Historian Clifton Crais will discuss his new book, The Killing Age: How violence made the modern world, with anthropologist Larry Rosen.

In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today. (University of Chicago Press)

Books will be available for sale and signing courtesy of Compass Rose Books.

Clifton Crais is Professor of History Emeritus at Emory University, and previously held teaching positions at Johns Hopkins, Stanford University, and Kenyon College. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Larry Rosen is the Cromwell Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of Law Emeritus at Columbia University. A member of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court and named to the first group of MacArthur Award recipients, he recently served as a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School.