In _The Killing Age_, historian Clifton Crais argues that the modern era should be called the Mortecene - the Age of Death and Killing - rather than the Anthropocene. Crais contends that industrialization, slavery, and colonial exploitation created a system where violence reduced everything, including human beings, to exchangeable commodities in the so-called free market.

While Crais focuses on extractive violence under capitalism, his analysis notably excludes mass killing committed in the name of human emancipation. The French Revolution's Reign of Terror and civil war in the Vendée resulted in 150,000 to 200,000 deaths out of a population of 800,000. Similarly, the Soviet gulag system, which Crais doesn't examine, functioned as both a tool of political oppression and a state-managed extractive apparatus that consumed millions of prisoners as human resources.

The book's 736 pages contain no entries for the French Revolution, Robespierre, the Holocaust, or the Holodomor - some of the most significant episodes of modern mass murder. While Crais acknowledges that life improved for billions due to industrialization, his exclusive focus on capitalist violence creates a selective historical narrative that omits crucial chapters of 20th-century atrocities committed by revolutionary regimes.