New Books Network Clifton Crais, "The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Apr 12, 2026
Clifton Crais, a historian of Africa and comparative history at Emory University, presents his concept of the Mortecene, arguing violence and mass killing shaped modern global capitalism. He links slavery, weaponry, and commodity demands to ecological destruction. Short, provocative takes trace credit chains, animal slaughter, and the moral choices that shape our planetary crisis.
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Mortecene Reframes Modernity
- Clifton Crais reframes the Anthropocene as the Mortecene to foreground the enormous role of killing in making modern global capitalism.
- He links Industrial Revolution outputs (e.g., Manchester cloth) directly to slave-produced raw materials and mass violence behind them.
Military Commercial Revolution Explained
- Crais defines a Military Commercial Revolution as the fusion of new finance instruments with the global spread of weapons.
- Banking, bonds, insurance and the flintlock musket combined to militarize societies and enable large-scale violence in the 18th century.
Follow Weapons To Understand Commodities
- Crais structures the book by tracing where weapons and finance flowed and what they produced: slaves, ivory, whale products, bison and beaver commodities.
- He ties these resource flows to Britain's and the U.S.'s industrial takeoffs and near-extinctions like the bison.
