You get a sense of The Killing Age by Clifton Crais, a history professor at Emory University, when you read “killing became the West’s most profound contribution to world history" in the author's preface.

“The violence that created our present world of global warming is too often forgotten in the now vast literature on the Anthropocene, including and especially the violence that was the Industrial Revolution. We forget—or don’t want to remember—that the Industrial Revolution emerged out of a century and a half of untold predation, made singularly possible by the modern manufacturing and global spread of guns, which made killing infinitely easier,” wrote Crais.

“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 factories of Europe and North America cannot be explained without understanding the dispossession of Native Americans and the conversion of their lands into cotton fields,” added the author, who reminds readers that the flintlock musket was the “world’s first global gun.”

Crais runs down this history that we’d like to forget, acknowledging in his interview on Read Beat, that some of the reactions to the book include that it’s “a bummer” as well as being a leftist take on capitalism. 

But Crais calls The Killing Age “the story of the men who wrought this destruction…It is also about the people who fought them and who offered and defended alternative visions of the world grounded in communal values such as sharing and environmental responsibility.”

Among the many historic figures that Crais includes in his study are John Jacob Astor, Andrew Jackson, Herman Melville, and John Sutter. Among many others, you’ll find Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, who helped spread the Ghost Dance across the American West; Samoury Toure, the West African warlord who founded an empire and resisted French imperialism; and “General” Ecueracapa, the warlord leader whose use of horses, guns, and trade helped transform the Comanches into one of the most dominant powers west of the Mississippi.

Astor, perhaps America’s first millionaire, was a German immigrant who sold guns to help him profit from the North American fur trade. Astor saw there was a finite source of those furs as America’s beaver population was depleted so he nimbly pivoted to pursue other business interests. “As the (18th) century ended, Astor had the ear of the country’s most powerful leaders (some of whom owed him money),” noted Crais.

Melville documented the carnage being wrought on the high seas as whale oil was pursued in the 19th century, a time when not only whales were butchered by the millions, but bison. The cover of The Killing Age shows a mountain of buffalo skulls, a photograph taken in 1892 in Detroit, pointed out Crais, where buffalo bones were converted to a wide variety of industrial products.

Crais said all the violence that shaped our world had a result. Following the nightmare that was World War II, the globe became more orderly as rule-based economies prevailed. 

Crais said he hopes that recent developments don’t usher in a return to the lawlessness he documents in earlier times. History can serve as a call to action when it comes to restoring civility, he noted.