What Was History’s Deadliest Era?

In the beginning was the musket. By investing in gun making, monopolizing the manufacture of quality gunpowder, and arming themselves to the teeth with flintlock muskets that were more dependable than De Almeida’s arquebuses, the Dutch — and then the British — kitted themselves out for early forms of primitive accumulation. Flintlocks that still worked in rainy conditions were much more reliable than unlike matchlock weapons that preceded them, and helped raiders to seize tropical spices and organize the violent enslavement of huge numbers of Africans. In many places colonized by Europeans, chaotic predation of this kind slowly gave way to production: the organized but no less violent domination of domestic and imported workers to produce cash crops or tropical goods for export. Jamaica, which had been a docking station for pirates, became a plantation economy in which enslaved Africans toiled to produce the sugar on which Europeans were hooked.

Guns were not just tools for extracting goods and people from other places. Crais suggests that they were a vital commodity in thickening networks of trade. He vividly evokes the desire of non-Europeans for muskets, which conferred an edge — as much psychological as it was material — in conflicts with local rivals. He estimates that Western manufacturers and traders exported about half a billion guns from the mid-eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, along with enough gunpowder to kill every person then alive. One spike in this trade was the perverse expression of a peace dividend: after defeating Napoléon Bonaparte at Waterloo, European states ran down their stockpiles and flogged off weapons to Latin America and Africa.

Wherever guns went, societies upended themselves to obtain them and wreaked havoc with them. Heavily armed Indonesian pirates swapped prisoners for forest products with remote tribes in Borneo, who wanted them for human sacrifice. In North America, gunrunning led to “ecocide”: the relentless extermination of fur-bearing animals, beginning on the eastern seaboard and advancing westward, as First Nations used guns from British traders to kill the beavers whose pelts could be swapped for still more guns. The torrent of guns allowed peoples such as the Iroquois or Sioux to turn themselves into slaver states who forced their captives to work on preparing furs for market.

Although Crais’s analysis ranges widely, he gives an especially gripping account of how guns debauched Africa, where militarized capitalism was never just something inflicted by Europeans on passive indigenes. Along the west coast, Europeans joined forces with warlords who used guns to tighten their control of coastlines and river mouths, monopolizing the flow of goods and people from the interior. He gives a macabre portrait of predator states such as the Oyo Empire and the Kingdom of Dahomey, whose rulers amassed European trinkets while enslaving their neighbors. Elsewhere, Crais maps slaving economies that were as appalling as they are relatively unfamiliar: “viciously racist Egyptians” turned Sudan into a vast slave market, while caravans of heavily armed traders from the Arab Gulf trekked out from Zanzibar in pursuit of ivory and human beings.

The relationships on which these “immoral economies” depended were hardly stable or equal. Crais provocatively describes Europeans abroad as “warlords,” a term meant to convey that freebooters, rather than conventional armies, spearheaded the violent advance of capitalism. Yet the chartered companies that operated everywhere from Canada’s Hudson Bay to the river Niger arguably relied on legal and financial legerdemain more than brute force. They borrowed state authority and often deployed more capital than they amassed. The British East India Company, which bore a “sword in one hand, and a ledger in the other” as it conquered vast swathes of the Indian subcontinent, typified this approach.

Europeans were often remarkably casual in handing over guns that were supposed to give them a decisive advantage because they had mastered a more insidious technology of domination: debt. The strongmen with whom they traded struggled to pay for guns once fur-bearing animals vanished from their territories or when the peoples they raided armed themselves in turn. Europeans then pounced on their debtors. In North America, they demanded the surrender of land; in India, the control of tax revenues in payment. Instead of stuff, they took sovereignty.

Killing for capital did not in Crais’s view give way to fossil-fuel industrialism but rather made it possible in the first place. Practices that now look archaic, such as the mass slaughter of animals or the violent capture of people, actually greased the wheels of industrial modernity. A century-long war on African elephants supported the development of manufacturing towns like Ivoryton, Connecticut, which turned out piano keys for American parlors. New Bedford, Massachusetts, was the base for America’s whaling fleet before it became a manufacturing hub. Boilers gave way to spindles, and blubber to cotton, but violence was a constant: New Bedford’s cotton came from the South, a slaving empire within the republic whose leaders hoped to push its borders to the Pacific. The American Civil War thwarted those dreams. When it came to a close, Americans turned their guns on the buffalo of the Great Plains, reducing their numbers from some seventy million to a few hundred within decades. Their tough hides, which had not been much use in leather making, turned out to make excellent belts for machines, helping to maximize the output of steam engines.

Connections like these encourage Crais to present the gun as the starting pistol for anthropogenic global warming. He concedes that scientists disagree on when human-induced climate change first became palpable and damaging. Dust thrown up into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions seems to have cooled the mid-nineteenth century globe, masking the impact of factory emissions. Some researchers nevertheless believe that anthropogenic climate change worsened the severe droughts that struck much of later-nineteenth-century North America and disrupted Asian monsoon systems. Following Mike Davis, Crais argues that the mismanagement of dogmatic British officials turned the failure of Indian harvests into famines. He adds the thirty to sixty million people who “needlessly perished” of hunger in late-nineteenth-century India and China to his butcher’s bill.

Not all of Crais’s links between capitalism and excess deaths from hunger and disease are so speculative. Predation, and the exploitative regimes of production that followed it, often had immediate and grave effects on local ecologies. The extermination of North American buffalo brought about the starvation of the plains Indians who relied upon them. This was by design, but other disasters were inadvertent. Wherever African elephants were hunted, trees and bushes grew back. These harbored the tsetse fly, the carrier of a deadly sleeping sickness that killed millions of people, horses, and farm animals across Africa. The network of irrigation canals dug by the khedive of Egypt as part of his plan to force the peasantry into growing cotton for export proved to be the ideal habitat for mosquitos and snails: millions succumbed to the malaria and bilharzia they carried.

This gun-toting capitalism is so deadly that it is hard to see why Crais abruptly calls time on the Mortecene around 1900. His answer, paradoxically, lies in the formal expansion of European empires. This process continued to unleash great violence, not least because it was often driven by pirates with new and better weapons. Cecil Rhodes carved out his fiefdom in South Africa with Martini–Henri rifles and Maxim machine guns, which decimated the Ndebele regiments his troops faced. Yet the new imperialism of the later nineteenth century increasingly preferred stability to profitable chaos and tried to establish a monopoly of violence.

The export ban on guns agreed at the 1890 Brussels Conference of the imperial powers dampened internecine warfare in Africa; the political boundaries hashed out by the colonial powers largely endured through independence to the present. Europeans likewise repented of their profitable decision to arm the Taiping rebels against the Qing regime in China. Despite having themselves bullied the Qing and looted their capital of Beijing, they now assisted them in liquidating the rebels.

There was nothing philanthropic about the demilitarization of the world. In the United States, a ban on selling weapons to indigenous peoples strengthened the hand of gun-toting settlers, while whites in the American South used the Second Amendment to keep the guns denied to their freed slaves. Still, Crais concludes that the age of killing was drawing to a close. This claim sits uneasily with the eruption of World War I. Concerned as he is mainly in the skirmishing of warlords within, or at the ragged margins of empires, Crais has little to say about what he views as a conventional showdown between dynastic alliance systems. The conflict matters to him chiefly because it was followed by a renewed injection of surplus weaponry into the extra-European world. He treats World War II in much the same way, noting it primarily to emphasize the decades of arms dealing that followed its close.

A “Mortecene” that includes the hunting of elephants or the “pelagic genocide” of whales but excludes the Somme, Stalingrad, or Dachau is perilously artificial. In judging The Killing Age, we need to distinguish the range and energy with which it maps excess deaths from its arguments about periodization, causation, and thus responsibility. Crais never seems sure whether the urge to kill is basic to humans or a historically novel urge that hijacked the West and then engulfed the world.

At times, Crais offers an Augustinian definition of humans, as creatures driven to seize what others have — a premise capacious enough to explain nearly all political and social forms in history. But he also wants to date our Fall rather precisely: early modern Europeans, he claims, chose violence, before either victimizing or suborning the rest of the planet.

If The Killing Age were more consistent in its pessimistic anthropology, then much of what it describes should be seen as an intensification of natural processes rather than a criminal frenzy of “stark planetary destruction.” Whalers who killed sperm whales for the oil that became indispensable to lighting homes and factories were little different from Australian aboriginals who had hunted their continent’s megafauna to extinction. Should we “collectively grieve for what we have done” if such destruction is part and parcel of being human? Perhaps the question is less whether we should grieve than whether, in doing so, we are responding to historical evidence or instead giving expression to our politics or spirituality.

Perhaps scale is what distinguishes the planetary crimes of the Mortecene from the routine horribleness of human experience. “Engines of history that had begun centuries earlier suddenly sped up and swayed out of control,” writes Crais, whipping up a “storm.” He deploys a staggering array of statistics to back up these turbid metaphors. Again and again, he seeks to appall and persuade his reader with the quantity of arms that circulated throughout the Mortecene. The volume matters, he submits, precisely because these weapons did not represent a qualitative change in lethality. Most were flintlock muskets — the “Toyota Corolla” of firearms, or, more appositely, the “AK-47” — capable of inflicting ugly wounds, but neither rapid to fire nor easy to aim. Many of their indigenous buyers chose to decorate them rather than to use them. Still, must not the half billion guns exported to the rest of the world have had huge effects on their makers and their buyers?

We need to consider relative rather than absolute magnitude in answering that question. In 1790, guns only made up 0.15 percent of British exports to the rest of the world. The case for the indispensability of gun-making to industrialization rests on harvesting suggestive examples, such as the Lloyds banking dynasty, who got their start in guns before moving into commerce and finance. The implication — that gun manufacture was an innovative part of the economy, rather than significant in absolute terms — resembles arguments now common in the scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. For all its horrors, Crais concedes that slavery can at best be said to have had “sizeable aggregate effects” on Britain’s industrial revolution. Efficiency gains on West Indian plantations ran parallel to, but did not anticipate, those in domestic manufacturing; slave-grown sugar nourished urban factory hands but does not explain the productivity gains of the industries in which they toiled. The gun is less the “epicenter” of mercantile imperialism than its most evocative symbol.

Indeed, tucked away in Crais’s statistics is a telling qualification: the vast majority of arms made by Europeans never left Europe. Across the eighteenth century, only 15 percent of Britain’s production was exported; the rest going into the stockpiles of its armed forces. Were guns really so instrumental in the transformation of the world if most of them vanished into domestic armories or were deployed primarily on European battlefields rather than wielded by warlords on African and Asian killing fields?

The awful, sometimes incomprehensibly huge body counts assembled by Crais make these criticisms seem quibbling. They undoubtedly convince readers to reject as Eurocentric a view of the long nineteenth century as a stable interval between the two great bloodlettings of the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. Before the Tianjin Rebellion was finally defeated, between twenty and thirty million Chinese had been killed, a toll that outstrips all the dead of World War I. But magnitude is not synonymous with significance, and not all enormities need be enormous. Crais constantly maximizes the number of people killed in wars, as if the Mortecene were the sum total of a spreadsheet column. He despairs of calculating how many Africans died in wars initiated by outsiders before suggesting that “perhaps hundreds of millions” may have perished. The hand-waving here is unconvincing. Cecil Rhodes’s British South African Company waged wars of invasion and counterinsurgency whose viciousness recalls the worst crimes of the present day, including dynamiting women and children as they sheltered in caves. Yet the historian William Beinart has calculated that these campaigns killed only about twelve thousand people.

It sounds grotesque to write “only” in such a context, but the wobbliness of the huge numbers thrown around by Crais leaves readers unsure how to calibrate their emotional response. In an appendix, he tells us that perhaps 228 million people died unnecessarily in Africa, Asia, and the Americas during the Mortecene. On more conservative estimates though, it was perhaps only one hundred million. But then Crais perks up and wonders if we could not bump that number up to three hundred million by including other parts of the world. If we suppose that the average person weighs about ninety pounds, then a human biomass of as much as twenty-seven billion pounds disappeared from the world during the Mortecene. I am ashamed to say that this figure stirred no emotions in me whatsoever. But why should it? There is no moral gravity in physical weight.

The Killing Age quotes Edward Gibbon’s line that the vocation of the historian is the “melancholy calculation of human calamities.” It makes good on that promise, but lacks Gibbon’s bluff Georgian clarity about tracing individual or collective responsibility for the disasters it describes. Most of its “unnecessary” deaths were not acts of killing, but the consequence of famines or diseases that followed wars, wrenching economic change, or simply bad weather.

It is odd to invoke the Anthropocene to inflate the death toll of the Mortecene, when almost no one had an inkling that the consumption of fossil fuels was deranging the weather. Crais points to the scientists who in the last decades of the nineteenth century had posited a link between carbonic gas levels and rising temperatures. Yet this is hardly enough to establish culpable “denial” about the causes or impact of global heating.

In any case, it is difficult to dismiss the Anthropocene as a crime — or even a mistake — when everyone reading these words owes their standard of living to it. It is easy to regret turning elephants into piano keys, buffalo into “robes” for posh New Yorkers, or sea cucumbers into aphrodisiacs, but much harder to see how we might have dispensed with kerosene gas lighting.

There is a moral, or perhaps a psychological, gap at the core of The Killing Age. We are never given a convincing account of why so many people felt they could kill in this period, or what it felt like to do so. Like many trade publications in history, The Killing Age has a dutifully picaresque rather than a forensic structure: each chapter introduces a new clutch of rogues before tracing out the details of their careers. Most of these perpetrators are doers rather than thinkers, instinctual and thuggish chancers like Rhodes — or his African, Asian, and Latin American counterparts — who rampaged into the world, head down and gun arm outstretched.

It is salutary to recall that people do not always have elaborate rationales for the harm that they do. Crais’s Boschian panorama of ruthless self-seeking and primal greed is a corrective to many academic accounts of European imperialism and settler colonialism, which see it as generated by fundamental shifts in how societies thought, with the churches, the Enlightenment, or the sciences variously indicted for generating new motives and rationales for the plunder and domination of other peoples. For Crais, Europeans did not need ideas to justify their ruthless appetites. The sea change came in the tools they had to pursue their coarse dreams of self-aggrandizement. His bracing materialism is in line with other recent works that understand imperialism as an outgrowth of an older will to profit.

All the same, the actions of his gunmen did have a moral and intellectual context that is too thinly stretched here. Their crimes cannot be understood without considering the thick web of religious reflection, legal thought, and statute that justified the use of violence by Europeans against others and, at times, restrained its excesses. Crais wonders rather naively why more people did not protest against a modern world that was going so “profoundly wrong.” The answer may be that many of them considered themselves more or less right.

When he mused on what makes a state, St Augustine quoted the pirate captured by Alexander the Great: “I do my fighting on a tiny ship, and they call me a pirate; you do yours with a large fleet, and they call you Commander.” Many states could be regarded as bands of robbers; many robbers, when they amassed power to seize whole regions and subdue their populations, could claim to have made kingdoms. The Killing Age chillingly evokes how distinctions between warlords and statesmen, empires and bands of robbers, slip and blur when we consider organized robbery and mass murder. It is a world hardly remote from our own, which is one reason why the “Mortecene” will not stick as the label for a distinct historical period. Augustine believed that a true state must be founded on “justice,” a principle he did not derive from but applied to his contemplation of the past. We need some such principle to make sense of the bewildering and gruesome facts with which The Killing Age presents us.