The Killing Age

Clifton Crais’s stroke of inspiration is to reread the history of the world, 1750-1900, 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.” – J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of DisgraceAn urgent corrective to grand narratives that naturalise the role of violence in human history … 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 of scholarship, which lays bare a nexus of forces that – if left unchecked – will surely destroy the future of life on Earth – David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of EverythingCombines 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 ViolenceThe 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 … This vital book will be widely discussed and productively debated for years to come – Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great DivergenceA 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 – Kerry Ward, author of Networks of EmpireA 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 – Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating CoastOur understanding of the global history of the last 300 years will never be the same again. – Peter Furtado, editor of RevolutionsA sweeping and immensely learned condemnation of Anglo-American greed and slaughter – J. R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun

Clifton Crais is Professor of History at Emory University specializing in African and comparative history. He has previously held teaching positions at Johns Hopkins, Stanford University and Kenyon College. He has published numerous award-winning books on slavery, empire, colonialism, inequality, violence, climate change and the environment, including The Politics of Evil, Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa, History Lessons and Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.