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. As historian Clifton Crais shows in this magisterial work, the period that we most associate with human progress--which gave us the Enlightenment, the birth 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 the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profit
