Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "What you say is true for 19th and 20th century wars, modern wars, total wars. I just want to note that it has generally not been true for most of history; war is a game with rules. For example, 18th century wars were fought between small standing armies and the civilians were mostly left out of it. How wars will be fought in the 21st century remains to be seen."
Selected Death Tolls for Wars, Massacres and Atrocities Before the 20th Century
* The Thirty Years War (1618-48), 7½ million.
* Seven Years War (1755-63), 550,000 civ.
* French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), 1,000,000 civ.
* Vlad Dracula, Wallachia (r.1456-1462), 50,000-100,000
* Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834), 350,000
* Peasants' War, Germany (1524-25), 100,000 peasants
* Novgorod Massacre, Russia (1570), 60,000
* St. Bartholomew's Eve Massacre, France (1572), ???
* Ireland (1651), 100,000 to 200,000
* Delhi (1738), 150,000 civilians massacred
* China (1755-57), 300,000 civ.
* China (1771-76), 60,000 civ.
* Sainte-Domingue (1791-1803), i.e. >145,000
* American Indians, 16th-19th centuries 13,778,000
* The Dictionary of Military History, (1994, André Corvisier, editor) cites a French scholar who estimated that 2% of the non-military European population died of war during the 17th Century.
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The world is now, and has always been a nasty brutish place, at least as far as war goes. There have been brief periods in world history where small regions of the world failed to massacre the civilians, but they are very brief and very restricted. And the same militaries that did have "rules of war" promptly forgot them as soon as it became convenient.
-- Carl |
