I've been listening to too much Hardcore History lately, and wanted to visualize and compare the number of deaths in wars spanning the centuries.

All data is pulled from Wikipedia. All deaths are by the millions. All numbers used are the high end of the death estimates on Wikipedia for simplification and uniformity. For conflicts that were fought on multiple continents (other than WWI & II), I just picked one for the sake of visual legibility. Other than blatant simplifications, feel free to let me know how this could be more accurate/readable for faster comprehension.

Tool: Excel

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Posted by StockMarketProduce

16 comments

  2. % of global population killed: 3.69%. **85**

    Next bar is like 65% the height but is labeled 13.5% / **60**

    What is happening

    ——

    Edit: since I’m getting mcbuttslammed not even five minutes after this comment I’ll just reply at the top level:

    Yes, I’m a stupid dumb idiot. I get it. There’s enough going on with this graphic that I totally overlooked the subtitle of the graph. I usually look at the axes for labels. If this is a common point of confusion it might be an opportunity to improve clarity. I always learned to design graphics for the dumbest potential reader, i.e. me

  3. Got damn 17% of all humans killed during the Three Kingdoms War

  4. Interesting—as a resident of the Americas, I’ve never even heard of some of the wars/conflicts in Asia.

  6. A lot of these numbers are basically made up.

    Nobody was counting all the people the Mongols killed.

  7. People believe we are currently living in trying times.

    During WWII an average of 4000+ people died PER DAY over 7 YEARS.

    Everyday was worse than 9/11 for 7 YEARS STRAIGHT.

  8. What’s crazy is that most of those deaths were preventable and caused by infection/disease, meaning they were long, drawn out and painful.

  10. Dows this account for people inflation? Like 1M in year 1 is not the same as a 1M today

  11. Is there something about Reddit lately where it vastly blurs images?

  12. I just want to say that the “Includes French Revolution” label is incorrect. Tha tnumber includes the *French Revolutionary Wars*, which is distinct from the *French Revolution*.

  13. Mao’s war against sparrows killed about 15M/ year

  14. This is a little tricky, because a lot of the deaths in, for example, the Soviet Union during WWII were the result of Stalin’s purges. How many of those deaths can be attributed to war as such, rather than Stalinism more generally, is hard to say.

    That said, I doubt noting this would change the numbers all that much.

  15. Jesus Christ. 86M in 7 years – that’s 25% of the US population today. Russia lost 20M alone (why!?). People don’t talk about that. WWII losses were exponentially higher among the warring parties than the Holocaust, but that’s all anyone seems to remember.

  16. There’s no way 60 million people died in the Mongol invasions – and I imagine there are similar inaccuracies in the data for the older wars. Essentially we don’t actually know how many people died, there just isn’t the data, but 60 million is just way over the top and based on very poor data. For more see this historian’s explanation:

    [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te7bjlB69T8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te7bjlB69T8)

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