Thursday July 9
7:00 at Blue Hill Public Library

5 Parker Point Road
Blue Hill, Maine 04614

co-sponsored by Blue Hill Public Library

We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slavery, and imperialism that has devastated the natural world and led us to our present moment. As historian Clifton Crais shows in this magisterial work, the period that we most associate with human progress–which gave us the Enlightenment, the rise of democracies, the Industrial Revolution, and more–was at the same time catastrophically destructive.

In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.

Drawing on years of scholarship and marshaling myriad sources across world history, The Killing Age turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror–how it shaped who we are, what we value and fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.

 

“The Killing Age provides an urgent corrective to grand narratives that naturalize the role of violence in human history. Crais strips the modern ‘civilizing’ 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.”

— “David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything”

 

“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 nonhuman 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”

 

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 books on slavery, empire, colonialism, inequality, violence, climate change and the environment, including The Politics of Evil (which won the 2004 Ohio Academy of History Prize), Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa and Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus. He is also the author of the memoir History Lessons, which was a Kirkus Best Memoir of 2014. Crais lives in Castine, Maine.