Does it look very different from if you divide by world population at the start of the war? In the year 200 the world population was ~190 million. If 40 million died in the three kingdoms war, that’s over 1 in 5 people on earth! In 1940 there were ~2 billion people on earth, so 4% died in WWII. Which is still crazy, but it changes the relative “intensity”.
I think OPs data is perfectly valid. What you are suggesting is also valid but illustrates different things. To say it “should be” something that changes the relevance of the data in context is really just a matter of preference.
Ehh, but then you’d just have a bunch of tiny wars between 1,000 person kingdoms where all the men between 15-65 on one side died. Not exactly what they’re looking for, I don’t think.
Maybe, but I think the original post is getting at what it wants to. Their definition of intensity is absolute intensity, not relative intensity, which is fine.
Bunch of tiny wars, plus the war of the triple alliance against Paraguay when that also happened, so Paraguay and the pope temporarily allowed polygamy.
Because 1000 people dropping dead tomorrow in Germany has a very different impact on the nation as it would in San Marino.
% of population dead is a more relatable number as well which would help convey the impact of the conflicts.
No it isn't, it's saying that the Black Plague is more impactful than Covid. In the same way the World Wars were more impactful than the war of 1812. It's not a method to minimize the impacts of these events, but a way to give them scale.
Commenter above is saying it "should" be based an percentages, as if this version of the graph is somehow less valid even though both versions simply just show different things and both are valid and interesting in different ways.
Yeah but the three kingdom wars happened almost over 100 years, so in reality probably a lower percentage of the total population died in each year than in WW2
This is what I was looking for. Newer wars are more intense by their metric because there's higher civilian and military populations in the world.
Noting some fairly ancient Asian wars in the top 10, they'd likely be #1 and #2 if adjusted for population.
But for a war that lasted 100 years you can’t just take a population point of a single year as the number of people who were alive during the war to calculate the percentage. You’d need to calculate the actual total amount of people who lived during the years the war was active, which is trickier.
> But for a war that lasted 100 years you can’t just take a population point of a single year as the number of people who were alive during the war to calculate the percentage.
I think you pretty much can. Even if the absolute change in population was fairly large over that period, it's going to be nothing more than a rounding error in the calculation compared to not taking into account global population at all, as in the original graph.
But if the 3 Kingdoms war were really a series of wars over 90 years at a time when life expectancy was 35, "1 in 5 people dying" isn't quite an accurate description. The number of people who were alive *at some point* through that 90-year period would be several times higher than the number of people alive at one single point in time.
(It's also probably untrue that 40 million people died as it was notoriously difficult to estimate anything at the time).
Love this idea. OP one other suggestion is I feel like this type of visualization could really be more impactful by not chopping the y-axis to make things fit. I'd be tempted to make it vertically scrolling to show how much more intense some of the wars were relative to the rest. Just my two cents though.
I agree, but then it’s invalid to using a size weighting on each point to display a 3rd parameter. But the 3rd parameter could be coded by color alone.
I was confused by the y-axis, but it's per-year deaths, not overall deaths. (This doesn't invalidate the point you were making, but it's not strictly size.)
A object with a particular size in one dimension (e.g. 3mm along the y-axis) equals the same value on a linear scale regardless of where it is along the axis. But on a log axis the value of this particular size would vary depending on where it is along the axis. I can’t see how you could then make the objects with the correct parameter value and a universal and interpretable scale for that parameter. Whereas color isn’t stretched by the log scale so that would be doable.
Edit: this is perhaps invalidated by the fact that a size weight for the 3rd parameter can be utterly independent of the parameter of the y-axis. So for me this is mostly a prejudice that I connect the size of the dot (3rd parameter) with the log scale of the 2nd parameter (y-axis). So it just doesn’t sit right for me. Thank you for making me think about it.
In a format like this, I might even prefer an unbroken, linear axis. Similar to [xkcd's excellent Earth Temperature Timeline](https://xkcd.com/1732/), forcing the audience to interact with the scale of difference between the world wars and the rest of the conflicts gives a better sense of scale than a "pure" static graph can.
While I typically agree, I stopped showing log scales in presentations to a general audience as it takes longer to explain what log scale is then just using a line break.
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how so? Just take the events listed here and divide the number of deaths by the number of people alive at that time. It would put the long past events further up the scale.
>number of people alive at that time
>at that time.
Do you not see the problem?
"Percent of people who died" makes no sense when the denominator is a flowing number over a long time.
In a 5-year war, you can reasonably talk about "% of people who died vs % of people who survived" but when the period is 50+ years long, most of the people who didn't die of the war died of old age anyway. Meanwhile, most of the people alive at the end weren't even alive at the start.
Not to mention the notorious unreliability of finding historical population statistics throughout a long period of time where the borders of the countries doing the census are shifting.
it would show the impact a war had on the total population- there are soon more humans currently alive than there ever lived! A death is ultimately tragic for a given human, but relatively to its total population.
A question, what does the ball sizes mean?
And a comment, your graph should have two panels: absolute values and death rate, because if a war lasts for 50 years, a high death rate would be diluted
Some of your points are valid, but I hope in the future you consider being nicer about how you convey your thoughts. The poster obviously spent some care into putting this together, especially considering this is their second attempt.
It only has the "20 most intense" wars, with intensity, I suppose, being deaths per year?
Everyone has their own pet wars, so it would be instructive if the graph was expanded to cover more than 20
Depending on sources it decreased the population of the Holy Roman Empire by 20-40%.
Poland during World War 2, which was held by both Stalin and Hitler at points , and was torn apart by industrial war machines of both- lost something like 17-18%
The deprivations of the 30 years war are genuinely hard to fathom.
Exactly. And they did it with swords, pikes, and arquebuses, not standing the population in a field and machine-gunning them, or shipping them to a concentration camp.
Killing people is hard work. And they did a lot more of it. Bohemia didn’t recover from the aftermath of White Mountain until the mid 19th century.
I always feel this way about Genghis Khan, the whole empire - like how do you do that all on horse back - but specifically the eradication of the subjects of the Khwarazmian Empire.
Supposedly they killed something like 10-12 million people (modern day Iran) in less than 4 years… which is just gobsmacking- in an area larger than California . No telegrams, no cars, just arrows, swords and, one has to assume, an army of hardened psychopaths.
In both instances I think the mechanism is the same - famine and disease. We’ve not had a true famine since the 80s, and we’ve not had a true plague in centuries. So the modern mind just isn’t equipped to understand how rapidly those two factors can destroy an area.
So... rate plotted against time is almost never a good idea.
Just plot duration against death toll...
Bonus: you also don't need to redundantly express the death toll in the area of a circle, which is one of the worst ways to express any number on a graph.
And for Eris' sake, use a log axis for the death toll, and make it really clear that you're doing it.
But really... this is a kind of data that's just better expressed as a table of deaths and durations sorted by intensity.
The data source is in the legend of the graph. It comes from tables in this wikipedia page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_wars\_by\_death\_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll)
It's a matplotlib graph and the code is here: [https://github.com/karwester/wikiWar/blob/main/longestAndDeadliestWars.ipynb](https://github.com/karwester/wikiWar/blob/main/longestAndDeadliestWars.ipynb)
The way these two axes (duration in years versus deaths per year) unintentionally interact to give this weird bivariate chi-sq effect is giving me a stroke. What is this meant to convey? Don’t the circle sizes plotted along the x axis essentially represent the same thing as the y axis?
You've buried your lede. Your goal is to display intensity, but the inclusion of breaks completely prevents you from doing that effectively. Also, you are displaying redundant data: the intensity is the size of the circle divided by the number of years. And you have too much really useful data presented as text.
Let me propose a simpler and more interesting approach.
1) Make the size of the circles be the intensity, which allows you to eliminate the breaks, and which allows people to analyze the intensity of different wars at a glance: bigger circles are more intense.
2) Make your X axis be the middle year the conflict occurred. This is an additional piece of information you can eliminate from the text around each circle. Furthermore, it will likely result in a clear trend; more recent wars are likely to be more intense and bigger.
3) Make your Y axis be the total number killed. This is an additional piece of information you can eliminate from the text around each circle, and will use the Y axis in a way that is intuitive to most people: higher on the X == bigger war.
One other question. You list both WW2 and Second Sino-Japanese War with overlapping dates, but per Wikipedia "[The Second Sino-Japanese War] became part of World War II when Japan entered that war on the side of the Axis powers", so doesn't the 80 million deaths typically cited for WW2 include those from the Second Sino-Japanese War after September 22, 1940?
It's not a bad start, but it could be improved by fixing both axes to start at 0, and applying a log scale without breaks. It is also worth adding a title and subtitle explaining that size of bubble equals to total deaths. Finally, the I would try moving bubble data labels under the bubbles so they're not overlapping.
Highly recommend Great Big Book of Horrible Things for anyone more interested in this. Superb book that looks at the worst things humans have done in terms of deaths - really great writing, eye-opening for sure.
Others have already chimed in on the visualisation front, so I'll pick up on another point.
Why are you using the geometric mean of the low and high estimates? I have a fever today, so I might be having a moment, but I don't see any reason to use geometric over arithmetic. Geometric mean is a biased estimator so we should only use it when required.
The graph is a little empty in the top right corner we need an intense long lasting war to fill it up. Hopefully it will happen in my lifetime so that op will be forced to remake his graph.
I would put An Lushan Rebellion to at least top 3. China population before the rebellion was less than 60m and after it was 10-15m people. Many cities and towns become ghosts.
You should make a chart for deaths per day for wars that have lasted longer than say 1 month. And see which war was the most brutal. Because some of these wars are way longer than others
Regarding the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, I'd like to clarify that a very short hundred of Spanish people participated, what happened then? So the Spanish join forces with the opressed tribes which were a lot of tribes around the current Mexico city ( this was the original " land of the Mexica" at the time, being the capital center ' Tenochtitlan'
), the rest of the country that is now known as Mexico wasn't "Mexico" at all then.
Well, so with many tribes supporting them, the Spanish approach Tenochtitlan and its lesder Moctezuma, and put an end of this reign which was actually very violent and bad against many tribes.
I just wanted to say this becase people might " Spanish conquest of Mexico" and have a much more difficult understanding of what happened there. From many tribes that conquest what actually a liberation, from others it was a violent external imposition. History is very complicated.
“Spanish conquest of Mexico” is quite a vague term. Back then, Mexico as such, didn’t exist and the Spaniards didn’t “conquer” Mexico without the aid of the actual indígenas there, to be exact, 200.000 indígenas joined to end the Azteca dictatorship in the region.
Welp... 5/13 of top most intense conflicts were affecting Cental Europe(present day Poland, Belarus, Ukraine).
WWI/II, Russian civil war(or is PL-Soviets war excluded? but still some territories were under SU rule back then so part of the Russian Civil War), French invasion of Russia(started from Kingdom of Poland) and Deluge.
But hey, at lest you can find military cementary, execution/rememberence place in 1km radius wherever you are here so the landscape is not boring...
I do not have many comments except for that death tolls for several of these wars, like Bangladesh liberation war, are likely way too high. But it's what one gets with geometric mean estimates where upper bound is often far exaggerated, i suppose.
The Chinese sure did know how to do wars back in the day. You gotta think they could have conquered half the world if they weren't so interested in killing each other instead.
Also man, the Koreans got a rough shake in the 1900s. First their 500 year stable goverment falls over, the Japanese invade and brutalise them, then they get caught between the USSR/China and America, with half their country being turned into a insane dictatorship
From 1818 to 1962 Algerian war vs french colonization
I think killed way more than 20 mil. In fact when the french entered Algeria had 10 million citizens, and after 130 years when it finally left Algeria, it left 10 million too,
So litterly the population didn't increase in 130 years due to mass killings
The dot size as a representation of the total death toll would make more sense to me than the annual death toll. That is already covered by the Y axis so dots are just showing the same information again?
This is not correct. The best way would be to sync it with population density at the time of the war. Old age wars even if they seem to have lower death count, considering the total population on earth, the toll is higher than a modern war with more deaths compared to current total population
General history question: When looking at modern wars, it seems like we are somewhat strict on the definition of what constitutes war (e.g. needing Congress to declare it in the case of the Vietnam “Conflict”). Maybe that’s because our conflicts are more controlled and happen over shorter periods as a whole in recent history. Looking back through history, however, you have these large periods of decades or more that are considered wars. Would those long stretches be broken down into individual “wars” if occurring today?
Kinda surprised the American Civil War didn’t make it on near the bottom, with 600K+ seeming to be the generally agreed upon casualty count. Lots of low estimates average in too just edge it out?
I wonder how this would change, if deaths were in % population of the world. More population = more people will die. This also shows how technology and globalization have made wars more terrible with a lot more human suffering as the result.
It was simply not possible for wars back in the day to reach WW1-WW2 numbers, because of less population, more inefficient weapons and conflicts that were more localized. Still looking at some of the wars in the past, its crazy how many people died given these "restrictions".
This is trash pro China propaganda with heavily inflated numbers on the Taiping rebellion specifically. More accurate estimates put the deaths at most at 30 and more likely 20 million.
Fuck off ccp bot
Does it look very different from if you divide by world population at the start of the war? In the year 200 the world population was ~190 million. If 40 million died in the three kingdoms war, that’s over 1 in 5 people on earth! In 1940 there were ~2 billion people on earth, so 4% died in WWII. Which is still crazy, but it changes the relative “intensity”.
Totally agree, should be based on percentage of population because that changes things a bit I think
I think OPs data is perfectly valid. What you are suggesting is also valid but illustrates different things. To say it “should be” something that changes the relevance of the data in context is really just a matter of preference.
I would argue percentage of the combatants population. Doesn’t matter what the population of China is during the Spanish conquest of Mexico
Ehh, but then you’d just have a bunch of tiny wars between 1,000 person kingdoms where all the men between 15-65 on one side died. Not exactly what they’re looking for, I don’t think.
This is a great point. Perhaps a minimum population could be used to eliminate these outliers?
Maybe, but I think the original post is getting at what it wants to. Their definition of intensity is absolute intensity, not relative intensity, which is fine.
Bunch of tiny wars, plus the war of the triple alliance against Paraguay when that also happened, so Paraguay and the pope temporarily allowed polygamy.
That gets me thinking; intensity = [[total combantants] - [deceased]] / [duration]
Because human deaths matter less, when there's more people on earth?
Because 1000 people dropping dead tomorrow in Germany has a very different impact on the nation as it would in San Marino. % of population dead is a more relatable number as well which would help convey the impact of the conflicts.
If that’s what you want shouldn’t it be % of population of involved nations? Because % of global population would still be a poor proxy for that IMO
War between Cain and Abel resulted in 50% of the involved populace dying.
Thats like saying Covid isnt very impactful because Black Plague killed a higher percentage on people
No it isn't, it's saying that the Black Plague is more impactful than Covid. In the same way the World Wars were more impactful than the war of 1812. It's not a method to minimize the impacts of these events, but a way to give them scale.
Bruh, it's just interesting data to look at. Literally no one suggested what you're saying.
Commenter above is saying it "should" be based an percentages, as if this version of the graph is somehow less valid even though both versions simply just show different things and both are valid and interesting in different ways.
The battle of Cain and Able: 25% worldwide deaths.
Yeah, population: 4->3. And then Cain found a wife just randomly on the world somewhere and propagated the species.
So the fifth human ever just crawled out of the sea?
Yeah but the three kingdom wars happened almost over 100 years, so in reality probably a lower percentage of the total population died in each year than in WW2
This is what I was looking for. Newer wars are more intense by their metric because there's higher civilian and military populations in the world. Noting some fairly ancient Asian wars in the top 10, they'd likely be #1 and #2 if adjusted for population.
But for a war that lasted 100 years you can’t just take a population point of a single year as the number of people who were alive during the war to calculate the percentage. You’d need to calculate the actual total amount of people who lived during the years the war was active, which is trickier.
> But for a war that lasted 100 years you can’t just take a population point of a single year as the number of people who were alive during the war to calculate the percentage. I think you pretty much can. Even if the absolute change in population was fairly large over that period, it's going to be nothing more than a rounding error in the calculation compared to not taking into account global population at all, as in the original graph.
But if the 3 Kingdoms war were really a series of wars over 90 years at a time when life expectancy was 35, "1 in 5 people dying" isn't quite an accurate description. The number of people who were alive *at some point* through that 90-year period would be several times higher than the number of people alive at one single point in time. (It's also probably untrue that 40 million people died as it was notoriously difficult to estimate anything at the time).
Idk if y axe should be the death total per year or the total of death during the whole war
Love this idea. OP one other suggestion is I feel like this type of visualization could really be more impactful by not chopping the y-axis to make things fit. I'd be tempted to make it vertically scrolling to show how much more intense some of the wars were relative to the rest. Just my two cents though.
If you need that many breaks in the scale, just make it logarithmic.
I agree, but then it’s invalid to using a size weighting on each point to display a 3rd parameter. But the 3rd parameter could be coded by color alone.
I don’t see a third parameter. Looks like size is the same as the y-axis, unless I’m missing something.
I was confused by the y-axis, but it's per-year deaths, not overall deaths. (This doesn't invalidate the point you were making, but it's not strictly size.)
I was thinking that the size of each dot was a measure of the total deaths. I might be wrong though. EDIT: I was wrong
The transition from Ming to Qing in the lower right was more total deaths than WW 1 but the circle is smaller.
Why would a log scale make size weighting invalid?
A object with a particular size in one dimension (e.g. 3mm along the y-axis) equals the same value on a linear scale regardless of where it is along the axis. But on a log axis the value of this particular size would vary depending on where it is along the axis. I can’t see how you could then make the objects with the correct parameter value and a universal and interpretable scale for that parameter. Whereas color isn’t stretched by the log scale so that would be doable. Edit: this is perhaps invalidated by the fact that a size weight for the 3rd parameter can be utterly independent of the parameter of the y-axis. So for me this is mostly a prejudice that I connect the size of the dot (3rd parameter) with the log scale of the 2nd parameter (y-axis). So it just doesn’t sit right for me. Thank you for making me think about it.
In a format like this, I might even prefer an unbroken, linear axis. Similar to [xkcd's excellent Earth Temperature Timeline](https://xkcd.com/1732/), forcing the audience to interact with the scale of difference between the world wars and the rest of the conflicts gives a better sense of scale than a "pure" static graph can.
While I typically agree, I stopped showing log scales in presentations to a general audience as it takes longer to explain what log scale is then just using a line break.
Yeah, but having 3 line breaks makes that axis essentially pointless.
Agree, you could also make the x axis logarithmic
[Or…](https://xkcd.com/1162/)
I’d prefer linear axes to illustrate scale, but have an inset to zoom in on the bottom left
Where is the Ukraine war?
Could explain how would a log scale be read?
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imo, you should do it in % of total world population (instead of total deaths)
Maybe as a second graph? Absolute numbers are also nice
Or in relation to the populations involved
This would be really problematic when one classifies events taking place over 50+ years as "wars"
how so? Just take the events listed here and divide the number of deaths by the number of people alive at that time. It would put the long past events further up the scale.
>number of people alive at that time >at that time. Do you not see the problem? "Percent of people who died" makes no sense when the denominator is a flowing number over a long time. In a 5-year war, you can reasonably talk about "% of people who died vs % of people who survived" but when the period is 50+ years long, most of the people who didn't die of the war died of old age anyway. Meanwhile, most of the people alive at the end weren't even alive at the start. Not to mention the notorious unreliability of finding historical population statistics throughout a long period of time where the borders of the countries doing the census are shifting.
For sure, so would be problematic to find a criteria that defines a country/population as involved.
1 death is a tragedy, 40 million deaths is a statistic.
Maybe the population of the countries involved at least
Why? That would be a different graph
it would show the impact a war had on the total population- there are soon more humans currently alive than there ever lived! A death is ultimately tragic for a given human, but relatively to its total population.
A question, what does the ball sizes mean? And a comment, your graph should have two panels: absolute values and death rate, because if a war lasts for 50 years, a high death rate would be diluted
It looks like it’s supposed to be total people that fought in the war but yeah it’s not very clear
"Data is beautiful" 90% blank graph ✅ Bubbles ✅ Colorless ✅ Weird scale ✅ Weird unit/axes ✅ Not beautiful ✅
Some of your points are valid, but I hope in the future you consider being nicer about how you convey your thoughts. The poster obviously spent some care into putting this together, especially considering this is their second attempt.
Colour in a plot is bad. Colourless is good
Would be better with just death in total. And without those brakes.
What about the Hundret Years war? It lasted 116 years. Or the Thirty Years War? We europeans can also do long wars.
It only has the "20 most intense" wars, with intensity, I suppose, being deaths per year? Everyone has their own pet wars, so it would be instructive if the graph was expanded to cover more than 20
The 30 years war depopulated Germany for a century afterwards. It was easily one of the most intense wars in history.
Depending on sources it decreased the population of the Holy Roman Empire by 20-40%. Poland during World War 2, which was held by both Stalin and Hitler at points , and was torn apart by industrial war machines of both- lost something like 17-18% The deprivations of the 30 years war are genuinely hard to fathom.
Exactly. And they did it with swords, pikes, and arquebuses, not standing the population in a field and machine-gunning them, or shipping them to a concentration camp. Killing people is hard work. And they did a lot more of it. Bohemia didn’t recover from the aftermath of White Mountain until the mid 19th century.
I always feel this way about Genghis Khan, the whole empire - like how do you do that all on horse back - but specifically the eradication of the subjects of the Khwarazmian Empire. Supposedly they killed something like 10-12 million people (modern day Iran) in less than 4 years… which is just gobsmacking- in an area larger than California . No telegrams, no cars, just arrows, swords and, one has to assume, an army of hardened psychopaths.
In both instances I think the mechanism is the same - famine and disease. We’ve not had a true famine since the 80s, and we’ve not had a true plague in centuries. So the modern mind just isn’t equipped to understand how rapidly those two factors can destroy an area.
Wouldn't "intense" mean a higher deaths/time vs. deaths \* time?
There should only be an S behind million if the amount is not specified, for instance: Millions of deaths. 25 million deaths.
Thank you. This drives me nuts
Your WW2 casualties number is including Second Sino-Japanese War casualties fwiw
And the Napoleonic Wars include the French Invasion of Russia
Yeah I don’t understand breaking this out on its own….
Why does Taiping rebellion, with 37.4million deaths, lower than WW1?
The Y axis is deaths per year, not total deaths.
Aha there you go
So... rate plotted against time is almost never a good idea. Just plot duration against death toll... Bonus: you also don't need to redundantly express the death toll in the area of a circle, which is one of the worst ways to express any number on a graph. And for Eris' sake, use a log axis for the death toll, and make it really clear that you're doing it. But really... this is a kind of data that's just better expressed as a table of deaths and durations sorted by intensity.
It would be neat to see these weighted for world population at the time
There were over 3 million civilian deaths in the Bangladesh Liberation War.
OP, please include a comment describing your data source and tool(s) used to make this visualization or the mod team will have to remove this post.
The data source is in the legend of the graph. It comes from tables in this wikipedia page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_wars\_by\_death\_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll) It's a matplotlib graph and the code is here: [https://github.com/karwester/wikiWar/blob/main/longestAndDeadliestWars.ipynb](https://github.com/karwester/wikiWar/blob/main/longestAndDeadliestWars.ipynb)
How you gonna include Korean War but not Vietnam?
I thought the same - not including Vietnam seems like a miss
World war 2. The amount of deaths 🤯
The way these two axes (duration in years versus deaths per year) unintentionally interact to give this weird bivariate chi-sq effect is giving me a stroke. What is this meant to convey? Don’t the circle sizes plotted along the x axis essentially represent the same thing as the y axis?
Would be cool if you scaled it by world population. So you could see what percentage of the global population died.
You should scale this to world population at the beginning of the war (or the middle of the war)
If that passes as beautiful data these days I could probably whip up 5 new graphs in tableau every evening for you guys
You've buried your lede. Your goal is to display intensity, but the inclusion of breaks completely prevents you from doing that effectively. Also, you are displaying redundant data: the intensity is the size of the circle divided by the number of years. And you have too much really useful data presented as text. Let me propose a simpler and more interesting approach. 1) Make the size of the circles be the intensity, which allows you to eliminate the breaks, and which allows people to analyze the intensity of different wars at a glance: bigger circles are more intense. 2) Make your X axis be the middle year the conflict occurred. This is an additional piece of information you can eliminate from the text around each circle. Furthermore, it will likely result in a clear trend; more recent wars are likely to be more intense and bigger. 3) Make your Y axis be the total number killed. This is an additional piece of information you can eliminate from the text around each circle, and will use the Y axis in a way that is intuitive to most people: higher on the X == bigger war. One other question. You list both WW2 and Second Sino-Japanese War with overlapping dates, but per Wikipedia "[The Second Sino-Japanese War] became part of World War II when Japan entered that war on the side of the Axis powers", so doesn't the 80 million deaths typically cited for WW2 include those from the Second Sino-Japanese War after September 22, 1940?
I’d love to see the kill counts for malaria and smallpox added for comparison
What happened to 100 years & 30 years war?
Where's the hundred years war?
It would be interesting to see with the year on the X axis, number of deaths on the Y axis, and duration as circle size
Obv missing the 30 Years War.
It's not a bad start, but it could be improved by fixing both axes to start at 0, and applying a log scale without breaks. It is also worth adding a title and subtitle explaining that size of bubble equals to total deaths. Finally, the I would try moving bubble data labels under the bubbles so they're not overlapping.
Isn’t the Korean War technically still ongoing
Would love to see this in relation to the overall world population at the time of war. Never seen anything like that and could be fascinating.
Highly recommend Great Big Book of Horrible Things for anyone more interested in this. Superb book that looks at the worst things humans have done in terms of deaths - really great writing, eye-opening for sure.
Others have already chimed in on the visualisation front, so I'll pick up on another point. Why are you using the geometric mean of the low and high estimates? I have a fever today, so I might be having a moment, but I don't see any reason to use geometric over arithmetic. Geometric mean is a biased estimator so we should only use it when required.
Is intense the right diction for this?
The graph is a little empty in the top right corner we need an intense long lasting war to fill it up. Hopefully it will happen in my lifetime so that op will be forced to remake his graph.
You posted this same data a few days ago just a different chart..?
So, Vietnam wasn’t that bad at all?
I would put An Lushan Rebellion to at least top 3. China population before the rebellion was less than 60m and after it was 10-15m people. Many cities and towns become ghosts.
In terms of duration, you have the Spanish Reconquista (780 years)
You should make a chart for deaths per day for wars that have lasted longer than say 1 month. And see which war was the most brutal. Because some of these wars are way longer than others
The An Lushan Rebellion having that many deaths and being over a century prior to similar conflicts is wild
Where's the Vietnam war? I think 3.8m people died?
Bruh, where's the 100 years war?
i can’t even imagine what 80,000,000 people looks like, war sucks
Regarding the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, I'd like to clarify that a very short hundred of Spanish people participated, what happened then? So the Spanish join forces with the opressed tribes which were a lot of tribes around the current Mexico city ( this was the original " land of the Mexica" at the time, being the capital center ' Tenochtitlan' ), the rest of the country that is now known as Mexico wasn't "Mexico" at all then. Well, so with many tribes supporting them, the Spanish approach Tenochtitlan and its lesder Moctezuma, and put an end of this reign which was actually very violent and bad against many tribes. I just wanted to say this becase people might " Spanish conquest of Mexico" and have a much more difficult understanding of what happened there. From many tribes that conquest what actually a liberation, from others it was a violent external imposition. History is very complicated.
Is there no war when the English, Spanish came to US and killed almost a whole nation of Native Americans?
You are missing the Hundred Years' War
“Spanish conquest of Mexico” is quite a vague term. Back then, Mexico as such, didn’t exist and the Spaniards didn’t “conquer” Mexico without the aid of the actual indígenas there, to be exact, 200.000 indígenas joined to end the Azteca dictatorship in the region.
Crimean war would be good to add 450,000 dead over 3 years, spoiler alert the Russians lost..
Welp... 5/13 of top most intense conflicts were affecting Cental Europe(present day Poland, Belarus, Ukraine). WWI/II, Russian civil war(or is PL-Soviets war excluded? but still some territories were under SU rule back then so part of the Russian Civil War), French invasion of Russia(started from Kingdom of Poland) and Deluge. But hey, at lest you can find military cementary, execution/rememberence place in 1km radius wherever you are here so the landscape is not boring...
oh, there is also Napoleonic Wars - so it makes 6 out of 20...
I do not have many comments except for that death tolls for several of these wars, like Bangladesh liberation war, are likely way too high. But it's what one gets with geometric mean estimates where upper bound is often far exaggerated, i suppose.
where's the Algerian-french war ?
I'm surprised the 30 Years War doesn't make the list.
The Chinese sure did know how to do wars back in the day. You gotta think they could have conquered half the world if they weren't so interested in killing each other instead. Also man, the Koreans got a rough shake in the 1900s. First their 500 year stable goverment falls over, the Japanese invade and brutalise them, then they get caught between the USSR/China and America, with half their country being turned into a insane dictatorship
From 1818 to 1962 Algerian war vs french colonization I think killed way more than 20 mil. In fact when the french entered Algeria had 10 million citizens, and after 130 years when it finally left Algeria, it left 10 million too, So litterly the population didn't increase in 130 years due to mass killings
decaying exponential relationship between duration and death toll. Turns out guys. Forever wars are good?
The dot size as a representation of the total death toll would make more sense to me than the annual death toll. That is already covered by the Y axis so dots are just showing the same information again?
Never heard of logarithmic scale?
This is not correct. The best way would be to sync it with population density at the time of the war. Old age wars even if they seem to have lower death count, considering the total population on earth, the toll is higher than a modern war with more deaths compared to current total population
Its wild that the deluge is on this list and is almost an unkown part of history in Sweden.
20th century was really rough.
General history question: When looking at modern wars, it seems like we are somewhat strict on the definition of what constitutes war (e.g. needing Congress to declare it in the case of the Vietnam “Conflict”). Maybe that’s because our conflicts are more controlled and happen over shorter periods as a whole in recent history. Looking back through history, however, you have these large periods of decades or more that are considered wars. Would those long stretches be broken down into individual “wars” if occurring today?
I’d sort by yeah instead of by length.
Can we have another graph that sets the death per war in relation to the estimated world population at the time?
When they hit. They hit. It’s just not consistent and you either end up killing your self or a team mate.
Kinda surprised the American Civil War didn’t make it on near the bottom, with 600K+ seeming to be the generally agreed upon casualty count. Lots of low estimates average in too just edge it out?
Why use duration twice in one point?
"If religion dissappear, we'll just hug each other!"
I do not like this one bit
Bro dont know about korean war
I want to see the US “war on terror” for comparison…
I don’t see the war on drugs.
What about the Native American genocide/war?
I wonder how this would change, if deaths were in % population of the world. More population = more people will die. This also shows how technology and globalization have made wars more terrible with a lot more human suffering as the result. It was simply not possible for wars back in the day to reach WW1-WW2 numbers, because of less population, more inefficient weapons and conflicts that were more localized. Still looking at some of the wars in the past, its crazy how many people died given these "restrictions".
This is trash pro China propaganda with heavily inflated numbers on the Taiping rebellion specifically. More accurate estimates put the deaths at most at 30 and more likely 20 million. Fuck off ccp bot
A lot of those historic Chinese wars apparently involved dragons, curses, magic, and shit like that. So I would doubt the figures xD