This blog post is part of the series investigating the belief in progress. The contention that "The 20th century was the bloodiest ever" is often used (at least by laymen) as an argument against a belief in progress.
The first point to make is that death totals should be judged in relation to the total population of the world. Twenty million people dying in a century, when only 100 million people lived at all, is much worse than 50 million dying in century in which a 1 billion people lived (This depends on a moral contention that it is worth choosing to live at all).
I shall argue that the 20th century was not in fact the bloodiest century ever. Indeed I'll argue that despite the wars, genocides and created famines of the last century that most of the history of homo sapiens has been worse (again on a per capita basis). Furthermore I shall show that there have been at least two (quite possibly many more) centuries in the last 2000 years which were clearly more bloody than the 20th century.
There are many problems with the statistics for warfare, genocides and famines:
1) Death counts collated by armies or politicians cannot be trusted due to bias and neglect.
2) Counting deaths caused directly by weapons results in a gross underestimate.
The authors of the 2006 Lancet study concerning the Iraq war say "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods".
3) The historical record is poorer the further back in time you go. As a result major famines, genocides and wars in remote parts of the world may have been underestimated or even overlooked.
4) Famines caused by gross mismanagement of the economy or by political suppression are often counted as atrocities when these events occurred in the 20th century. Logically, however, when comparing centuries we must take such famines into account from earlier centuries. It is very hard to find good statistics on human caused famines prior to the 20th century. This may result in an underestimate of our death tolls by as much as a factor of 2.
A cautionary note: Together these problems mean that any casualty estimates by people other than serious historians will almost certainly be underestimates (assuming they don't just quote historians).
I cannot give figures for deaths due to warfare for any century other than the 20th. I have searched the Internet and have been unable to find the necessary data. However, there are other ways to demonstrate my point.
Firstly tribal societies have very high rates of mass male on male violence. See Steven Pinker's excellent article on the history of violence.
The relevant quote "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths..."
The precise figure is debatable but even if its out by a factor of 5 the conclusion still holds: For most of human history we were tribal (or mostly tribal) so most of human history was more bloody than the 20th century was.
Secondly I shall show that the 8th century and the 13th century were both more bloody than the twentieth.
In the 8th Century 36 million people died as a result of a single civil war in China known as the "An Shi Rebellion". Adjusting for world population (210 million) this is almost twice as bad as the death toll for the entire 20th century (I assume a high estimate of 231 millions dying in the 20th century). A comparison based on all the warfare, famines and genocides would almost certainly be much worse.
In the 13th Century 40 million people were killed in various wars that can be grouped under the heading of the "Mongol Conquests". The population of the world had grown to 442 million. Never the less, the figures for this campaign itself are enough to show the 13th century to be more bloody than the 20th.
I am not in a position to answer the question "Which centuries were genuinely more bloody than the 20th century?". However, its obvious that a good statistical analysis would throw up further surprises.
In conclusion there has been progress in reducing the per capita impact of man made mass murder but how fast this is occuring and how steadily is still unclear to me at least (despite my best efforts to find sources).
Finally I should point out that I do not intend to judge past ages using standards from the 21st century. I intend rather to show that being born in the 20th century results in a lower risk of death due to warfare, genocide or engineered famine than being born during most of the rest of the history of man.
The first point to make is that death totals should be judged in relation to the total population of the world. Twenty million people dying in a century, when only 100 million people lived at all, is much worse than 50 million dying in century in which a 1 billion people lived (This depends on a moral contention that it is worth choosing to live at all).
I shall argue that the 20th century was not in fact the bloodiest century ever. Indeed I'll argue that despite the wars, genocides and created famines of the last century that most of the history of homo sapiens has been worse (again on a per capita basis). Furthermore I shall show that there have been at least two (quite possibly many more) centuries in the last 2000 years which were clearly more bloody than the 20th century.
There are many problems with the statistics for warfare, genocides and famines:
1) Death counts collated by armies or politicians cannot be trusted due to bias and neglect.
2) Counting deaths caused directly by weapons results in a gross underestimate.
The authors of the 2006 Lancet study concerning the Iraq war say "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods".
3) The historical record is poorer the further back in time you go. As a result major famines, genocides and wars in remote parts of the world may have been underestimated or even overlooked.
4) Famines caused by gross mismanagement of the economy or by political suppression are often counted as atrocities when these events occurred in the 20th century. Logically, however, when comparing centuries we must take such famines into account from earlier centuries. It is very hard to find good statistics on human caused famines prior to the 20th century. This may result in an underestimate of our death tolls by as much as a factor of 2.
A cautionary note: Together these problems mean that any casualty estimates by people other than serious historians will almost certainly be underestimates (assuming they don't just quote historians).
I cannot give figures for deaths due to warfare for any century other than the 20th. I have searched the Internet and have been unable to find the necessary data. However, there are other ways to demonstrate my point.
Firstly tribal societies have very high rates of mass male on male violence. See Steven Pinker's excellent article on the history of violence.
The relevant quote "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths..."
The precise figure is debatable but even if its out by a factor of 5 the conclusion still holds: For most of human history we were tribal (or mostly tribal) so most of human history was more bloody than the 20th century was.
Secondly I shall show that the 8th century and the 13th century were both more bloody than the twentieth.
In the 8th Century 36 million people died as a result of a single civil war in China known as the "An Shi Rebellion". Adjusting for world population (210 million) this is almost twice as bad as the death toll for the entire 20th century (I assume a high estimate of 231 millions dying in the 20th century). A comparison based on all the warfare, famines and genocides would almost certainly be much worse.
In the 13th Century 40 million people were killed in various wars that can be grouped under the heading of the "Mongol Conquests". The population of the world had grown to 442 million. Never the less, the figures for this campaign itself are enough to show the 13th century to be more bloody than the 20th.
I am not in a position to answer the question "Which centuries were genuinely more bloody than the 20th century?". However, its obvious that a good statistical analysis would throw up further surprises.
In conclusion there has been progress in reducing the per capita impact of man made mass murder but how fast this is occuring and how steadily is still unclear to me at least (despite my best efforts to find sources).
Finally I should point out that I do not intend to judge past ages using standards from the 21st century. I intend rather to show that being born in the 20th century results in a lower risk of death due to warfare, genocide or engineered famine than being born during most of the rest of the history of man.
I agree with this analysis. Though was the Twentieth Century the bloodiest if we adjust for the level of civilization of the population of the world at the time? I offer no good measure of "level of civilization", but I think the perception that /contextually/ the Twentieth Century was the bloodiest ever might be accurate.
Posted by: Jon | 28 May 2008 at 12:29
Its certainly the case that the trend in warfare is not as clear a progressive trend as many other trends (science, technology, average life expectancy). This may partly be due to warfare deaths following some form of power law.
The standards by which we judge war morality have advanced hugely since the 13th century but the leathality of war is very much the same. So in that sense we feal that warfare hasn't gotten better. But I think progress must be judged against a fixed ruler. At the end of the day if the likelyhood of a new born baby being killed in warfare has reduced by 5 (or more) times since tribal times that must count as progress.
Posted by: Barnaby Dawson | 28 May 2008 at 23:47
We would be better off asking a specialist to comment on this, but I am not convinced by the methods used to calculate the death toll of the An Shi Rebellion. Apparently somebody just took the difference between the results of two censuses. Surely - in the absence of actual genocidal measures - it could be caused at least in part by gross disruption in the (previously very well-developed) civil service used to conduct the census?
I suppose one of the main reasons that 20th century slaughter is used to question a belief in progress (and why, for example, WWI did cause a large shift in attitudes in this respect) is that slaughter in the 20th century was of a kind that would have been very difficult without the technological advances that it used. Of course, at least in so far as wars are concerned, this is hardly anything other than a difference of degree - technology has been involved in warfare for as long as anybody can trace these things. Still, technological progress came to be seen as a major destructive force during and immediately after the Great War, and it is important to at least remark on this shift in attitudes.
As for genocide in WWII: it started in a fairly disorganised fashion, with massacres carried out by firearm; still, both what came before and what came after that period - namely, racial laws and "industrialised" slaughter - were remarkable both for their insistence on classification and the way in which they used the processes of modern industry and the modern state in order to classify, dehumanise, mechanise and sterlisise a process that had become a little too much, at an instinctive level, for some of the people who had been involved in it from the beginning.
As for famines: this is a side issue, but I do not see how the Ukranian famine of the early 1930s is terribly different from either the Irish potato famine or the Bengal famine from the early 1940s. In all of these cases you had natural phenomena giving rise to a much larger dearth than they physically necessitated - a dearth that was then treated with a mixture of callousness and incompetence by those in power. (In all three cases, the people affected and some of their descendants tend to see evidence of planning where there may or may not have been some.) Of course, avoidable famines can also exist in precapitalist societies, not only in an industrial-age capitalist system, a colonial/feudal/capitalist system, or a planned Soviet economy; if some of the examples mentioned most often of great famines with little or no total food availability decline happen to be modern, it may be because we have better data for modern society, or because gross total food availability decline may happen more often in societies that are not technologically modern.
Posted by: Harald Helfgott | 20 August 2008 at 18:44
I should make one last comment: we are living in a universe in which, in part by chance, thermonuclear warfare did not happen. At no previous moment in history was the actual disappearance of humanity a serious possibility. It became a serious possibility because of the conjunction of advanced technology and stone-age instincts.
It may be, of course, that, in a nuclear war, the disappearance of humanity would have been much less likely than, say, the destruction of about one fourth of all living individuals, plus that of most major cities. If we count human lives alone, this is about the proportion of people in Europe killed by the black plague, and the black plague was caused by the lack of proper sanitation. Had sanitation been kept merely at Roman levels, the black plague may have been impossible.
Posted by: Harald Helfgott | 20 August 2008 at 18:49
Try counting again, or better yet, reference an acknowledged expert. 250,000,000+ dead in one century makes it the bloodiest. Count the bodies. Check out Nietzsche's prediction that the 20th century would be the bloodiest.
Start here: Democide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide), as defined by political scientist Dr. R. J. Rummel (Ph.D. Northwestern University, 1963), is murder by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. He estimates there were 262 million victims of democide in the 20th century. Dr. Rummel the foremost authority on this subject. Please see his web site at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM.
Posted by: David B. | 01 June 2011 at 02:27
David B: The figure for the 20th century would have to be well over 400 millions for it to exceed the bloodyness of the 8th century per capita.
Posted by: Barnaby Dawson | 25 August 2011 at 23:37