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I added a new EXCEL file to accompany the information under “Appendices & databases: “Deaths outside Europe.” please note that This file may not be reproduced without express permission, since the database is in its infancy.
Before examining this database, however, users should be aware of the following issues by way of introduction:
- I have not yet proofed the information, nor have I checked it against what is in the book. (Students, whatever you do, do not use this material for a research paper!) There may, for example, be instances of overlap.
- The list is quite incomplete. There are, for example, just a very few inclusions relating to the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. These two empires were massive, and like all empires engaged in violence. If these two empires were included the numbers would go up dramatically. The database also misses many other polities. To take just one example, it really does not reflect the rise and fall of the Comanche in North America, or many other instances of intra-native violence in North America.
- The database is in general state/empire-centric. This is very important especially for the eighteenth and for much of the nineteenth centuries when the new means of destruction were in effect very democraticized. So, banditry and warlordism is weakly/unevenly represented in the database.
- Dangers of overlap.
Most of us have all grown up learning about the catastrophes of the twentieth century: WWI and WWII, Stalin, Mao, for example. This was, in the words one o famous historian, an “age of catastrophe.” (For more on the twentieth century see my other essays on this website, especially “Numbers and their Discontents,” and “Comparisons and Contrasts.”)
We have survivors of those catastrophes to remind us of their horrors. They are also part of the public cultures of many areas of the world, especially the West.
No one is living who was born before about 1900. And given the emphasis on the West, it it highly likely that a person living in Berlin or Los Angeles—even a highly educated person, would know what unfolded in Bunyoro in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or even where Bunyoro is (Uganda).
An important goal of The Killing Age was to return to this earlier period and to offer a global history of violence the period c. 1750-c.1900. One argument was that this period which saw the making of the modern world, was colossally destructive, for humans and non-humans alike.
I never intended the book to be comprehensive. And I offered numbers warning the reader that these were—in some cases could only be—estimates.
I have gone back now and want, in this database, to provide some additional statistical details. I did so without going back to the book; as an experiment I thought this would be a good way to see if how far off I might be.
I have prepared the database for a few reasons. First, some readers seem surprised by the general claim that the period under study could have been so dreadful. Second, the nineteenth century especially seems to be all the current rage. President Trump explicitly invokes, indeed nearly worships, the period. And the nineteenth century has re-entered public culture.
Interestingly, the totals are remarkably similar to my crude estimates in the book: 162,519,752 million as a reasonable sum, and 295,650,850 for the upper estimate.
Obviously, far more work must be done. There are both empirical and ethical challenges here, not to mention political ones. After a certain number, does it really matter, and why?
But what I do hope is very clear is that the period c. 1750-1914 was very violent. To access the EXCEL file click this link: Deaths_Outside_Europe_1750_1914_withRegion and DupRisk indicator