Did killers make the modern world?

Like many planters in 18th-century Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood grew rich by forcing other people to work for him at gunpoint. Unlike most slaveowners, he kept a detailed record of his own cruelty. His diaries, never intended for publication, offer valuable insights into the day-to-day horrors of slavery. In matter-of-fact prose, Thistlewood describes whipping slaves and rubbing chilli into their wounds; raping more than 100 women; and punishing a runaway by shackling him, smearing him with molasses and exposing him “naked to the flies all day”.

Clifton Crais, a historian at Emory University, uses Thistlewood’s ghastly story—and many more like it—to illustrate a striking argument. In his view, brutality like Thistlewood’s was not merely a scar on the modern world but essential to creating it. In “The Killing Age”, he claims that “without…globalised violence, the Industrial Revolution would not have happened.”

He is building on two ideas that have long been popular on the campus left. First, that the West is to blame for most of the world’s ills. As Mr Crais puts it, “killing [has been] the West’s most profound contribution to world history.” Second, that capitalism is a jolly bad thing. (This “economic system is the cause of violence”, says the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, a party whose members include Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic new mayor of New York.)

It is always tempting to describe the past in ways that reflect the present. Shakespeare played up what a repulsive villain King Richard III was because he could not afford to upset the Tudor dynasty that overthrew the hunchbacked monarch. British imperialists lauded the Roman empire as a backhanded way of justifying their own “civilising” mission.

This year, as the United States turns 250, MAGA types are promoting a self-congratulatory kind of history. The White House’s “Taskforce 250” urges unrestrained joy at “the greatest political journey” of all time. By contrast, the New York Times’s “1619 Project” dates the nation’s true founding from the day the first slave ship docked and describes racial injustice as the central fact of American history.

Mr Crais makes an even bolder argument, and applies it more broadly. Over 700 gore-splattered pages, he contends that “capitalism’s ‘big bang’—a turning-point in the history of the planet—emerged out of nothing less and nothing more than the globalised use of violence to make money.”

His reasoning goes like this. Weapons technology improved dramatically in the West in the late 1700s. Many new guns, often wielded by private firms such as the British East India Company, were used to conquer and plunder foreign lands. Others were sold to local warlords, who then preyed on their neighbours. Global trade was thus driven by an arms race. All around the world, people either bought guns or were robbed by those who had. So they sold what they could to raise the necessary funds: wax, camphor and birds’ nests from the jungles of Borneo; ivory from Africa; slaves from almost everywhere.

With a barrage of statistics, Mr Crais shows that weapons were indeed a big business. During the 19th century, he notes, England’s annual imports of Indian potassium nitrate were enough to make gunpowder for 1bn-3bn musket shots, more than the number of people in the world at the time. The profits from arms-dealing, looting and enslavement were vast, and some of the cash was invested in the coal-powered factories and railways that made up the Industrial Revolution. Thus, “destruction made the modern world” and sowed the seeds of today’s existential threat, climate change.

There are big holes in this argument. It is far from clear that the world grew more violent after the late 1700s. The torture that Thistlewood inflicted, though vile, was not obviously worse than that inflicted by slave-owners in previous times and in other places. (The Romans, for example, practised crucifixion.) The warlords and imperialists of the 19th century were not obviously more brutal and rapacious than the warlords and imperialists of earlier ages, from the crusaders who sacked Constantinople to the Mongols who rode bloodshod over Eurasia.

Data about the distant past are sketchy and disputed, but scholars such as Steven Pinker of Harvard argue that there has been a dramatic decline in violence over the centuries. The homicide rates in 14th-century Germany, Italy and Spain were, respectively, roughly 70, 200 and 50 times higher than they are now. In some pre-modern hunter-gatherer societies, as many as a third of people died violently.

For 18 blood-drenched centuries after the birth of Jesus, global income per head barely budged. Then, after 1820, it shot up 14-fold (see chart). It is simply not plausible that violence caused this sudden great enrichment. What changed was not “man’s inhumanity to man”, a phrase coined by Robert Burns in 1784, but an explosion of innovation by the poet’s contemporaries. That single decade, for example, saw the invention of the power loom, paddle steamer, threshing machine and bifocal glasses.

The fundamental driver of the Industrial Revolution was the invention, spread and application of new ideas. This in turn depended on an earlier technology—printing—which allowed the price of a book to fall from months of wages for a typical worker to a couple of hours. Knowledge is cumulative and advanced ever faster as more and more people had the means to learn, digest and build upon the ideas that came before them.

Did the profits of slavery and colonialism accelerate this process, as some argue? Perhaps. But if so, probably not by much. European powers with large colonies industrialised at roughly the same pace as those with insignificant ones. The slave trade was no weightier in the British economy than sheep farming, yet few people claim that “sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution”, notes a study by Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think-tank.

“The Killing Age” is deeply researched and contains some fascinating passages about who killed whom and who stole what in parts of the world to which too little attention is paid, from Darfur to New Zealand. It offers interesting digressions on the environmental harm caused by 19th-century whalers and elephant-hunters. But the author, who often says “infinitely” when he means “very much”, has a tendency to exaggerate. And his central thesis is bunk. The modern world has been cursed by killers, but it was built by boffins. ■