European Warmongers That Sold Arms and Warfare to the World
Clifton Crais, The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, November 2025). Hardcover: $39.95. 654pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-82741-4.
****
“A bracing account of how our current planetary crisis emerged from the worst cataclysmic destruction in human history, which Clifton Crais terms the Mortecene—the killing age. 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… 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.”
The front- and back-matter is plentiful in this book: maps, figures, tables, a note on language and place names, the main characters are described, and a chronology and notes are offered. There are also appendixes on weapons, deaths, wealth and climate. Any re-writing or re-interpretation of history requires such parts for clarity. The book is divided into parts that cover technological warfare advances as a business, killing in Africa, killing in other regions, killing in America (two parts), and then the “Twilight of the Warlords”. The latter positions the totalitarian “Empire” as a rival force to “Warlords” in Africa, India, and China. This is partly the propaganda European empires used to turn regional rulers into villainous and barbaric “warlords”, which made it possible for them to conquer enormous territories through such propagandistic persuasion of the others’ inferiority at ruling.
I found some helpful information in this book regarding colonialism that somewhat helps my Fall Mythology course. Though most of these historic explanations are too vague, and more directly-quoted, and more thoroughly sourced information is needed to explain these intricate subjects that have previously been misunderstood. I have not seen similar studies previously that begin to shift the blame for the world’s killings onto European warmongering… But it does not really go far enough in this, as it still proposes “warlords” in these regions were not manipulated by the Europeans into fighting through propaganda, but rather themselves found reasons to kill each other. This book is suitable for acquisition by most libraries, and would benefit researchers of this subject.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2025/