In The Killing Age, the American historian Clifton Crais contends that the modern era should not be defined as the Anthropocene – an Age of Man characterised by rapidly expanding knowledge and large-scale human influence on the planet – but rather as an age defined by mass killing, in which state power converges with economic exploitation and environmental destruction. “Instead of the Anthropocene,” he writes, “we should consider speaking of the Mortecene, the Age of Death and Killing. The Industrial Revolution in England and the United States cannot be explained without understanding the enslavement of Africans and their exploitation in the Americas and the changed landscapes that both created… The Anthropocene effectively leaves out human predation, slavery and even imperialism. It leaves out the massive killing at the heart of a fossil economy, an era when violence reduced everything, including human beings, to goods that can be exchanged in a so-called free market. All this death left its own markers. The Mortecene has shaped who we are, what we value, what we fear and what we have forgotten, and the precarious present we inhabit today.”
In a bravura performance, Crais shows how a liberal version of Enlightenment ideals legitimised slaughter and environmental degradation on a grand scale. Anyone who has had any doubts about the Panglossian view of history peddled by progressive rationalists like Steven Pinker will find their scepticism vindicated by Crais’s richly detailed and memorably vivid recreation of the gory underside of capitalist progress.
Sadly, but perhaps predictably, Crais says nothing about how another variant of Enlightenment philosophy mandated mass murder and the despoliation of the natural world, in states dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. His account of the Enlightenment is narrowly Anglocentric; at its heart is Adam Smith’s doctrine of “the transformative potential of a fully commercial society”. But Karl Marx was also an Enlightenment thinker, whose vision of a natural world “humanised” by collective planning produced ecological disaster in the former Soviet Union – one of many examples of the Mortecene that go unmentioned in Crais’s account.
A book’s index is often more revealing for what it leaves out than for what it includes. The story told in The Killing Age stretches from around 1750 to the early 20th century. Yet there is no entry here for the French Revolution, Robespierre or the Jacobins, pioneers in methodical killing as a means of creating a new society. The author does not stick rigidly within the chronology he sets for himself. Inevitably, Donald Trump makes a cameo appearance as an avatar of evil, though the reader will look in vain for Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Much of the worst 20th-century killing is absent. If you search for the Holocaust, by any measure a defining episode of modern mass murder, you find no mention of the attempted extermination of European Jewry, but “holocausts, African, continental and slavery”. If you look for the Holomodor, the state-engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine in which millions died of starvation while the country’s grain production was exported, you will find a blank. Mao Zedong is given two entries, as leader of a Chinese uprising and anti-colonial fighter; there is no reference to the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, which Mao engineered, in which tens of millions perished. The general reader, for whom Crais says the book is intended, could read every word of this 736-page, heavily footnoted tract, and remain wholly ignorant of some of the most atrocious examples of modern industrial killing.
The silence in which these deaths are shrouded is a political decision. The violence that Crais – a distinguished historian of Africa – has chosen to examine is the extractive violence of market capitalism, which is what enabled industrialisation in the West. In this telling, the business of the modern state has, ever since, been the extraction of market value from labour by effectively manufacturing death. The slave ship, the concessionary company and the colonial police force are the infrastructure of modernity and the core institutions of the Mortecene.
The thesis that the free market was established through state coercion is not new. It was presented with unsurpassed force in Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece The Great Transformation (1944). The Killing Age focuses more on the cost exacted in terms of excess mortality. But here it faces an awkward fact. To his credit, Crais acknowledges that “it would be myopic to imagine that life didn’t improve for millions (later billions) of people because of the Industrial Revolution”. The difficulty is more fundamental, though. At the end of the 18th century there were around 800 million human beings. Today there are more than ten times that number. Many factors have contributed to this increase, but none is as important as fossil fuels. Without mechanised agriculture, fertilisers, refrigerators and national and global transportation links, all of them fuelled by hydrocarbons, the human population would not have reached its current level. Fossil fuel extraction does violence to the natural environment and to the human beings involved in and affected by it. The fact remains that without it most of Crais’s readers would never have been born.
Crais’s exclusive focus on extractive violence under capitalism is problematic, as will be seen. But it is also highly selective. The Soviet gulag was not only a tool of political oppression but also a gargantuan state-managed extractive apparatus. Designed to produce gold, timber and coal and build canals and railways, it was the backbone of the Soviet economy. The millions of displaced peasants, “former persons” and ethnic minorities from border regions who were consigned to the camps were simply human resources, consumed in a system in which their labour was coerced and often fatal. In Kolyma Tales, a collection of short stories that began to be published in the 1970s, the writer Varlam Shalamov, who somehow survived 15 years in the deadly camps of the Soviet Far East, reported tags being attached to the thumbs or big toes of dead prisoners to keep a tally of defunct labour units. Book-keeping is essential in modern industrial enterprises, and high rates of mortality were integral to the camps’ operations. The gulag was an exemplary Mortecene institution.
Screening out this chapter in the modern history of violence might be defended on the basis that it occurred after Crais’s official chronology ends, though he is ready to stray beyond it when it suits him. The larger problem is that he chooses to exclude mass killing when it is committed in the service of projects of human emancipation. The violence of the French Revolution was not extractive but pedagogic, aimed at inculcating republican virtue and forging a higher type of humankind. If your aim is a new humanity, what do you do with sections of the species that refuse to be re-educated? The fate of these inconvenient remnants of the past in revolutionary France and Russia is instructive.
The numbers of casualties incurred during the revolution are contested, but probably around 35-45,000 died in France’s Reign of Terror (1793-94) via the guillotine, execution without trial, disease and neglect in prisons and mob violence. In the ensuing civil war (1793-96) waged by peasants and rural labourers in the Vendée region resisting military conscription by the revolutionary government in Paris, credible estimates of casualties range from 150,000 to 200,000, out of a population of around 800,000. These are figures comparable with the death toll under Pol Pot in Cambodia, where somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the population was killed.
Ideological violence in revolutionary France set the pattern that later unfolded in Russia. Crais begins the epilogue to The Killing Age by noting that nearly 20 million people died in the Great War between 1914 and 1918, “Europe’s greatest bloodletting since the Thirty Years’ War three centuries earlier.” He omits to report that only a few years later, 7 to 12 million would die in the Russian Civil War. Most died from malnutrition and infectious disease but millions died in massacres and executions too; in Tambov, central Russia, Bolshevik forces burned villages and used poison gas to snuff out peasant rebellion. Their opponents, the Whites, perpetrated anti-Semitic pogroms in which hundreds of thousands were murdered. Whereas the latter were driven by an immemorial hatred, mass murder was seen by the Bolsheviks as the Jacobins had viewed it: as a means of fashioning a new world.
Limited as it is, Crais’s insight into the dark side of the Enlightenment is the strongest part of his analysis. He could well have said more on the subject of “racial science”. He touches briefly on the subject when reporting on a rebellion in Brazil of former slaves and landless people that would become known as the War of Canudos (1896-97), during which the body of a millenarian lay priest was exhumed so the priest’s head could be sent to a laboratory for phrenological analysis.
Racial pseudo-science was not confined to “craniometry”, which was used for decades in several countries to determine innate criminality. The Victorian polymath Francis Galton (1822-1911), the founder of eugenics – a term he coined – continued the pursuit of a science of human behaviour grounded in physiology, which earlier Enlightenment philosophes such as Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-51) had regarded as the key to improving the species. In Galton and many other eugenicists, this ersatz science affirmed the biological reality of a hierarchy of distinct racial groups, with differing and unequal intelligence and capabilities.
The modern idea of race is an Enlightenment construction. When Crais illustrates how it rationalised economic exploitation and political oppression, he performs a useful service. Yet focusing exclusively on the underside of the liberal Enlightenment promotes a kind of learned ignorance. Crais writes eloquently of the way capitalist progress and environmental destruction advanced side by side. He chooses not to mention the similar and sometimes greater ruination wrought by anti-capitalist regimes.
It is not as if information about environmental catastrophe in former communist countries is hard to come by. In Boris Komarov’s book The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union (1980), the dissident Russian economist described the White Sea-Baltic Canal completed in 1933 – the flagship project of the new Soviet economy – as “virtually useless”. Working in life-threatening conditions, using picks and shovels, up to 250,00 prisoners built the canal, ahead of time, in 20 months. Up to 25,000 of them appear to have perished from overwork, starvation and beatings along the way. Too shallow for cargo ships, built from poor materials and frozen for half of each year, the canal was barely used. Following their almost useless labours, most of the prisoners who survived were returned to the camps. It is easy to write off the canal as a Stalinist vanity project, but it expressed an authentically Soviet and Marxist ideology in which the Earth acquired value only by becoming an instrument of human ambition. The poisoned lakes and vast dustbowls created by Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature (late 1940s) and Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign (1953) embodied this ideology. Meaning was imprinted on the Earth by a political act of will. Nature was humanised.
One of the most interesting chapters of The Killing Age, “Deepwater Genocides”, concerns whaling. “Whale oil,” Crais writes, “helped create the modern world.” As well as being used in soap and perfumes, oils extracted from the blubber and head cavities of whales literally illuminated the urban-industrial world that capitalism was bringing into being. In 1774, it produced “just over one billion lumen hours”, lighting factories, schools and streets. “Modernity itself – or the Enlightenment, a term gaining popularity at precisely the same time that whales were being hunted to near extinction – depended on artificial light.”
It is a striking observation, but it would have gained in force if Crais had not left the environmental crimes of anti-capitalist regimes in darkness. Sixty years ago, around 180,000 whales disappeared from the waters around the Soviet Union. Starting in 1948, Soviet fleets – one of them led by the largest whaling factory ship there had ever been – extended their reach to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand. By the time they revisited the Australian coast in early 1961, they found a marine desert. When a global moratorium on commercial whaling came into effect in 1986, the Soviets reported killing 2,710 humpback whales. In fact, under a cloak of secrecy and deception, they had killed around 18 times that number – almost 50,000 – along with countless whales of other species.
This was one of the largest environmental crimes of the 20th century, and possibly the most senseless. There was little demand for whale products in the Soviet Union at the time. Once the blubber was cut away, the rest of the animal was left to rot in the sea or dumped into a furnace to produce low-value bone meal. Apart from crew members rewarded for exceeding their quotas, no one profited from the massacres. The mammals were driven to the edge of extinction solely in order to meet production targets required by five-year plans. In its 19th-century heyday, the hideous practice of whale slaughter helped create an industrial civilisation, however flawed. A century later, the slaughter was a barbarous ritual in a polluted and impoverished economy that was headed for collapse.
Crais’s exclusion of the larger history of the killing age is disappointing but hardly surprising. It is testimony to American intellectual introversion and the hegemony of progressive ideology. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s influential book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) was ostensibly a study of global conflict in the post-Cold War era; but on careful reading the civilisations he discussed proved to be proxies for America’s minority communities and the book an intervention in a provincial debate about multiculturalism.
Though it records much that is horrendous, The Killing Age will not disturb its readers unduly. Nothing in contemporary discourse is more reassuringly familiar, or more strangely satisfying, than a story of Western guilt, for it testifies to the moral and intellectual superiority of those who tell and listen to it. Any narrative in which structural violence is confined to the West is mass-market comfort literature. The truth is that systematic killing is embedded in modernity itself, as an inescapable concomitant of the project of building a new world, but that is a story for which there is no market.
The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World
Clifton Crais
Picador, 736pp, £28.50
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[Further reading: American hegemony comes for our lunch]
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This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
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Subscribe here to commentI have a confession to make. I don’t get John Gray most of the time: above my intellectual pay grade, too dense and too deep. I do try and read his stuff to the bitter end but I inevitably come away with just a few nuggets for all my unlearned toil. Except this one, the review of The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World by Clifton Crais. It is clear as crystal. It is beautifully done (done being a good word for this review, though Gray does pay some tribute to half of Crais’ argument). Anyway, I think I must be improving in my history and politics lessons. Great educators, like John Gray, are ever pearls before swine until that special point when the struggling student gets the light-bulb moment.I am not buying Crais’ book, obviously, but I am keeping Gray’s review. Thanks, sir.
“The Soviet gulag was not only a tool of political oppression but also … the backbone of the Soviet economy. ”
In The Soviet Century (2003) Moshe Lewin convincingly argues that this was not the case. In fact the Gulag system cost so much to administer and enforce, and was so unproductive, it was a giant drag on the Soviet economy. Its abolition in the 1950s made economic, as well as moral, sense.
That is a fair argument to make for the later soviet economy of 1955; however It was essential to early soviet industrial policy, though, especially in the construction of the Moskva-Volga canal