerate environmental change.
The book traces the military-commercial revolution, the global spread of violence, and the moral and political crises that followed as states and empires attempted to manage these transformations.
Crais argues that modern problems—mass consumption, dirty supply chains, and early anthropogenic climate impacts—are rooted in this violent making of the modern world.
The work calls for recognizing these entanglements to inform ethical and systemic responses to the climate and social crises we face today.
Drawing on scholarship across world history, Crais shows how weapons, finance, slavery, and ecological predation (whales, bison, ivory) interconnected to produce commodities, fuel industrialization, and accelerate environmental change.
The book traces the military-commercial revolution, the global spread of violence, and the moral and political crises that followed as states and empires attempted to manage these transformations.
Crais argues that modern problems—mass consumption, dirty supply chains, and early anthropogenic climate impacts—are rooted in this violent making of the modern world.
The work calls for recognizing these entanglements to inform ethical and systemic responses to the climate and social crises we face today.
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Eleonora Mattiacci
Clifton Crais, "The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
