The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (107 page)

War of the Austrian Succession

1.
Reed S. Browning,
The War of the Austrian Succession (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995), p. 377: "To the 100000 men in arms who perished as a consequence of the war must be added an additional 400000 civilians. . . . The War of the Austrian Succession killed half a million people." The same numbers (100,000 plus 400,000) appear in Armstrong Starkey's
War in the Age of the Enlightenment, 1700–1789 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p. 6. Urlanis, in
Wars and Population, estimated 120,000 killed in battle (p. 45) and 450,000 soldiers dead of all causes (p. 226).

Sino-Dzungar War

1.
John DeFrancis,
In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), p. 175 ("By 1755, nine-tenths of the Dzungars and their allies, some six hundred thousand people, had been wiped out"); Douglas Carruthers,
Unknown Mongolia: A Record of Travel and Exploration in North-west Mongolia and Dzungaria, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1914), p. 376 ("When the Chinese invaded Dzungaria, they killed off her population to a man—of six hundred thousand inhabitants not one remained").

2.
Rene Grousset,
Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970), pp. 537–538.

Seven Years War

1.
Estimates vary, but most scholars agree on the basic size of the conflict. Clodfelter, in
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 1, pp. 99–100, called the conflict "the bloodiest of the eighteenth century," and he found one estimate that said 868,000 soldiers died of all causes, and another that said 460,000 Austrians and allies and 180,000 Prussians died. Other sources:

• Dumas and Vedel-Petersen,
Losses of Life Caused By War
: 125,400 Austrians and 180,000 Prussians died.

• Urlanis,
Wars and Population
: 140,000 killed in battle, 550,000 soldiers died of all causes (pp. 45, 226). The civilian population of Austria declined from 5,739,000 to 4,890,000 (p. 282).

• Williams,
Historians' History of the World
, vol. 12, p. 352: "The Seven Years' War was a glorious means of personal aggrandisement to Frederick . . . yet it cost . . . 180,000 lives among his own partisans, a general diminution of Prussia's population by 500,000, and a grand total of 853,000 soldiers killed on all sides."

This indicates that somewhere between 500,000 and 900,000 soldiers and up to 1.3 million civilians died. Although you probably could make a case for over 2 million total deaths, I didn't want to overdo it, so I rolled back to the next round number.

2.
Britt,
Dawn of Modern Warfare, pp. 102–104.

3.
Rowen,
History of Early Modern Europe, p. 500.

4.
Fuller,
Military History of the Modern World, p. 198.

Napoleonic Wars

1.
Geoffrey Ellis,
The Napoleonic Empire, 2d ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 121–122: "The present consensus puts the war losses in the land armies . . . within the 89 departments which remained French in 1815 [at] a total of some 1.4 million for the whole period 1792–1814. These figures include those killed in action, the much larger numbers who subsequently died of their wounds or from illness, the victims of exhaustion or exposure to the cold, and prisoners of war not later accounted for. . . . As for the total war dead among
all the European armies during the Napoleonic campaigns, Charles Esdaile's 'intelligent guess' is a figure of nearly 3 million, and he also estimates that additional civilian losses amounted to around 1 million."

2.
Bell,
First Total War, p. 156.

3.
Schom,
Napoleon Bonaparte, p. 42.

4.
Ibid., p. 45.

5.
Ibid., pp. 75–106.

6.
Ibid., pp. 107–188.

7.
Ibid., p. 235.

8.
Bell,
First Total War, p. 251.

9.
Muir,
Tactics and the Experience of Battle, pp. 76–77.

10.
Ibid., pp. 130–131.

11.
Ibid., pp. 235–239.

12.
Sheldon Watts,
Epidemics and History: Disease Power and Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 116–117.

13.
Clodfelter,
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 1, p. 165.

14.
Schom,
Napoleon Bonaparte, p. 595.

15.
David Grubin, "Napoleon at War,"
Napoleon,
http://www.pbs.org/empires/napoleon/n_war/campaign/page_13.html
(accessed March 8, 2011).

World Conquerors

1.
Lynn, in
The French Wars, p. 90, estimates that 2,250,000 died in Louis's wars, based on Levy,
War in the Modern Great Power System. Corvisier and Childs, in
A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, p. 470, estimated the cost for France, both military and civilian fatalities, as follows:

Dutch War, 1672–78: 120,000

Nine Years War, 1688–97: 160,000

War of Spanish Succession: 500,000

Total number of French deaths in these three wars: 780,000

If we double the total to account for both sides, we get around 1.5 million.

2.
Pliny the Elder,
The Natural History, book 7, ch. 25, trans. John Bostock and H.T. Riley (London: Taylor & Francis, 1855), vol. 2, p. 166.

Haitian Slave Revolt

1.
Scheina,
Latin America's Wars, p. 18.

2.
Ibid., pp. 1–3.

3.
Rogozinski,
Brief History of the Caribbean, p. 165.

4.
Ibid., pp. 167–168.

5.
Ibid., p. 172.

6.
Scheina,
Latin America's Wars, pp. 15–16.

Mexican War of Independence

1.
Scheina,
Latin America's Wars, p. 84 ("Estimates of the number killed range from 250,000 to 500,000 individuals"); Clodfelter,
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 1, p. 534 (400,000 to 500,000 died).

2.
Scheina,
Latin America's Wars, pp. 71–84.

Shaka

1.
Ritter,
Shaka Zulu, pp. 25–28.

2.
Ibid., pp. 84–88.

3.
Ibid., pp. 81–83.

4.
Keegan,
History of Warfare, pp. 28–32.

5.
Chalk and Jonassohn,
History and Sociology of Genocide, pp. 227–228.

6.
Ibid., p. 223.

7.
Ritter,
Shaka Zulu, pp. 28–31.

8.
Monica Hunter Wilson and Leonard Monteath Thompson,
The Oxford History of South Africa, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 344; Donald R. Morris,
The Washing of the Spears (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 54.

9.
Ritter,
Shaka Zulu, p. 333.

10.
Chalk and Johassohn,
History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 223.

11.
See, for example, Wylie, "Shaka and the Modern Zulu State," which is a good summary of the revisionist school. That article disagrees with pretty much everything I've said in this chapter, down to the smallest details.

12.
"The numbers whose death he occasioned have been left to conjecture, but exceed a million." Henry Francis Fynn,
The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1986), p. 20.

13.
"Chaka may be termed the South African Attila; and it is estimated that not less than 1,000,000 human beings were destroyed by him." Major Charters, Royal Artillery, "Notices of the Cape and Southern Africa, since the Appointment, as Governor, of Major-Gen. Sir Geo. Napier,"
United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine (London: W. Clowes & Son, 1839), part 3, p. 24.

14.
See, for example, Donald R. Morris,
The Washing of the Spears (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 60 ("At least a million people, and more likely two, died in a decade that virtually depopulated" the interior); Hanson,
Carnage and Culture, p. 313 ("As many as 1 million native Africans had been killed and starved to death as a direct result of Shaka's imperial dreams"); "Shaka," in
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 10, p. 689 ("left 2,000,000 dead in its wake"); Totten,
Dictionary of Genocide: A–L, p. 280.

French Conquest of Algeria

1.
Mahfoud Bennoune,
The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830-1987 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 42: "As a direct consequence of this kind of colonial war of conquest the total urban and rural population declined from an estimated three million in 1830 to 2,462,000 by 1876." Kiernan (
Blood and Soil, p. 374) claims that the war killed 825,000 Algerians. The average of those two numbers is 681,500. Adding the French losses (92,329 soldiers dead in the hospital and 3,336 killed in battle, in 1830–51) and rounding it off yields 775,000.

2.
Kiernan,
Blood and Soil, pp. 364–374.

3.
Porch,
Wars of Empire, pp. 59, 73–74.

4.
John Reynell Morell,
Algeria: The Topography and History, Political, Social, and Natural (London: N. Cooke, 1854), p. 441.

5.
Porch,
Wars of Empire, pp. 40–41.

Taiping Rebellion

1.
Ho Ping-to,
Studies in the Population of China, 1368–1953, pp. 246–247 ("Some nineteenth century Western observers estimated the total population loss during the Taiping period at 20,000,000 to 30,000,000. Their estimates, however intelligent, were the guesswork of treaty port residents"). Ho is lukewarm on these estimates and seems to consider them too
low. The only hard evidence Ho gathers is that the provinces hardest hit by the rebellion had lost 19.2 million people between 1850 and 1953. "Although twentieth-century . . . wars must also have affected the populations of these provinces, the . . . figures may reflect permanent wounds that the populations . . . received in the great upheaval of the middle of the nineteenth century."

In any case, the estimate of 20 to 30 million deaths is one of the most common facts found in almost any discussion of the Taiping Rebellion. See, for example, Spence,
Search for Modern China
, p. 805; McEvedy,
Atlas of World Population History
, pp. 170–173; "Taiping Rebellion," in
Encyclopedia Britannica
, 15th ed., vol. 11, p. 509; "China," in
MSN Encarta Encyclopedia
, p. 20, http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761573055_20/China.html; Robert L. Worden et al., ed.,
China: A Country Study
(Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1987).