Centuries of conflict
2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the war which was supposed to end all wars. Has the toll of war since 1918 been lesser or greater than in the century before 1914?
1815-1914 saw the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars (5m deaths), the Zulu Wars (2m) and the US Civil War (750,000). In China, the Taiping Revolution of the 1860s cost an estimated 60m lives and the Dungan Revolution of the 1860s and 1870s 10m. These, along with the Mexican Revolution (1m) and the Paraguayan War (1m) total about 80m.
1918–2013 Mid-estimate for second world war death toll: 55m. A further 7m died in the Russian Revolution. After that the deadliest was the relatively little-known Congo War between 1998 and 2003 which cost 3.5m lives. The Afghan wars, the Nigerian civil war, the Korean war and the Vietnam war all killed around 2m each.
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