Renowned scientist and best-selling author Vaclav Smil meticulously
charts one of the single largest causes of non-natural mortality.
While trying to assess the probabilities of recurrent natural
catastrophes and catastrophic illnesses, we must remember that the
historical record is unequivocal: these events, even when combined, did
not claim as many lives and have not changed the course of world history
as much as the deliberate fatal discontinuities that historian Richard
Rhodes calls man-made death,
the single largest cause of non-natural mortality in the 20th century.
Violent collective death has been such an omnipresent part of the human
condition that its recurrence in various forms conflicts lasting days to
decades, homicides to democides, is guaranteed. Long lists of the past
violent events can be inspected in print or in electronic databases.1
Even a cursory examination of this record shows yet another tragic
aspect of that terrible toll: so many violent deaths had no or only a
marginal effect on the course of world history. Others, however,
contributed to outcomes that truly changed the world. Large death tolls
of the 20th century that fit the first category include the Belgian
genocide in the Congo (began before 1900), Turkish massacres of
Armenians (mainly in 1915), Hutu killings of Tutsis (1994), wars
involving Ethiopia (Ogaden, Eritrea, 1962-1992), Nigeria and Biafra
(1967-1970), India and Pakistan (1971), and civil wars and genocides in
Angola (1974-2002), Congo (since 1998), Mozambique (1975-1993), Sudan
(since 1956 and ongoing), and Cambodia (1975-1978). Even in our greatly
interconnected world, such conflicts can cause more than one million
deaths (as did all of the just listed events) and go on for decades
without having any noticeable effect on the cares and concerns of the
remaining 98 to 99.9 percent of humanity.
By contrast, the modern
era has seen two world wars and interstate conflicts that resulted in
long-lasting redistribution of power on global scales, and intrastate
(civil) wars that led to the collapse or emergence of powerful states. I
call these conflicts transformational wars and focus on them next.
Violent collective
death has been such an omnipresent part of the human condition that its
recurrence in various forms conflicts lasting days to decades, homicides
to democides, is guaranteed.
There is no
canonical list of transformational wars of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Historians agree on the major conflicts that belong in this category but
differ as to others. My own list is fairly restrictive; a more liberal
definition of worldwide impacts could extend the list. A long-lasting
transformational effect on the course of world history is a key
criterion. And most of the conflicts I have called transformational
share another characteristic: they are mega-wars, claiming the lives of
more than million combatants and civilians. By mathematician Lewis Fry
Richardson’s definition, based on the decadic logarithm of total
fatalities, most would be magnitude 6 or 7 wars (figure 1). Their
enumeration starts with the Napoleonic wars, which began in 1796 with
the conquest of Italy and ended in 1815 in a refashioned, and for the
next 100 years also remarkably stable, Europe. This stability was not
basically altered, either by brief conflicts between Prussia and Austria
(1866) and Prussia and France (1870-1871) or by repeated acts of terror
that killed some of the continent’s leading public figures while
others, including Kaiser Wilhelm I and Chancellor Bismarck, escaped
assassination attempts.
Figure 1:
Wars of magnitude 6 or 7, 1850–2000. Boldface font indicates wars that
the author considers transformational. Plotted fatalities are minimal to
average (heavily rounded) estimates from sources cited in the text.
The
next entry on my list of transformational wars is the protracted
Taiping war (1851-1864), a massive millennial uprising led by Hong
Xiuquan.2
This may seem like a puzzling addition to readers not familiar with
China’s modern history, but the Taiping uprising, aimed at achieving an
egalitarian, reformist kingdom of heaven on earth, exemplifies a grand
transformational conflict because it fatally undermined the ruling Qing
dynasty, enmeshed foreign actors in China’s politics for the next 100
years, and brought in less than two generations the end of the old
imperial order. With about 20 million fatalities, its human costs were
higher than the aggregate losses of combatants and civilians in World
War I....
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