The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World

‘Combines brilliant storytelling with rich and deeply researched evidence . . . essential reading’ - Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Imperial Reckoning and Legacy of Violence‘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--------------------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 ne