A History of Violence

In 2011, Steven Pinker wrote a book called The Better Angels of our Nature, in which he argued that human violence declined over time. I never bought that argument, and I felt even more skeptical after reading The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan. Fagan hypothesized that the changing climate of the 1300s led to an increase in war and revolution in early modern Europe. Based on Fagan's report, it seems like things have gotten much more violent in the modern era.

So, I parsed the data from Wikipedia's list of anthropogenic disasters by death toll. This is a list of man-made disasters, like wars and famines. I calculated the number of deaths from man-made disasters per century and then calculated it relative to the population at the time. Here's a chart of the data:

      54.00 ┤                        ╭╮
      51.40 ┤                        ││
      48.80 ┤                        ││
      46.20 ┤                       ╭╯│
      43.60 ┤                     ╭─╯ │
      41.00 ┤                  ╭╮╭╯   │
      38.40 ┤                  │╰╯    │
      35.80 ┤                  │      │
      33.20 ┤                  │      │
      30.60 ┤                  │      │
      28.00 ┤                  │      │
      25.40 ┤                  │      │
      22.80 ┤                  │      │
      20.20 ┤                  │      │
      17.60 ┤                  │      │
      15.00 ┤                  │      │
      12.40 ┤  ╭─╮ ╭╮    ╭─╮  ╭╯      │
       9.80 ┤  │ ╰╮│╰─╮  │ ╰──╯       ╰
       7.20 ┤  │  ╰╯  ╰──╯     ↑
       4.60 ┤  │               Black Death
       2.00 ┼──╯
            ┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼─
	   -5    0    5    10   15   20
                      Century

This is the number of deaths per 100,000 people by manmade disasters per century from the fifth century BCE to the present day.

The first spike, around the second century BCE, is the Qin's wars of unification. For the following millennium and a half, the deadliest events are all in China and the Mongol Empire — until 1347. The next spike — where the death toll rises to 41 people per 100,000 — is the Black Death in Europe.

Scholars debate whether the Black Death was man-made. It's possible that it was caused by poverty and hygiene or purely environmental factors. If we remove it from the data, the chart looks like this:

      34.00 ┤                        ╭╮
      32.40 ┤                        ││
      30.80 ┤                        ││
      29.20 ┤                       ╭╯│
      27.60 ┤                       │ │
      26.00 ┤                       │ │
      24.40 ┤                      ╭╯ │
      22.80 ┤                     ╭╯  │
      21.20 ┤                     │   │
      19.60 ┤                     │   │
      18.00 ┤                    ╭╯   │
      16.40 ┤                  ╭─╯    │
      14.80 ┤                  │      │
      13.20 ┤  ╭─╮ ╭╮    ╭─╮  ╭╯      │
      11.60 ┤  │ │ │╰╮   │ ╰─╮│       ╰
      10.00 ┤  │ ╰─╯ ╰──╮│   ╰╯
       8.40 ┤  │        ╰╯
       6.80 ┤  │
       5.20 ┤  │
       3.60 ┤  │
       2.00 ┼──╯
            ┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼─
	   -5    0    5    10   15   20
                      Century

Starting in the 1400s, mortality rapidly rises with the colonization of the Americas (1492–present), the transatlantic slave trade (16th–19th centuries), the German Peasants' War (1524–1525), the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), British colonization of India (1765–1947), the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), the Irish Famine (1846–1849), the American Civil War (1861–1865), and the Belgian Occupation of the Congo (1805–1908). (And many others.)

Finally, the chart peaks in the 20th century with WWI, the Russian Revolution, the Holodomor, WWII, the Holocaust, the Bengal Famine, the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, the Korean War, China's Great Leap Forward, the Cambodian Genocide, the Ethiopian Famine, the Rwandan Genocide, and the First and Second Congo Wars. (And many others.)

The data shows a tenfold increase in violence from ancient times to the 20th century. If we want to prove that violence is increasing, we need to find at least ten times as much mortality in the ancient period. That would prove challenging, since most deaths happen in massive events. In this dataset, half of all deaths occurred in nine events (ignoring the Black Death). But disasters leave obvious evidence in history: written records, mass graves, oral histories, abandoned settlements.

To illustrate: the largest war in European history prior to the Renaissance was Caesar's conquest of Gaul (58 BCE–50 BCE), which killed 600,000 people — that's 0.4% of the world's population at the time. In the 1600s, the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) killed 6,000,000 people — 1.2% of the world's population. If you want to argue that the first century BCE was more violent than the 17th century CE, you need to find two more wars as significant as Caesar's conquest of Gaul — and that still wouldn't bring you anywhere close to 20th century mortality.

This data ignores violence on a smaller scale, like murder and raiding, which historians tend to attribute to hunter-gatherers and "cavemen." Pinker picks up Thomas Hobbes' view that prehistoric life was "nasty, brutish, and short." But Pinker's critics argue that Pinker doesn't deliver real evidence to show that prehistoric hunter-gatherer life was so violent. And, anyway, statistics indicate that murder increases with inequality, which would suggest that people are getting more murderous as we build a society with an ever-greater capacity for disparity.

So far, the 21st century has seen fewer violent deaths than the 20th, but now we are witnessing the dawn of the polycrisis. It's too soon to tell what this century will bring.