← New Books Network
New Books Network
Clifton Crais, "The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
00:36:32
Loading summary
Transcript38 lines
- [00:02]
New Books Network Announcer
Hey, NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network audience survey, and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries, and institutions we partner with when we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:15]
Professor Clifton Cray
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:20]
Eleonora Matiacci
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci, an associate professor of political science at Amherst College. Today I'm here with Professor Clifton Cray, who is a professor of history at Emory University specializing in African and comparative history. Professor Cray's new book is called the Killing How Violence Made the Modern World. It was published in 2025 by the University of Chicago Press in the US and by Picador outside of the US Professor Krez, thank you for joining us and welcome.
- [01:59]
Professor Clifton Cray
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:01]
Eleonora Matiacci
Professor Krez, your book opens with a striking concept, the Morticine, or Age of Death. What do you mean by that?
- [02:11]
Professor Clifton Cray
Yes, well, I arrived at the word out of some dissatisfaction and concern with another word that is often used, the Anthropocene. And my problem with the Anthropocene, which is sort of everywhere nowadays.
- [02:31]
Eleonora Matiacci
Helen, send us what it means.
- [02:34]
Professor Clifton Cray
Well, Anthropocene means the age of man. It was developed by a scientist, Paul Crutzen, to describe the ways in which humans were changing planetary systems. And for Crutson, it all began with the steam engine. And there's a lot of truth to what he was observing and arguing, but it seemed to leave out a lot of history about how Precisely that world that made humans, as planetary actors on a global scale, possible. And it left out all of the violence that, as a historian, I was very well aware of as a scholar of colonialism, but also slavery. So if we think about the Industrial Revolution in Manchester, England, that was making cloth. Well, for many decades, particularly in the formative period, that cloth, of course, was being produced, the raw cotton by slaves. And so what I wanted to do was try to put the connections together. And that led me to discovering really, the extraordinary amount of killing that went into the. The development of global capitalism, including the Industrial Revolution. And so the Mortisene, it seems to me, is a more accurate way of sort of encapsulating that period in the 18th and 19th century in which so many things were killed to turn into commodities or. Or as the process of the commodification of, particularly with regard to slavery of humans. And so I began just kind of tallying, making a census. And it was like, oh, my gosh, this is huge. How do I describe it? And that led me to the mortisene.
- [05:12]
Eleonora Matiacci
So you kind of answered this already, but I was hoping you would tell us what inspired you to rethink the Industrial Revolution specifically. Was there. Was there something that you can pinpoint to that inspired you to rethink the revolution as you just told us?
- [05:34]
Professor Clifton Cray
You know, I think the. The. The most immediate thing was looking at the export of weapons into Africa, the export of human beings to the Americas, and the extraordinary tally of human life, the destruction of human life that was entailed by that process. Usually the scholarship talks about the mortality rates of enslaved peoples as they were moving from Africa to the Americas, roughly around 10%, which, of course, is extraordinary. But once I began putting the weapons together, I was led to how many people you had to kill to generate those slaves who then still had a 10% chance of dying. And since the labors of slaves was so connected to the rise of England and including the Industrial Revolution, that's when I began sort of putting it. There was a kind of aha moment. And then I began looking at other things that were part of the Industrial Revolution and then kind of tracing them back and forth across time and space.
- [07:15]
Eleonora Matiacci
Wow. That was quite the journey. I'm glad I asked.
- [07:18]
Professor Clifton Cray
It certainly was.
- [07:20]
Eleonora Matiacci
I'm glad I asked that question. It's an interesting way to get to that question. You are a scholar of African history. I wanted to ask you something about a concept that is at the heart of your book. This idea of a military, commercial revolution. What is that?
- [07:39]
Professor Clifton Cray
Yes. So the military commercial revolution refers to this unholy marriage of new forms of finance. We're thinking here, banking, bonds, stock markets, insurance policies, uniform currencies, all the things that we all require as part of the modern economy and the trade and the spread of weapons. So what you see is a militarization of societies around the world that is part and parcel of these new forms of finance. And so that together creates this military commercial revolution taking off, especially in the 18th century.
- [08:55]
Eleonora Matiacci
In the 18th century. So you told us what made you interested in this topic. You told us how you, you thought about this idea of the mortisene. You explained to us one of the key concepts, the hearts of the book, this idea of a military commercial revolution. Tell us a bit more now about the way in which the book is structured and why you chose to structure it that way.
- [09:22]
Professor Clifton Cray
Yes. So I should say first off, I went through about a dozen drafts of the book. So there were various changes in the structure along the way. Just to try to develop both the narrative, I wanted to tell a story. But how do you tell a story in a compelling way over the course of nearly two centuries? And that is also global in reach. So this was a major challenge for me. And the way I ended up structuring the book was to really begin with the military commercial revolution and just to think about the explosion and spread, global spread of weapons, particularly the flintlock musket. And then how was that possible? And so that's where I got into finance. So that covers the first part and then much of the rest of the book, at least the heart of the book is really following the where the weapons and the finance went and to what uses they were put. So, you know, in Africa, the scarce resource that was in demand globally, or at least the Americas were human beings. And so that led to my chapters on the Atlantic slave trade. Elsewhere in Africa, a scarce resource was ivory that was in demand. So that led me to that. And then because the book is very interested in the nearly simultaneous takeoff of two countries, Great Britain and the United States, I wanted to go to the United States, as it were. And there I focus in on really three things. Whales, bison, the American buffalo and beaver, which were used for clothing. And one of the things I discovered, which I think is really fascinating is on the COVID of the American Addition is the American bison was almost brought to extinction. And our usual, in America, at least it's often taught in American schools, is that this is tied to so called solving the American Indian problem. But in fact, what really almost killed off the bison was the discovery of how their body parts could become commodities. So I discovered that bison hide ends up in England in factories, literally helping power the industrial revolution. And bison bones, which is on the COVID end up as all kinds of things and end up in Detroit. It was the largest factory prior to cars, was processing bones, and at first, bison bones. So that's the kind of middle of the book. And then I have a large section on slavery and the products of slavery. And then the last half of the last third of the book, which goes on for quite a few hundred pages, is about the political crises that this rapid spread of violence and finance ended up creating, and how we need to think about the rise of states and of empires as an attempt to address or resolve some of the contradictions that violence was making. I mean, one of the stories here is simply that when violence spreads, it's very hard to control.
- [14:13]
Eleonora Matiacci
Yeah, that sounds convincing to me. I wanted to ask you. You just said, when you were explaining the structure of the book, you just said that you wanted to see where the weapons and the finance went and what use they were put to. And indeed, one of the most interesting parts of the book is how credit, debt and finance drove violence. Can you walk us through a typical example of how that worked on the ground?
- [14:49]
Professor Clifton Cray
So the. The classic example returns us back to Africa. And if you think about the enslavement of people, slaves were exchanged for goods, and typically they were done so on credit. So if you imagine a European merchant, a slave trader, arriving on the West African coast, he is taking out a loan from a British bank to purchase his guns and other material that he is going to exchange for slaves in on the West African coast. And he's in debt. He's probably taken out insurance policies and so on and so forth. And he then not simply sells them in. In exchanges them for slaves, but also there are a series of credit arrangements within Africa itself. And so you have these chains of debt that are insinuating themselves into African society. And these chains of debt that ultimately have their connections all the way to London banks create catastrophes for people. First of all, they spread violence because what the slave trader wants are humans. And slavery is impossible without violence. That's just the truth of the matter. But also people who found themselves in extraordinary debt were themselves susceptible to enslavement by their creditor. And so that creates a kind of debt crisis in Africa that begins shaping human conduct. So to escape out of your debt, you might then enslave others. And so you get this insidious system going that I. The word I use is an immoral economy. Immoral economy. And you know, slavery is, is perhaps the, the quintessential example, but you see it other examples all over the place where people find themselves in intractable debt and begin using predation use violence as a way of getting out of it.
- [17:56]
Eleonora Matiacci
So another, so you gave us this example of slavery. You explained to us how you talk about immoral economy, but the book also talks a lot about ecological violence. So you connect industrialization to environmental destruction. You talk about whales and bison and even elephants, ivory. As you were just telling us, why was this kind of ecological violence so integral to your story?
- [18:31]
Professor Clifton Cray
Part I, Part of the answer is that this is the age before plastics and rubber. And it's the age of just the beginnings of the transition to fossil fuels, but not the use of fossil fuels to develop very other aspects of the petrochemical industry. So, you know, you. A lot of those products are going to have to come from the natural world. And whale oil is an outstanding lubricant. So it was used in various industrial settings. Whale oil also produced light. And in the 18th and into the 19th centuries, prior to gas lighting, prior to kerosene, in other words, prior to the petrochemical fossil fuel transition, whale oil produced the best light. And so our early factories were literally lit by whale oil. And, you know, the only way to get whale oil is to kill whales. And so this, you know, ties into the fantastic amount of ecological destruction with regard to whaling and bison, as I mentioned earlier. You know, anyone who has a car, you'll see that there are rubber fan belts. The entire fossil fuel economy runs on circular motion and requires belting. And nowadays that is invariably done with rubber or other forms of synthetic substances. But in the past, prior to rubber, the only way of doing really decent belting was to use animal products. And so the natural world becomes a very important part of the making of what I would call a kind of the unnatural world that we live in today. I mean, ultimately, the fossil fuel revolution helped save the whale. So there's a kind of odd contradiction, but at the cost of, you know, emitting CO2 into the atmosphere and, you know, other forms of, of pollution and so, you know, the world. One of the things I wanted to talk about a lot is the kind of the paradoxes of our world, past and present.
- [21:49]
Eleonora Matiacci
Yes, and I'm glad you mentioned the fossil fuel economy because one of the most striking claims that the book that I want to ask you about is that modern global warming and modern slavery Were, in your own words, quote, born together, end quote. That's like a claim that connects things that most people treat as entirely separate issues. How did you come to see them as part of the same story?
- [22:21]
Professor Clifton Cray
Yes, well, I came to see it as part of the same story primarily through a rather deep dive into climate science. And the amount of information and databases that have been coming out on climate science has been really revolutionary, at least until the recent cutbacks that we are seeing, which is disturbing. And one of the things that some of the research I began reading has pushed back the dates of human created global warming considerably a lot of times. And, and this is what I thought is that our current global warming, you know, really emerged roughly after 1945 and what many people call the great acceleration. And if you look at those curves, they really are very dramatic. But if you think of things a little bit differently and begin, you know, inquiring into the earlier period we began to see was already taking off. And this was one of these eureka moments. It was like, wow, that means that we were beginning to change planetary systems much earlier than we thought. And it was overlapping with this period of extraordinary violence, imperialism, but also the kind of global globalization of slavery. And, and so I'm not saying that, you know, slavery caused global warming. What I am suggesting is the kind of close entanglement of, of processes of developments that we often pull apart and treat separately.
- [24:45]
Eleonora Matiacci
Yeah, I think the book does a lot of that. It's a striking read. And I can't shake the image of the COVID the book cover in the United States. Could you describe it for us?
- [24:59]
Professor Clifton Cray
Yes. So the photograph is from Detroit. And there was a part of Detroit called Boneville which housed these factories that were processing bones. And so there were so many bison bones across the American west in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s that homesteaders couldn't plow the land. There were just that it was just like, if you can imagine, like a sea of, of whitening bones across the prairies. And trains were actually, there were branch lines to begin to collect these bones and move them east to these factories. And so the, the COVID photograph are, is of two men. One is standing on a mountain, a veritable mountain of bison bones that are kind of neatly stacked and you know, would then be used to develop things like carbon filters, inks, even mascara in, you know, in some instances. And so these bones were, were being industrially produced. And this one factory in Detroit for a long time was operating 247 just to process these bones. Now bones were Also used as fertilizer because they have a high. They have phosphates in them. And so this is, you know, what I. What I hope the COVID does is show in, in the book as a whole, show these entanglements, right? Between that connect moments of violence with kind of everyday products, right? What could be more everyday than mascara or fine bone china or the sugar you put in your cup of tea?
- [27:27]
Eleonora Matiacci
Moments of violence and everyday products. That leads me to my next question. How does your take on the past change how we should think about today's global economy or climate crisis?
- [27:47]
Professor Clifton Cray
The most important things I hope readers will take away is that the connections between the global economy and the climate crisis have a much deeper and more complicated history than we often think about. And so the solutions to the climate crisis ultimately will have to be found in changes to how we think about the global economy in some respects in the most profound ways. So we need to kind of understand, for example, that our smartphones are part of a vast global economy that is itself tied to extraordinary levels of violence, indeed slavery itself, so that those earlier connections I talk about kind of endure into the present. Those supply chains are shockingly dirty. We need to develop, you know, mindfulness about the ways in which our planet is so intertwined and interconnected. And, you know, ultimately in, in my book is really also about the age of mass consumption. And mass consumption has an underbelly and is tied to the climate crisis today. And so, you know, the two have to be brought together. And I'm not persuaded by just simple technical answers to the climate crisis. There's a deeper, indeed, ultimately kind of ethical and moral quandary that we have to face.
- [30:12]
Eleonora Matiacci
And the carbon sinks cannot quite get to the depths that we need to get to.
- [30:17]
Professor Clifton Cray
Is that. Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
- [30:20]
Eleonora Matiacci
Professor Kress, you wrote a wondrous book that carries us through two centuries of history, that tells us the stories of so many living things, and that connects violence to the economy, to the climate crisis. So this question is so unfair, deeply unfair, but here it goes. If our listeners could take away just one core idea from, from your book, what would it be?
- [30:51]
Professor Clifton Cray
That is an unfair question, but I'll answer it nonetheless. The one thing I really want readers to come away from the book is that humans have almost infinite capacity to do harm to others. But. But we also have an extraordinary capacity for empathy and for recognizing our connections to one another and to the world around us. And ultimately, there are decisions that we have to make about which we want to embrace.
- [31:38]
Eleonora Matiacci
I am so glad I asked that very unfair question because the answer will stay with me and I'm sure with the listeners for a long time. And speaking of unfair questions, after the very long rich book, I must now ask you, what are you working on next?
- [32:00]
Professor Clifton Cray
Volume two?
- [32:02]
Eleonora Matiacci
Really?
- [32:03]
Professor Clifton Cray
Yes. What I want to do now and what I'm working on now is kind of basically a global history of the 20th century, roughly from, you know, 1914 up through the 1970s. And one of the things I'm returning to is how do we tell the history of violence in the 20th century? Because it seems to me substantially different than the violence I discussed in, in the book. And yet it seems to me that today, or at least roughly from the 1970s, we may be returning to the relationship between violence and, and commodities that I discuss in, in the book. And so, you know, what has been going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in terms of Colton and Cobalt, the relationship between authoritarianism and commodities, say lithium in South America, or what has been, you know, emerging from the Trump administration in terms of, you know, conquering Greenland, secure access to scarce resources. And so what I'm hoping to do is to kind of think about a good part of the 20th century as an age of both possibility and catastrophe and the more recent past as a kind of return to a rather barbarous age that I discussed in the Killing Age.
- [34:19]
Eleonora Matiacci
That's disconcerting. But I look forward to the book and I hope you'll be back to tell us all about it.
- [34:24]
Professor Clifton Cray
I look forward to being here again.
- [34:27]
Eleonora Matiacci
Thank you, Professor Craigs, for taking the time to talk with us today. My guest has been Professor Craze. He is the author of a new book, the Killing How Violence Made the Modern World. The book was published in 2025 by the University of Chicago Press in the US and by Picador outside of the US I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. Until next time,
- [35:02]
Professor Clifton Cray
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do. @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms@mintmobile.com.