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And we're live from the living room as Doug eyes up the match. Say spread. He's reaching for the buffalo wing. Perfect. Hang on. What's this? Oh, he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. Incredible. What a finish. Sensational combination. Look at the delight on his face. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a pack of Pepsi. Zero sugar for today's match. It's poetry in motion. I'm Serena Williams and I'm healthier on roe. I've lost 34 pounds in a year. With GLP1's diet and exercise on row, you can access GLP1 options including the first FDA approved GLP1 pill for weight loss. Go to Ro Co Journey to see if you qualify.
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14 to 20% average weight loss in
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one year in non diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight related medical condition versus 2.2% to 3.1% in placebo arm Rx only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to Ro Co Safety. What if the modern world was built not first by steam engines, factories or liberal ideas, but by guns? Violence, slavery, empire and greed are as old as civilization. So what changed around the year 1750? Why did killing suddenly become cheaper, more efficient, more commercial, and capable of transforming the entire planet? Clifton Crace is professor of history at Emory University and the author of the Killing How Violence Made the Modern World. In this conversation, he explains how firearms democratized violence, how credit and debt turned killing into capital, and how the slaughter of enslaved people and animals became entangled with industrialization. We explore the warlords who emerged across Africa, Asia and the Americas, the moral compromises hidden inside respectable consumer life, and the spiritual transformation that made accumulation an end in itself. I'm Thomas Small is my Conflicted conversation with Clifton Crace. Hello Clifton. Welcome to Conflicted. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's great to have you.
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C
It's great to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.
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Well, your new book, the Killing How Violence Made the Modern World is quite a read. It's not a short book, Clifton. It's long. It is packed with information, with incredible little stories, and overall it tells a kind of historical narrative that I suppose is very important to know. It clarifies a lot of things, but my goodness, it's bracing. You're not really telling a very happy tale here, Clifton.
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Yes, it is admittedly a dark tale, but I wanted to write a book that really got the reader to stare down, really confront the kind of mess the planet is in today and the possibilities of thinking about the world differently. In other words, it seems to me sometimes there's a sense of either on the one hand, kind of denialism or a sense that we're epic screwed and. And that, you know, it's inevitable that the course of human events and of the planet itself has been, you know, kind of written in stone. And I wanted to. I wanted to tell a different kind of story that brought the human drama into the making of our world in ways that really brought forward issues around struggle and issues around knowledge and its production and issues around possibility that there were other ways that this could have gone. It brought me to dark places. Admittedly, I surprised myself when I was, you know, I found myself halfway into the book thinking, my Lord, what have I done?
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Well, you know, Clifton, it took me to dark places as I read it and dear listeners, you know, we'll get to the book in a second. In short, it really makes the argument that what particularly characterizes the modern age, say from the mid 18th century to the present, is its extraordinary propensity for violence. That violence is at the root of the explosion in human industry, technology, political sophistication or domination, et cetera. That ultimately underlying it all was an increase in the capacity for and the willingness to employ violence. So we'll get to that in a second before we get to the book the Killing Age. I mean, even the title's rather bracing. Tell us, Clifton, where you come from? We like to know our guests here on Conflicted. I know you've written a memoir and in our pre interview conversation you described a rather difficult childhood growing up first in New Orleans. So tell the listener a little bit about yourself.
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C
Yeah, well, sometimes I don't know where I'm from. I was raised in a broken family and so I moved all over the place. I can't remember the number of schools I went to prior to college, but I think it was something like, well, more than a dozen. Many people seem to think I'm from Connecticut. I'm not sure if that's a criticism or a compliment. Having never lived in the state of Connecticut.
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I hear it's very nice, Clifton. I don't know why it would be a criticism, right?
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But I grew up in a broken family and so I moved all over the place. I was almost made award of the state of Louisiana twice, which I think takes a bit of an effort. And I kind of rose from poverty into the middle classes when I was de facto adopted by my eldest sister. And education saved Me, I was taken by my sister, who was married to a fighter pilot. And we ended up from Mississippi to California toward North Africa. And I still have this memory of getting an atlas out and trying to figure out where Tunisia was. And we put our fingers on Tunisia, which almost took. Know, our finger took up almost the entire country. And we moved to the city of Carthage, where one is utterly surrounded by history.
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Not just history, but a memory of tremendous violence.
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Violence, exactly right. But also violence.
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Yeah, because the Romans, they really showed the Carthaginians what's what, didn't they?
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And then regretted it because they destroyed what was an incredibly thriving port. So then they had to kind of rebuild things. That you know, just kind of awakened my interest in history, but also in the history of Africa. And so I ended up in college, the University of Maryland. And I, at the time, I was interested in colonialism, the nature of capitalism, and also racial intolerance. And South Africa at the time, this would have been the late 70s, was sort of the poster child for what was wrong with the world. And I sort of gravitated to the study of Southern Africa and then lived there during a period of extraordinary political violence. This was in the 80s. And participated in the momentous changes that saw the fall of apartheid. And so, you know, it was an incredibly exciting period of time. It felt for me that all of the world's problems were kind of condensed at the southern tip of Africa.
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I think I remember, you know, all of us felt a bit like that as apartheid ended and Mandela came back.
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That's right.
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You know, out of prison. And the Rainbow Nation, or whatever it used to be called, was born. There was so much optimism about it.
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Absolutely.
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Sadly, you know, the last 30 years have been a little bit more complicated than we hoped. But certainly it did seem. Yeah, that South Africa was a kind of microcosm of all the evils that had preceded 1990 and offered the hope of all the good things that were going to come. So this kind of gave you a taste for, like, the dark. The darkness at the heart of history. You got a taste for it.
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That's right. But also, as well as part of my research on South Africa, that apartheid was not inevitable. There were times where decisions were made most clearly in the early part of the 20th century that led South Africa towards white supremacy and against a more liberal, multicultural, democratic future. And so those issues of contingency. Well, us fancy historians talk about human choice and contingency, you know, we're really right up front. Just as the choices that South Africa has made after 1994, you know, were not written in stone.
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Well, from that research into South Africa, you became something of an Africanist in his historical terms. You built your career on that. But now you're broadening out with this book and you're telling a global history. You're, you're throwing your hat into the ring of those historians who tried to explain really everything, you know.
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Right.
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It's a big book, huge ambition. And the central thesis of the book is that what we now tend to call the Anthropocene, the age of man, of man's domination of the world, you think that word Anthropocene is inadequate and you have proposed an alternative, and I hope I pronounced this correctly, you've called it the Mortisene, as it were, the Killing Age. This is the title of the book. What is, is the Morticine. Why have you decided that our era, which you kind of start at the year 1750 or thereabouts, should be primarily understood as an era of killing?
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So I think we had to go back a little bit to this concept of the Anthropocene. You know, it emerged, it exploded on the scene, you know, a little more than 20 years ago. And everyone was talking about it. You know, it was just part of the intellectual and public cultures globally. As a historian, it just didn't feel intuitively right. In other words, it tended to kind of, you know, go back to the Industrial revolution, the invention of the steam engine, and then leapfrog to the present. And as a historian, particularly of Africa, you know, giving lectures on slavery, the slave trade, colonialism, you know, all of that was just not part of the picture. So it really came out of that sense of irritation that I began researching the book that led to the Killing Age. At one point when I was researching and writing the book, I became kind of overwhelmed by the destruction of humans and non humans roughly in the 18th and into the 19th century. And I couldn't find a word in the existing vocabulary that seemed to make sense. And there were, there were tons of them. There was the Anthropocene, the capitalist scene, the Planticine. You know, there was like tons of them and none of them worked for me, so I just made one up. And the more the morticine seemed to be the one that spoke to what I was confronting.
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Well, morticine is a very pregnant term that you invented. The Killing Age. You know, it's interesting. You are now one of a number of interviews we've given, we've conducted on Conflicted One with Sven Beckert. Of Harvard University, who came on to talk about his history of capitalism, an interesting history where he puts the germination of capitalism much earlier than most people tend to do, way back in the. In the Middle Ages and in the Islamic world particularly. And we've also had Martin Plout on recently to talk about his recent history of African slavery. So slavery in Africa, the whole history of slavery that involved Africa going way back to the Egyptians, ancient Egyptians and even before. And you're sort of part of this line of inquiry that we're conducting here on conflicted big histories, trying to understand how the modern world was forged. And so I kind of want to make sure at the outset that a bit like them, who are not interested in what has become quite, in my view, a lazy west versus the rest interpretation of history, that the west, that Western people almost Western culture, is sort of singularly wicked and to blame for all the problems in the world. I don't agree with that, obviously. I think the truth is much more complicated, as it always is. And I don't think that's what your book is arguing either. You want to tell a story that is truly global, that isn't simply an oppressor, oppressed kind of narrative. Although the truth is that these processes, these modern processes, did originate in their most violent form in the West. But you're telling a more nuanced story, is that right?
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Absolutely. On the one hand, the west provided the guns, they manufactured the weapons, they sold the weapons, along with a fantastic amount of gunpowder, a truly extraordinary amount of gunpowder, enough to kill everyone on the planet many times over. But other people wanted those weapons and bought them and used them for all kinds of reasons. And so for me, one of the central ideas is a kind of sense of entanglement and complicity. And so what you see around the world are people, I call them warlords, who use access to Western weapons to pursue their own agendas around accumulation and. And political power. And so it's this entanglement and complicity that is crucial. I think the idea of the west versus the rest completely obscures the complexity of the human past.
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And as you say, complicity. It's a good word. I mean, I remember Sven in his book on capitalism, talks really in terms of network effects, that there were nodes of capital across the world that were kind of rising in sophistication, moving towards what we would understand as capitalism now kind of together and almost like notes on a scale or like a chord, you might have the grace note at one point be in one part of the world, but it reverberates across the whole network.
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Absolutely.
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And that's also true of the rise of modern violence. So it's true that industrially speaking, or in terms of technological development, the modern firearm was perfected in the west and then became a kind of currency, almost circulating around the world, increasing the power of anyone who got their hands on this new weaponry. And often those people were not the traditional rulers of a place, any given place, in Africa, say, Southeast Asia, whatever.
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That's right.
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So in a way, guns evolve in complexity over the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. In sophistication, they're more powerful, but they're also, in a way, democratizing violence, which upsets traditional kind of military hierarchies, often empowers these warlords. And you use warlords equally of white guys and non white guys. You know, it's a kind of category of man, a man with a gun who's going to use that extra violence, that extra capacity to kill to further his own will, to impose his will on something, a warlord. But this happened globally kind of all at once, though, again and again, the preponderance of power was with Western states, although, you know, eventually that kind of is ending. You know, we are seeing it end now. But that is the story you're telling, a kind of network effect story.
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That's right. I think the image of a network is, I think, extraordinarily helpful. One of the ways I kind of see it and to get back to the west and the rest is it's like doing music with like two notes, like chopsticks.
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That, that, that.
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Right. And that's just not how things are. And I wanted to kind of write and do history symphonically. In the past is a symphonic world, if at times deeply discordant. Right. But yeah, I mean, these, you know, warlords were men who pursued violence for primarily economic gain. And the quintessential example is from Africa. And it is someone who uses guns, quite literally to hunt people. And that was what the slave trade, the enslavement of people and their export was all about. Because in the Americas, the desired good, the desired commodity was humans. That's what was in demand. And in Africa, warlords with access to these weapons and gunpowder went out and pursued violence to enslave people.
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Yeah, you really make it clear because, you know, you kind of compliment what Martin Plout revealed to us on the show because, you know, obviously there was slavery in Africa for millennia, of course, and the slavers, black Africans. The enslaved were black Africans. The buyers of slaves were often Black Africans, but often they sold them onwards to non black Africans. Everyone was implicated in this very wicked system. And then when Europeans come and they create these outposts initially on the coast of West Africa, they're buying slaves sold to them by black slavers. And some of those men get their hands on weapons which allow them more effectively to enslave other Africans, but also to build states for themselves to create warlord polities that are deeply implicated in the slave trade with the west undermining longer established empires and things. So again, it's a complicated story and it really is revealing, I must say, about how it's all interconnected.
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Yeah, yeah. I mean you might think of it like an engine that is kind of slowly moving, right. And then all of a sudden the accelerator takes off. This is what guns and the spread of guns and gunpowder did is it just accelerated everything to truly monstrous proportions in ways that overwhelmed societies. And you're absolutely right, it led to the consolidation of power. But these warlord polities were often different than the ones that had preceded them. They rose by violence and they fell by violence. And the kind of social web that connected ruler and ruled. The reciprocity and redistribution got kind of perverted. And that's why many common people who were subject to this violence often saw these warlords as kind of vampires that literally were sucking not just physical human life, but in a sense the very life force that makes societies and cultures prosper.
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Such warlords still exist on conflicted. We try to talk about the destabilizing effects of non state actors. Militia movements.
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Absolutely.
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Sometimes quote unquote revolutionary movements and often at the, at the other end of initially like Kalashnikovs in the old days, which very much democratized violence in the 20th century. It's a kind of repeat of what had happened in the 18th and 19th centuries. You brought up in our pre interview conversation. Drones ever cheaply manufactured. I think we can talk about that at the end. So you know, this capacity for these warlords to in a vampiric way suck the life out of societies by just exploiting people for economic gain. And you know, I also agree with you. I mean people accuse me of being a kind of romantic because maybe as a consequence of living through a long era now where this warlordism was so prevalent. I mean I think a lot of people and a lot of the way westerners actually think about the past, they sort of assume that that is simply the standard for all history. That like that there was never a time when something like justice was more or less really being pursued. By a traditional elite. Because they were, you know, they were military. They were men on horseback. They had swords and stuff. But it does seem to me, and I don't want to be a romantic, but it does seem to me that the proliferation of guns and the increase of this warlordism globally did change a kind of unspoken contract that had existed before between the man, Almost always a man, the man with the sword, and the people that he governed. You know, I think the arthurian legend Kind of is about this, Like a man with the sword and he has to create justice. But that as the morticine kind of unfolded, that became less and less the case for lots of the world. It wasn't really about a kind of holistic and integrated justice. It was just exploitation. At least that seems to be what you're arguing. I mean, it's very depressing.
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Yeah, and that is very depressing. I mean, these. These social contracts Were, in many areas, Kind of hollowed out. And that's why people often saw rulers as. As thugs and. And vampires. But at the same time, and I think this is critically important, Peoples were reminding others of how the world should be, that there was once a social contract. And critically, there should be a social contract. And so you see all kinds of social movements. For example, in west africa, you see the rise of voodoo, which is partly a critique of power, Arbitrary power, But also a vision of the restoration of a moral economy.
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A
That's super interesting. Tell us more about that. So about the way in which voodoo evolves and rises in the context where more traditional african structures Were being eroded by the rise of the morticine in those areas, the rise of gun based warlordism. What is voodoo's response to that? Or how is it a response to that?
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So we have to go back to Dahomey in the 18th century. And Dahomey is the sort of poster child of the gun state and the slave trade. Weapons flooded into this area. You had these rulers that were just extraordinarily violent. In fact, they had kind of orgies of violence. They would regularly sacrifice large numbers of people in these annual ceremonies. Just extraordinary levels of violence. And this is why I had. I could not stand that film that came out on dahomey that sort of romanticized.
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Was this called the woman king or something like that?
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The woman king, yeah. It just really. It really bugged me a lot. In any event, in more rural areas, Outside of the capital, Emerges these kind of critiques of this kind of. This predatory state. And these are the kind of origins of voudon, which Is really a kind of spiritual movement that is sort of critiquing state power. And so the king of dahomey, he wants to actually control that source of religious power and ultimately is unsuccessful.
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So you mean that these are peoples who have been suddenly at the receiving end of new forms of political violence and kind of in the best way they can, the best way they know. And we have to be honest, you know, this is a very un. As we would understand it, like, uneducated population. So these are people much closer to their ancestral traditions, and they're trying to use what we might consider to be something like magic to neutralize this violence, which to them seems like an overwhelming eruption of wickedness into their life. So they're trying to, like, absolutely use spells or whatever to keep it at bay.
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Exactly, exactly. Because they saw the perpetrators of violence as also using magic.
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Magic. Oh, yes. Well, that's wonderful. And it. It overlaps with that whole critique of modern science As a kind of sophisticated magic, actually.
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Right. This is kind of counter magic to try to kind of level the field, as it were. And you see this in various spots around the globe in this period, as humans are naturally doing or trying to make sense of what is happening to them, and they're using the kind of cultural knowledge and languages that are available to them.
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You wonder, actually, if that. That is kind of the root of much religion in general. I'm thinking of. Oh, gosh, what was his name? The scapegoat mechanism guy. What's his name?
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Rene Girard.
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Yeah, Rene Girard. You know, in his meditations, Even within the christian context, of the powerful image Of a kind of victim of state violence, you know, Jesus of Nazareth being crucified by the Roman empire and then becoming this powerful totemic image.
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That's right.
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Of the. The wickedness, the inherent wickedness of that kind of ruthless violence. And then able, at least theoretically, but possibly at sometimes even really, to kind of, you know, critique that raw violence, maybe temper it about with law and justice and, you know, inclinations towards looking after the sort of poor and needy, Employing rituals to communicate that, you know, that ideal. So maybe it's not so different from what was going on in. In more recent centuries to an absolutely much bigger degree of state violence.
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Right.
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Could you please help make it kind of realer for the listener in a way? I mean, your book overlaps with Beckert's in many respects. One way is that you do link the rise of guns, Their sale across the world to the rise of capitalism, that they went hand in hand that gun selling, gun producing was a means whereby debt and credit sort of instruments were invented, were spread around the world. That people took on debt in order to buy guns. And then it kind of implicated them more and more in an ever growing system. And this was global obviously like the East India Company is involved in this and lots and lots of other things are involved in this. Can you find, can you sort of paint a picture for us about how this mechanism worked on the ground? Like a story from the book that would really make it clear.
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Sure. So we have to kind of combine a little bit of European history with other areas of the world, right? So we have to kind of recognize that they were important economic and institutional changes in England. Obviously the rise of gun manufacturing is critical, but so is things like banking, insurance policies, so on and so forth. And so how it would work is something like this. You have a merchant, British merchant, who wants to engage in the Atlantic world. So he takes out a loan and buys a whole bunch of guns and gunpowder along with other commodities that he thinks are in demand in Africa. He puts it in his boat. And I kind of call these early ships sort of like floating Walmarts. You know, they're just chock a Block full of stuff. And, you know, off he goes to Africa. And he's in the back of his head, of course. You know, he's got debts to pay. So he's in debt, right, Ultimately to a bank or someone else in Africa. He then loans these weapons, especially to an African warlord who is now in debt to the merchant. And there are kind of chains of debt that percolate, spread into the countryside. And the way in which people liquidate their debt relationships is to exchange something that that Western merchant wants. And in the 18th and into the 19th century, what that person wants are human beings. And so it generates violence and an indebtedness, and it kind of spreads out. So kind of everyone is in debt and doesn't want to get too mired in it, right? Including our merchant, you know, because if all of his slaves die on the ship, he's out of luck, right? And he's going to have to declare bankruptcy.
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What I really loved about the book, chapter after chapter, you know, how. How do I put this? You often. We kind of hermetically seal two zones of the world in those centuries. We sort of see that there is an industrializing, modernizing, ultimately liberalizing world focused on Britain and its empire. But Britain, Northwest Europe and North America, let's say it's a very. It's sort of sealed off from the rest of the world. And all of this modernization is occurring there. The modernization that will, in this version of the story, slowly almost redeem the whole world from the depravities and the deprivations of the past. That's the kind of liberal story of the world. But what your book shows is that that part of the world, the industrializing, modernizing part, was never in any way at all disconnected from the whole. So you'll have a chapter, fascinating chapter, about the fact that the first place, or at least an extremely early example anywhere of a steam engine being employed was not in England itself, but in the colony of Jamaica, implicated in the production or the refinement of sugar and therefore the slave trade. Or there'll be a chapter about, you know, you start talking about a bourgeois family in New England with its piano and the ivory keys. On the piano. They're playing their. I don't know, Amazing Grace or whatever. They're playing their hymn. And you sort of trace how that ivory got to that piano. And you. You sort of show that it's completely implicated in the scramble for Africa in a rush to get elephant tusks, which is involved in. Not just in the slave trade as well, based on this sort of debt, kind of dynamic you just described, but also implicated in tremendous environmental destruction that completely destabilized huge parts of already and long settled Africa. A fascinating chapter. You do the same again with whales, the sort of rush to hunt whales that Moby Dick, of course, the great American novel portrays. I love all this stuff on Moby Dick, really revealing that Herman Melville, the author, was kind of aware that all of this was going on, but whale oil, the need for whales, kind of implicated again in this global system. So I just love all of that. It's really illuminating. And because I've mentioned Melville, I'll ask you because this came up again and again in, in your book and this is in a way where a spark of optimism is to be found that all throughout the story there are men and women who are aware of the morally compromising nature of this growing morticine system. Always.
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I'm glad you, you, you raised Melville, but I would also raise another person, Frederick Douglass, because my chapter on Wales actually begins with both of them. And you know, Douglass is in New Bedford. He's a leading abolitionist, he's working in New Bedford. And yet New Bedford is intimately tied to Atlantic slavery.
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Just for to make sure that our non American listeners know who Frederick Douglass is. He was an African American, a real giant really, and an abolitionist, an educated man, a great writer, a very passionate advocate for justice in the 19th century.
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Right. And New Bedford in Massachusetts was one of the great centers of abolitionism in the United States. And yet that great liberal town was engaged in entangled with the Atlantic world of slavery. But also the extraordinary destruction of Wales, incredible amounts of violence. And what's incredible to me about Melville is he makes two incredible observations. One, that this is not going to turn out well. This accelerating violence is depleting a resource and is leading whales towards the edge of extinction. Now that doesn't happen ultimately and they make a comeback, though some whales remain critically endangered. So in Moby Dick, he is sort of raising this specter of a country that is rising upon extraordinary violence, both against non humans whales. But he also mentions bison, but also of course, the destruction of human indigenous societies.
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Yeah, it's all linked together.
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It's all linked together.
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Your chapter on the kind of American West. Yeah, that romantic playground of cowboys and Indians, which kind of is centered a bit on the bison, on the American buffalo. And it's pretty quick. Actual, actually disappearance over the course of the 19th century really just blew my mind, Clifton. It blew my mind for all sorts of reasons. First of all, you Know, you tell the whole story. And again, it's very judicious. You talk about the Comanche nation, one of these warlord polities that kind of got their hands on new technologies, not just guns, but horses, that had been introduced by the Europeans, perfected the art of subjugating other native peoples, exploiting them, you know, enslaving them.
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Enslaving them. Absolutely.
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Quite amazing. Quite remarkable. So that's all part of that story. But what really blew my mind, and I never knew this. I never knew this. Growing up in the 80s and 90s by, you know, like left wing teachers and stuff, I was told, and thank God I was about, like, indiscriminate killing of buffalo, that settlers would come by and just kill them. And I was always told they did it just from the wickedness of their hearts, like there was almost no reason to do it. But what your chapter revealed was that that's not true at all.
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Right.
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Because they did actually use the hides of these creatures to manufacture the leather belts that were strong enough to power the industrial revolution. So almost like saying there was no reason for them to do it, it was just wickedness is a way of ignoring the fact.
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That's right.
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That there was a very good reason for them to obliterate the American buffalo. It was to make our modern world that we love and take for granted possible. We're all implicated in it.
- [39:22]
C
Absolutely right. I mean, it's not the wickedness, but rather issues around greed, right. That killing paid well, paid handsomely. It made some people a lot of money. And once these German tanners invented a better way of processing bison hide, once guns got a little bit better and more destructive, once you could put a scope, a better sight on your gun, once you understood the behavior of herds, it allowed just an extraordinary destruction of America's mammal. And you're absolutely right. It was condensed literally within a few decades. And so, you know, these men would go out, they knew to shoot the herd leader, which then kind of freaked out the rest of the herd and then made it very easy to shoot the rest. They skin the animals. You have these pictures of these wagons stacked up 10, 20ft high with bison hides which were then put on trains or steamboats to these factories. And they end up in your neck of the woods, you know, they end up in North England creating, yeah, big
- [40:45]
A
leather belts that were kind of running the steam powered engines.
- [40:49]
C
Steam powered, absolutely right. And so this is, you know, part of these entanglements. And then you have to kind of imagine the planes at a time as A massive killing field in which literally there are bones as far as the eye could see. And then they discovered, hell, these bones
- [41:11]
A
make money, goodness gracious.
- [41:15]
C
And trains started carting the bones out to places like Detroit. You know, one of the, the biggest factories prior to automobiles was in a part of Detroit called Boneville, which then turned these bones into useful commodities.
- [41:32]
A
Wow.
- [41:33]
C
You know, and they end up in mascara and ink and carbon filters, you know, in all kinds of places.
- [41:41]
A
You know, it's, it's amazing how, how your story draws out just how much things that we think of as particularly characteristic of the 21st century are much older than we think. You know, even the kind of on again, off again culture war that, that is violently, you know, going back and forth. And if you, if you adopt, you know, if you sort of listen to that perspective, which would say that there is amongst our kind of haute bourgeois liberal elite a kind of moralizing about various issues as if they're not actually implicated in it. As if their pensions aren't invested in arms, you know, companies and oil companies, and as if, you know, they're doordash, underpaid Mexican work laborer, isn't it? It's all kind of mixed up. And Even in the 18th century, this was the case. A kind of person believing that he or she, because of their moral feelings, almost rose above these huge systems of iniquity and killing, but it's just not the case. We're all implicated in it.
- [42:47]
C
As we are today. As we are today.
- [42:49]
A
Exactly as we are today. That's the point. As we are today, which indeed the
- [42:53]
C
technology you and I are using right now is implicated in all kinds of child slavery, actually.
- [43:01]
A
Children being used in mines to find rare earths. Exactly that power, all of this technology right now.
- [43:07]
C
That's right, right now, as we speak.
- [43:09]
A
And just as I said at the end of the Martin Plout episode about African slavery, it's actually weirdly encouraging almost that we're all implicated in it. Because unlike the black and white narrative, I mean, sometimes literally black and white in a racial sense, but unlike that, that oppressor, oppressed narrative where it's like all the villainy can be pushed on to white European men or something, the fact that research like yours, research like others, is revealing just how global this system is, how complicit we've all been in it, it's like we're all to blame. And if we're all to blame, then we can together all work on a solution precisely on changing some aspects of this system so that at least it gestures towards goodness and justice again. But the deeper question is, Clifton, sort of, what changed around 1750? What changed? Because it's not like gunpowder was invented then. Gunpowder was invented in the nine hundreds in China around eight hundreds, nine hundreds. And though we're often told that the Chinese only used gunpowder for fireworks, unlike Europeans, who made weapons out of it, that's just not true. The Chinese were using gunpowder weapons in the 10th century, 11th century. That technology moved into the Islamicate world through the caliphates and things. Muslims were using that weaponry before Europeans. Europeans then adopted it from them, adapted it, became more adept at using it. But what changed around 1750 to switch the human spirit almost into this greedier, more instrumentalizing way of relating to the world? I mean, what happened?
- [44:48]
C
Yeah, I think it was a confluence of things. On the one hand, you have these institutional changes that are beginning to take place in Western Europe and especially England that allow for new forms of greediness in effect. Right. New forms of accumulation for accumulation sake. So instead of, you know, making some money and building a church. Right. You have now making money to make more money. Right. And, you know, so there. There are these important cultural changes that are taking place.
- [45:30]
A
Well, you're gesturing at some, like, spiritual changes, almost just about priorities.
- [45:34]
C
Absolutely.
- [45:35]
A
Our definition of what the good life is, you know, what human destiny is about.
- [45:40]
C
That's absolutely right. And, you know, I'm someone who thinks there's still a shred of importance in the old Weberian Protestant ethic of capitalism thesis, which I realize opens me up to accusations of being Eurocentric, but I think there really was something happening that we need to abide to. And then there was, you know, the. Especially the Atlantic world that was blossoming, and international trade. So again, it's these kind of networks, right. Or this kind of conjunction that makes possible kind of like a big bang of capitalism, which I think began in one place and then ultimately becomes kind
- [46:34]
A
of globalized and very much globalized. The chapter on Southeast Asia and on Indonesia and Polynesia, that kind of part of the world, the chapter on its history after it first encountered the modern gun, after it began to itself be transformed by the introduction of modern forms of violence, making there that chapter was really illuminating. And at one point, you even suggest that it is possible that more humans were enslaved and traded and bartered across that part of the world than in the transatlantic slavery. So you just. Slave trade. So you really show that we're all implicated in it. And it draws out something like, in the heart of man is darkness, is greed. Is lust, a lust for power, a lust for domination. And at some point, something happened where technology made every man more powerful and therefore empowered those dark forces.
- [47:40]
C
That's right.
- [47:40]
A
In his heart, you know, to manifest more and more powerfully in the world. That did really kind of first happen in. In northwest Europe and gosh, what a fascinating fact. But wherever the fruit of that transformation, that is those guns and all of that technological power, wherever it went, there was nowhere on earth that was actually free of the dark passions inside the heart. They all just became kind of their worst selves as a result of being empowered in this way. I mean, it's. As I say, dear listeners, it's a really depressing story.
- [48:13]
C
But I think, you know, we're a weird species, us humans, right? We. We are, I think, indeed capable of extraordinarily horrible things. And it doesn't take too much effort to discover that. But we are also, you know, capable of goodness.
- [48:35]
A
We sure are.
- [48:36]
C
Right. Of empathy, self sacrifice of self sacrifice of love.
- [48:43]
A
And we do have the capacity to know the truth. This remarkable fact.
- [48:46]
C
That's right.
- [48:48]
A
Of human spirit. It's amazing.
- [48:49]
C
That's right. And to try to somehow make. To leave the world a little bit better than we found it. And so I don't want to leave the reader with simply, my gosh, what a bummer. Although I don't want to romanticize the past either.
- [49:09]
A
No, no, and you certainly don't.
- [49:11]
C
But it does seem to me, and it gets really back to a point you made earlier, that precisely this entanglement, right, the ways in which we are intertwined and a recognition of that really, it seems to me, offers us today a way of making the world better.
- [49:32]
A
Well, maybe that's part of the whole story that, I mean, throughout human history, maybe, but maybe certainly in the history that you're telling, that there's something about the introduction of these violent tools and the explosion of killing and the destruction of traditional ways of life, traditional folkways, long established ways of doing things that. That very destructive nature of the last 300 years or whatever, it also, almost as a result of that destructiveness, it. It kind of raised to consciousness even more than before what was lost or what could be. You know, it's. It's a strange fact that as a result of the revolutionary nature of this killing, revolutions of the human spirit towards greater and more explicit affirmations of the equality of all people, the value of human life, etc becomes loud, become louder as well. I mean, both sides are happening at the same time, almost like a.
- [50:40]
C
That's Right.
- [50:41]
A
Like a dynamic back and forth, you know, it. Yeah, it is a strange mystery, isn't it?
- [50:45]
C
It really is. And you know, to get back to Melville a little bit, he. He both issued a kind of warning sign about this extraordinary violence that was making, kind of making America right. But he also could recognize that whales were incredibly smart and had a kind of cultural life, social and cultural lives. And that recognition, that kind of empathy with the species that he was also hunting. Right. So admittedly it's a paradox if not a contradiction. Nonetheless, it seems to me is inspiring. And what we're seeing now today is a sense of an awareness of entanglement, but also kind of the life worlds of non humans. And that's pretty neat at the very least.
- [51:42]
A
It's pretty neat.
- [51:43]
C
And you know, it gives me some sense of hope.
- [51:47]
A
Well, what do you think about sort of the future? I mean, reading the book? In a way it feels a little bit, as you're reading the book, like you're. We're in a courtroom and modernity is in the dock. And this is the prosecution's case. Like modernity did all this bad stuff. And we could of course, easily then articulate the defense. Human rights, better dentistry, more human knowledge, going to space the normal sort of story. So you have the prosecution, the defense, what is the judge and jury? What are they going to make of this, do you think? How can we interpret but the future based on the past, especially given the invention of these new ways of killing like drones, which are making. Making it cheaper and cheaper to do tremendous acts of violence, you know, and destabilizing geopolitical relations and things in the process. So what do you think the judge and jury are going to say about the mortisene?
- [52:52]
C
Right. Well, one of the things I try to do towards the end of the book is point out that various people were aware from the beginning that this wasn't going well, it wasn't going to end well. And two, that something had to be done. There were various, for example, various gun laws that emerge in the 19th century to try to tamp down this violence. And indeed, in many areas of the world, violence declined. And here, yet another Paradox in the 20th century, of course, where it didn't decline was in the core west, which was infinitely, it seemed, capable of murdering one another.
- [53:39]
A
You're speaking of the world wars especially.
- [53:41]
C
Yeah, the world wars, yeah.
- [53:42]
A
Amazing abattoirs of killing. Incredible. Like we, we kind of. It was so traumatizing to our civilization that we still don't really grasp it. The degree to which it was, was civilizational suicide. Unbelievable.
- [53:55]
C
Absolutely. So, I mean, if I were the, the judge, I would say we have to recognize the contradictions and the violent origins of, of our modern world, but we also have to recognize that there are other futures possible. And it is indeed the extraordinary capacity of humans to imagine other futures that is really in our hands. And we can make the world better now. You know, we're, we are now faced with extraordinary challenges. You know, I would point to two drones. AI.
- [54:35]
A
Yeah. Goodness. Yeah.
- [54:36]
C
You know, some would like to say that they both need to be totally unregulated. But if we go back to, you know, some of the things I look at in the book, there seems to be a strong case for laws and a social fabric that holds to account those who are in power.
- [54:56]
A
And if we're going to do that, we should do it soon. Because one thing your book demonstrates is that at some point, Western states especially, but everywhere statesmen realized the destructiveness of this democratization of violence that the gun and all of its, you know, related technologies had given people. And so they tried to begin to regulate it, to control it, but in a way, too late. The genie was out of the bottle and we're still dealing. I mean, look at the Middle East. That's what this podcast tends to talk about. It's terribly violent because of all of these armed groups. But then look at the United States. It's terribly violent because there's so much, so many guns there. You know, so if we're gonna do something about drones and AI, we should do it soon. Because once the gen out of the bottle, that's it. That's it. It's very sobering.
- [55:48]
C
That's right. Right. And something that a lot of Americans conveniently forget is that a lot of weapons made in America actually move across the border into places like Mexico, which helps fuel the cartels that are now using drones, by the way.
- [56:08]
A
Well, the story that you tell in this book, the Killing Age, an excellent book, dear listeners. I really recommend it. Another book that will really help you understand the world that we live in. The story that you tell has not ended. I hope it's not just chapter one of a multi volume book. Hopefully we will get our acts together sooner rather than later. But Clifton Crace, it's a great book. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.
- [56:33]
C
Well, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure.
- [56:37]
A
That was Clifton Crace. His new book, the Killing How Violence Made the Modern World World is available from all good booksellers. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host, Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a Message Heard Production Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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