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Comparisons and Contrasts: Violence in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
Could the violence I explore in The Killing Age really have been that bad? Surely the bloodletting of the twentieth century was worse, way worse. And what about today?
These are super-important questions, ones I will be exploring in a new book project. They are also highly charged, politically and emotionally; there is a tendency among some, for example, to sacralize WWII, particularly the Holocaust. And it is important to remember that there are still millions of people around the world who survived that ghastly period.
I can’t possibly go into much detail here, but I hope the following points are of some help.
The problem of measuring. I think it is dangerous, if hard to resist, temptation generally to get into the game of “which era was worse,” like an earlier game of weighing the pros and cons of empire, as if we could place the past on some sort of scale. That said comparisons and contrasts are important, one basic way of producing knowledge. We just have to tread carefully.
Violence and economic development and state catastrophe. The violence I explored in The Killing Age was mostly interested in the connections to the rise of capitalism and the making of a world economy. In other words, I was mostly interested in violence as a mode of wealth accumulation, that is using violence as a mode of commodification. One important part of that story was the destruction of the natural world; another was slavery. This is like what Marx described as “primitive accumulation.” That process is ongoing, with similarities and differences to the past. What is happening in the eastern DRC has strange parallels to what I explored for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But WWI and WWII are entirely different, though there are still some Marxists who want to collapse both wars into a reductive materialist analysis. To do so, to explain WWI and WWII in such narrow economistic terms is a mistake.
So, in some senses, the comparison is a classic example of apples and oranges; I like to keep my fruit separate.
A second important distinction is that WWI and WWII were both instances of state violence; these were wars fought by modern states and their militaries and not the warlords I discussed in my book. The might of those states had grown markedly in the nineteenth century and continued growing roughly until the 1970s in the core areas of the West. (China is another story.) An important part of that growth was the monopolization of the means of destruction—the weapons to kill others: tanks, airplanes, howitzers, atomic bombs. I touched on this development in the last part of The Killing Age. A central part of this story is the triumph of the modern state and the tyrannies of nationalism.
In other words, state capacity increased dramatically in the twentieth century, including the capacity to destroy vast numbers of people and property. One result is that “wars have tended to become less frequent but more destructive” (Martelloni, Patti, and Bardi, “Pattern Analysis”). Here is a great image from this article, based on the Brecke database (https://brecke.inta.gatech.edu/research/conflict/).
Note the steep upward curve from the late eighteenth century to the end of the 1800s, followed by an equally steep downward cure before we get to the remarkable surge between 1914 and 1945. That first upward curve is discussed in the last part of The Killing Age. Using the Brecke database (I have many problems with this database. It is very incomplete, particularly Africa, and doesn’t really account for internecine conflict, but that’s another issue.), total casualties in wars from 1750-1900 were 23.6 million. The world population in 1750 was around 800 million and grew to around 1.7 billion by 1900.
However you look at it, 1914-45 is absolutely shocking in terms of the destruction of human life. At least 3% of the global population died in WWII. Note that the global population in 1939 was around 2.3 billion. This destruction also makes many of the claims by people like Pinker (2011) seem rather foolish.
What about the more recent past? Two observations seem important. The first is the re-democratization of the means of destruction and state incapacitation especially from the 1970s and especially in places like Africa. Think the AK-47 and, most recently, drones. The number of non-state armed groups using drones was 17 in 2021. In 2025, the number was 469. The accessibility of armed drones is one of the most important developments in the past quarter century. (See https://acleddata.com/report/whats-driving-conflict-today-review-global-trends#:~:text=ACLED%20records%20more%20than%20185%2C000,full%2Dscale%20invasion%20in%202022. According to this study, 1/6 people “was exposed to conflict in 2025.)
The second development is the very recent increase in state violence. Here the 2022 Russian war in Ukraine is the most visible, followed by conflicts in the Middle East. It is still too early to talk about the United States under Trump, both domestically and internationally, though as of writing what seems clear is his commitment to using violence to pursue economic and political ends.
So where does this leave us? The first is that the period discussed in The Killing Age was consistently violent. Second, violence in the first half of the twentieth century was more episodic or punctuated but dramatically more destructive. Third, for a time at least violence was driven by the ideology, or near religion, of nationalism. Fourth, we have to wonder: are we entering a new age of barbarism?