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The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities
A compulsively readable and utterly original account of world history―from an atrocitologist’s point of view. Evangelists of human progress meet their opposite in Matthew White's epic examination of history's one hundred most violent events, or, in White's piquant phrasing, "the numbers that people want to argue about." Reaching back to 480 BCE's second Persian War, White moves chronologically through history to this century's war in the Congo and devotes chapters to each event, where he surrounds hard facts (time and place) and succinct takeaways (who usually gets the blame?) with lively military, social, and political histories. With the eye of a seasoned statistician, White assigns each entry a ranking based on body count, and in doing so he gives voice to the suffering of ordinary people that, inexorably, has defined every historical epoch. By turns droll, insightful, matter-of-fact, and ultimately sympathetic to those who died, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things gives readers a chance to reach their own conclusions while offering a stark reminder of the darkness of the human heart. 20 black-and-white illustrations and 4 maps
688 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 152 reviews
March 27, 2017
This book isn't in the best possible taste. Like one of those countdown programmes on cheesy tv - 2016's 100 Most Shocking Celebrity Moments - it ranks massacres, wars and man-made catastrophes of limitless human suffering and discusses them all in a slightly unnerving jokey chatty unhistorianlike manner :
The Germans had come so close to winning the First World War they couldn't believe they didn't.
Communism lasted longer than fascism, jazz, John Wayne, Bonanza and the American Motor Corporation.
Believe me, I don't want to discuss Shaka's penis any more than you want to read about it
It's not all like this, the rest of it is breathlessly potted history - there's more history in this book than 20 others put together, and often very obscure history too - and naturally the poor reader is going to suffer from factual brain overload if he reads this from page 1 to page 565,
so this is for dipping into.
But who wants to dip in and read about an event which caused the death of 2 million people and rates 18 on Matthew White's list? Er, so what's this book for? To settle really morbid pub arguments?
"Derek, I think you will find that the Haitian Slave Revolt killed far more people than the Albigensian Crusade."
"Marjorie, Marjorie - before we go any further I think we should consult our well-thumbed copy of Atrocitology, don't you?"
The best parts of this odd book are the essays thrown into the mix. Here are some interesting conclusions from Mr White, who has thought about men, women and children dying in huge numbers more than is surely healthy for anyone -
1. Chaos is deadlier than tyranny.
2. The world is very disorganised - soldiers and nations change sides in the middle of wars, it's often hard to tell where one nation stops and another starts, and same goes with actual wars.
3. War kills more civilians than soldiers and more people than oppressive governments do. This last point will not please libertarians.
4. If you are a tyrant who has killed millions (you know who you are out there in Goodreadsland), you have a 49% chance of dying peacefully whilst still in power and an 11% chance of retiring from office and dying peacefully in retirement. The rest of you will be shot. That's not bad odds.
5. Let's hear it for India and Hinduism - the most peaceful nation & religion, based on its nearly complete absence in these pages. The only atrocities inflicted in India have been by non-Hindus.
The Germans had come so close to winning the First World War they couldn't believe they didn't.
Communism lasted longer than fascism, jazz, John Wayne, Bonanza and the American Motor Corporation.
Believe me, I don't want to discuss Shaka's penis any more than you want to read about it
It's not all like this, the rest of it is breathlessly potted history - there's more history in this book than 20 others put together, and often very obscure history too - and naturally the poor reader is going to suffer from factual brain overload if he reads this from page 1 to page 565,
so this is for dipping into.
But who wants to dip in and read about an event which caused the death of 2 million people and rates 18 on Matthew White's list? Er, so what's this book for? To settle really morbid pub arguments?
"Derek, I think you will find that the Haitian Slave Revolt killed far more people than the Albigensian Crusade."
"Marjorie, Marjorie - before we go any further I think we should consult our well-thumbed copy of Atrocitology, don't you?"
The best parts of this odd book are the essays thrown into the mix. Here are some interesting conclusions from Mr White, who has thought about men, women and children dying in huge numbers more than is surely healthy for anyone -
1. Chaos is deadlier than tyranny.
2. The world is very disorganised - soldiers and nations change sides in the middle of wars, it's often hard to tell where one nation stops and another starts, and same goes with actual wars.
3. War kills more civilians than soldiers and more people than oppressive governments do. This last point will not please libertarians.
4. If you are a tyrant who has killed millions (you know who you are out there in Goodreadsland), you have a 49% chance of dying peacefully whilst still in power and an 11% chance of retiring from office and dying peacefully in retirement. The rest of you will be shot. That's not bad odds.
5. Let's hear it for India and Hinduism - the most peaceful nation & religion, based on its nearly complete absence in these pages. The only atrocities inflicted in India have been by non-Hindus.
October 26, 2011
You know that scene in Maus Part II when Art Spiegelman, seated at his drawing board, is perched high up on a Holocaust bodypile? Okay. Matthew White is made of something *steely* because this man's work has him sitting on top of not just *a* tragic body pile, but *the* tragic body pile, the ENTIRE HUMAN BODYPILE. And I just spent the last couple of evenings mountaineering with him to the human bodypile's damnable peak. From up here, let me tell you what it was like: I was impressed because I am not a real historian (The hemoclysm? I had never or barely heard of that theory!), so of course I was impressed that Matthew White took the trouble of making, like, all of history completely accessible to me (because, depressing side note, it turns out that when you are laser focusing on the history of human-induced mass death, you are actually taking it upon yourself to tell most of what there is to tell of human history), but I was also impressed because of Matthew White's steely-eyed, steady-handed determination to number the numberless atrocities of man, but in this stubbornly charming way. He refuses to be grim in the face of the unfaceable, but at the same time made me aware that cannibalism is A LOT less taboo than anyone would like to admit. So, yeah, this book is weird, and important, and long, and it makes all of the death seem strangely connected, and you don't know if the sense of connection means we are perpetually doomed or close to enlightenment. Or what. I recommend it.
December 29, 2011
I expected to be utterly depressed throughout my reading of this fascinating trip down Atrocity Lane, but instead I found myself enthralled by the history being presented to me and the different way it was being presented. Though the sordid history of humanity is quite the cautionary tale in how we fail to treat each other in the ways in which we wish them to treat us, from slavery to warfare to acts of genocide to politically and racially induced famines, "The Great Big Book of Horrible Things" is far from boring or dry. There is an energy and an excitement in the writing of Mr. White; he prevents the subject matter from being bogged down by just statistics. In short, he refutes to habit of historians in labeling the hundreds of millions of deaths discussed in this book as "mere" statistics. Enjoy, if it is possible to enjoy reading about the deaths of 460+ million people, then "The Great Big Book of Horrible Things" makes it possible.
April 4, 2013
-Sistematizar datos para obtener información, especialmente en algunos temas, es francamente loable, por terrible que sea el asunto-.
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Tras explicarnos el autor su idea, intención y método respecto a la identificación de las mayores matanzas de la Historia, nos embarcamos en un viaje que nos llevará a través de 25 siglos desde la Segunda Guerra Médica hasta la Segunda Guerra del Congo, en el que se nos relatan los hechos más relevantes de cada uno de los acontecimientos retratados y se nos explica su posición en su terrible “Top 100” de la muerte.
¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Tras explicarnos el autor su idea, intención y método respecto a la identificación de las mayores matanzas de la Historia, nos embarcamos en un viaje que nos llevará a través de 25 siglos desde la Segunda Guerra Médica hasta la Segunda Guerra del Congo, en el que se nos relatan los hechos más relevantes de cada uno de los acontecimientos retratados y se nos explica su posición en su terrible “Top 100” de la muerte.
¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
September 13, 2016
I know a lot of people can be heavily offended by the tone of this book. I wasn't. I couldn't be. Researching evil people and understanding war, torture, man-induced famine from a psychological point of wiew is what I do every day. This is not an offensive work - gasping and bowing your head in pain and shame everytime you hear the word "gang rape" or "Holocaust" is not a sign of caring more for the subject than someone who is very clinically exposing the truth behind (and of) them. For the ammount of information I got out of this and the succint way in which terrible events have been written about and reduced to their clinical cause and effect, this is a five star for me. There's other works out there emotionally careful enough for anyone who is into that.
January 20, 2012
The first thing you need to know about The Great Big Book of Horrible things is, you're going to not only learn things, but you'll at times be embarrassed about the things you know almost nothing about. The worst genocide since the Holocaust occurred in Bangladesh in 1971? The bloodiest war since WWII, the Second Congo War, ended less than ten years ago, and nobody in the United States noticed? 20 million Indians died in the 1800s due to famines that the British didn't want to respond to?
Makes you rethink how informed you are.
The premise of the work is simple; an overview of the 100 worst things, by bodycount, humanity has ever inflicted on itself. It's quite a piece of work: Matthew White did his homework, going over events famous and obscure with a voice that is engaging and lively, somehow able to convey the horror of, say, the 30 Years war (the bloodiest conflict in Europe until WWI) without making you unable to keep going, respectful of the dead (he insists you remember that the postwar "peace" of the cold war claimed 11 million lives by his reckoning), but not without humor ("In any case, the thing to remember about Dorgon is that, unlike his fellow Manchus, he has a great name for a barbarian warlord. Go on; say it out loud: Dorgon the Barbarian")
What makes things more intriguing is that, while some of the topics are the obvious ones, (World War 2, Stalin), others you wouldn't have expected until you find them present. The Gladiatorial Games, for example. It's hard to think that such a thing would stack up against real wars, but the Games saw 3.5 million die over 600 years. It's all about perspective.
And that's what the Great Big Book offers: perspective. People have been terrible to people ever since we became people; his estimate that 3% of all deaths in the 20th century were due to man is tempered by the fact that 15% of deaths in tribal societies were violent. He doesn't offer optimism, exactly; but it's possible to make some from his work.
Makes you rethink how informed you are.
The premise of the work is simple; an overview of the 100 worst things, by bodycount, humanity has ever inflicted on itself. It's quite a piece of work: Matthew White did his homework, going over events famous and obscure with a voice that is engaging and lively, somehow able to convey the horror of, say, the 30 Years war (the bloodiest conflict in Europe until WWI) without making you unable to keep going, respectful of the dead (he insists you remember that the postwar "peace" of the cold war claimed 11 million lives by his reckoning), but not without humor ("In any case, the thing to remember about Dorgon is that, unlike his fellow Manchus, he has a great name for a barbarian warlord. Go on; say it out loud: Dorgon the Barbarian")
What makes things more intriguing is that, while some of the topics are the obvious ones, (World War 2, Stalin), others you wouldn't have expected until you find them present. The Gladiatorial Games, for example. It's hard to think that such a thing would stack up against real wars, but the Games saw 3.5 million die over 600 years. It's all about perspective.
And that's what the Great Big Book offers: perspective. People have been terrible to people ever since we became people; his estimate that 3% of all deaths in the 20th century were due to man is tempered by the fact that 15% of deaths in tribal societies were violent. He doesn't offer optimism, exactly; but it's possible to make some from his work.
April 4, 2013
-Sistematizar datos para obtener información, especialmente en algunos temas, es francamente loable, por terrible que sea el asunto-.
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Tras explicarnos el autor su idea, intención y método respecto a la identificación de las mayores matanzas de la Historia, nos embarcamos en un viaje que nos llevará a través de 25 siglos desde la Segunda Guerra Médica hasta la Segunda Guerra del Congo, en el que se nos relatan los hechos más relevantes de cada uno de los acontecimientos retratados y se nos explica su posición en su terrible “Top 100” de la muerte.
¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Tras explicarnos el autor su idea, intención y método respecto a la identificación de las mayores matanzas de la Historia, nos embarcamos en un viaje que nos llevará a través de 25 siglos desde la Segunda Guerra Médica hasta la Segunda Guerra del Congo, en el que se nos relatan los hechos más relevantes de cada uno de los acontecimientos retratados y se nos explica su posición en su terrible “Top 100” de la muerte.
¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
November 19, 2018
Tengo que confesar que me ha encantado.
El tema es duro, claro, pero no cae en el morbo. Está narrado de forma amena y didáctica, incluso con algún toque de humor. Se aprende muchísimo.
Muy recomendable.
El tema es duro, claro, pero no cae en el morbo. Está narrado de forma amena y didáctica, incluso con algún toque de humor. Se aprende muchísimo.
Muy recomendable.
January 31, 2016
Pierdere de timp. Nu inteleg de ce ai citi o astfel de carte. E ca si cum ti-ai propune sa citesti DOOM-ul sau DEX-ul de la cap la coada.
Genul de enciclopedii scrise de un singur om nu ma atrag nicicum. Nu stiu de ce am ales, totusi, sa-mi pierd timpul cu volumul lui White. Poate ca de vina-s sarbatorile de iarna...
Spicuiri din recenzia finala care se gaseste pe blogul meu
..........................................
Nu contează ce crede Pinker despre Marea carte a umanității și nici nu mă interesează, sincer să fiu, deoarece volumul lui White este o mare porcărie. În primul rând scriitura este jalnică. White nu știe cum să construiască nici cel mai simplu articol astfel încât să fie atractiv și interesant.
Dincolo de scriitura proastă, White, probabil mințit de același Pinker sau ceva prieteni răuvoitori, crede că are un simț al umorului aparte și decide să strecoare glumițe de doi lei în articolașele care trec în revistă zeci de mii sau milioane de morți. Ce să zic, e o carte câștigătoare care nu are cum să nu fie jucată de un autor inteligent și cu respect față de suferința și cruzimea pe care o trece cu o desăvârșită relaxare în revistă.
Avem scriitură la nivelul compunerilor de liceu și observații care se vor amuzante și care pot să fie amuzante doar pentru descreierați deoarece nu-mi imaginez cum o persoană întreagă la cap ar putea glumi în acest context. E ca și cum Lifton s-ar apuca să crack some jokes când vorbește despre medicii naziști care ucideau cu sânge rece copii în spitalele naziste sau în lagărele de concentrare. Sau Kershaw s-ar apuca să spună bancuri despre femeile germane care erau violate de soldații sovietici ș.a.m.d. Ce să zic, dacă o astfel de lucrare se bucură de laude și recomandări venite din partea unor nume mari din cultura contemporană înseamnă că avem o foarte mare problemă atât cu respectul față de atrocitățile care au înecat omenirea în sânge cât și cu simțul umorului care dă semne că este ușor handicapat.
.......................................
Genul de enciclopedii scrise de un singur om nu ma atrag nicicum. Nu stiu de ce am ales, totusi, sa-mi pierd timpul cu volumul lui White. Poate ca de vina-s sarbatorile de iarna...
Spicuiri din recenzia finala care se gaseste pe blogul meu
..........................................
Nu contează ce crede Pinker despre Marea carte a umanității și nici nu mă interesează, sincer să fiu, deoarece volumul lui White este o mare porcărie. În primul rând scriitura este jalnică. White nu știe cum să construiască nici cel mai simplu articol astfel încât să fie atractiv și interesant.
Dincolo de scriitura proastă, White, probabil mințit de același Pinker sau ceva prieteni răuvoitori, crede că are un simț al umorului aparte și decide să strecoare glumițe de doi lei în articolașele care trec în revistă zeci de mii sau milioane de morți. Ce să zic, e o carte câștigătoare care nu are cum să nu fie jucată de un autor inteligent și cu respect față de suferința și cruzimea pe care o trece cu o desăvârșită relaxare în revistă.
Avem scriitură la nivelul compunerilor de liceu și observații care se vor amuzante și care pot să fie amuzante doar pentru descreierați deoarece nu-mi imaginez cum o persoană întreagă la cap ar putea glumi în acest context. E ca și cum Lifton s-ar apuca să crack some jokes când vorbește despre medicii naziști care ucideau cu sânge rece copii în spitalele naziste sau în lagărele de concentrare. Sau Kershaw s-ar apuca să spună bancuri despre femeile germane care erau violate de soldații sovietici ș.a.m.d. Ce să zic, dacă o astfel de lucrare se bucură de laude și recomandări venite din partea unor nume mari din cultura contemporană înseamnă că avem o foarte mare problemă atât cu respectul față de atrocitățile care au înecat omenirea în sânge cât și cu simțul umorului care dă semne că este ușor handicapat.
.......................................
Read
December 17, 2018From the introduction:
"Aside from morbid fascination, is there any reason to know the one hundred highest body counts of history? Four reasons come to mind:
"First, things that happen to a lot of people are usually more important than things that happen to only a few people....
"Second, killing a person is the most you can do to him....
"Therefore, just by default, my one hundred multicides had a maximum impact on an enormous number of people. Without too much debate, I can easily label these to be among history's most significant events.
"....
"A third reason to consider is that we sometimes forget the human impact of historic events....
"The fourth and certainly most practical reason to gather body counts is for risk assessment and problem solving. If we study history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, it helps to know what those mistakes were, and that includes ALL of the mistakes, not just the ones that support certain pet ideas." pg. xvi
"Despite my skepticism about any common thread running through all one hundred atrocities, I still found some interesting tendencies. Let me share with you the three biggest lessons I learned while working on this list:
"1. Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the break-down of authority rather than the exercise of authority....
"2. The world is very disorganized. Power structures tend to be informal and temporary.... Most wars don't start neatly with declarations and mobilizations and end with surrenders and treaties.... Most nations are not as neatly delineated as you might expect....
"3. War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a war...." pg. xvii
Herge's cartoon Tintin, and individual survival after mass atrocity
"Aside from morbid fascination, is there any reason to know the one hundred highest body counts of history? Four reasons come to mind:
"First, things that happen to a lot of people are usually more important than things that happen to only a few people....
"Second, killing a person is the most you can do to him....
"Therefore, just by default, my one hundred multicides had a maximum impact on an enormous number of people. Without too much debate, I can easily label these to be among history's most significant events.
"....
"A third reason to consider is that we sometimes forget the human impact of historic events....
"The fourth and certainly most practical reason to gather body counts is for risk assessment and problem solving. If we study history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, it helps to know what those mistakes were, and that includes ALL of the mistakes, not just the ones that support certain pet ideas." pg. xvi
"Despite my skepticism about any common thread running through all one hundred atrocities, I still found some interesting tendencies. Let me share with you the three biggest lessons I learned while working on this list:
"1. Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the break-down of authority rather than the exercise of authority....
"2. The world is very disorganized. Power structures tend to be informal and temporary.... Most wars don't start neatly with declarations and mobilizations and end with surrenders and treaties.... Most nations are not as neatly delineated as you might expect....
"3. War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a war...." pg. xvii
Herge's cartoon Tintin, and individual survival after mass atrocity
May 10, 2013
-Sistematizar datos para obtener información, especialmente en algunos temas, es francamente loable, por terrible que sea el asunto-.
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Tras explicarnos el autor su idea, intención y método respecto a la identificación de las mayores matanzas de la Historia, nos embarcamos en un viaje que nos llevará a través de 25 siglos desde la Segunda Guerra Médica hasta la Segunda Guerra del Congo, en el que se nos relatan los hechos más relevantes de cada uno de los acontecimientos retratados y se nos explica su posición en su terrible “Top 100” de la muerte.
¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Tras explicarnos el autor su idea, intención y método respecto a la identificación de las mayores matanzas de la Historia, nos embarcamos en un viaje que nos llevará a través de 25 siglos desde la Segunda Guerra Médica hasta la Segunda Guerra del Congo, en el que se nos relatan los hechos más relevantes de cada uno de los acontecimientos retratados y se nos explica su posición en su terrible “Top 100” de la muerte.
¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Want to read
May 19, 2022FOREWORD
TRADITIONAL HISTORY IS ABOUT KINGS AND ARMIES
RATHER THAN PEOPLE. Empires rose, empires fell,
entire populations were enslaved or annihilated, and no
one seemed to think there was anything wrong with it.
Because of this lack of curiosity among traditional
scholars about the human cost of historical
extravaganzas, a curious person had nowhere to go to
answer such basic questions as whether the twentieth
century was really the most violent in history or whether
religion, nationalism, anarchy, Communism, or monarchy
killed the most people.
During the past decade, though, historians and
laypeople alike have gone to the sprawling website of a
guy on the Internet, Matthew White—self-described
atrocitologist, necrometrician, and quantifier of
hemoclysms. White is a representative of that noble and
underappreciated profession, the librarian, and he has
compiled the most comprehensive, disinterested, and
statistically nuanced estimates available of the death tolls
of history’s major catastrophes. In Atrocitology, White
now combines his numerical savvy with the skills of a
good storyteller to present a new history of civilization, a
history whose protagonists are not great emperors but
their unsung victims—millions and millions and millions of
them.
White writes with a light touch and a dark wit that
belies a serious moral purpose. His scorn is directed at
the stupidity and callousness of history’s great leaders,
at the statistical innumeracy and historical ignorance of
various ideologues and propagandists, and at the
indifference of traditional history to the magnitude of
human suffering behind momentous events.
—Steven Pinker
INTRODUCTION
NO ONE LIKES STATISTICS AS MUCH AS I DO. I
MEAN THAT LITERALLY. I CAN never find anyone who
wants to listen to me recite statistics.
Well, there is one exception. For several years, I’ve
maintained the Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century,
a history website on which, among other things, I’ve
analyzed statistics of changing literacy, urban populations,
casualties of war, industrial workforce, population density,
and infant mortality. Of those, the numbers that people
want to argue about are casualties.
Boy do they want to argue.
From the moment I first posted a tentative list of the
twenty-five largest cities in 1900, the twenty bloodiest
wars, and the one hundred most important artworks of
the twentieth century, I was swamped by e-mails
wondering how, why, and where I got my casualty
statistics. And why isn’t this other atrocity listed? And
which country killed the most? Which ideology? And just
who the hell do I think I am, accusing the Turks of
doing such things?
After many years of this, my website has become a
major clearinghouse for body counts, so believe me
when I say that I have heard every debate on the
subject. Let’s get something out of the way right now.
Everything you are about to read is disputed. There is
no point in loading the narrative with every “supposedly”
or “allegedly” or “according to some sources” that it
deserves. Nor will I make you slog through every
alternative version of events that has ever been
suggested.
There is no atrocity in history that every person in the
world agrees on. Someone somewhere will deny it ever
happened, and someone somewhere will insist it did. For
example, I am convinced that the Holocaust happened,
but that Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents did not. It
would be easy to find people who disagree with me on
both.
Atrocitology is at the center of most major historical
disputes. People don’t argue about nice history. They
argue about who killed whose grandfather. They try to
draw lessons from the past and speculate about who is
the most Hitleresque politician coming over the horizon.
On a particularly contentious topic, two historians from
the opposite poles of politics can cover the same ground
yet appear to be discussing two entirely different planets.
Sometimes you can’t find any overlap in the narratives,
and it becomes nearly impossible to fuse them into a
seamless middle ground. All I can say is that I have
tried to follow the consensus of scholars, but when I
support a minority view, I will tell you so.
Most people writing a book about history’s worst
atrocities would describe the “One Hundred Worst Things
I Can Recall at the Moment.” They would include the
Holocaust, slavery, 9/11, Wounded Knee, Jeffrey
Dahmer, Hiroshima, Jack the Ripper, the Iraq War, the
Kennedy assassination, Pickett’s Charge, and so on.
Unfortunately, just brainstorming a list like that will
usually reflect an author’s biases rather than a proper
historical balance. That particular list makes it look like
almost everything bad in history was done either to or
by Americans rather recently, which implies that
Americans are intrinsically, cosmically more important
than anyone else.
Other lists might make it seem like everything bad can
be associated with one root cause (resources, racism,
religion, for example), one culture (Communists, the
West, Muslims), or one method (war, exploitation,
taxation). Most people acquire their knowledge of
atrocities haphazardly—a TV documentary, a few movies,
a political website, a tourist brochure, and that angry
man at the end of the bar—and then proceed to make
judgments about the world based on those few
examples. I’m hoping to offer a broader and more
balanced range of examples to use when arguing about
history.
To be fair to all sides, I have carefully selected one
hundred events with the largest man-made death tolls,
regardless of who was involved or why they did it. To
emphasize the statistical basis of this list, I devote more
space to describing the deadliest events, while quickly
summarizing the lesser events. A death toll of several
million gets several pages, while a death toll of a few
hundred thousand gets a few paragraphs. The deadliest
event gets the longest chapter.
One of the standard ways to skew the data is to
decide up front that certain kinds of killing are worse
than others, so only those are counted. Gassing ethnic
minorities is worse than bombing cities, which is just as
bad as shooting prisoners of war, which is worse than
machine-gunning enemy troops, which is better than
plundering colonial natives, so massacres and famines
are counted but not air raids and battles. Or maybe it’s
the other way around. In any case, my philosophy is
that I wouldn’t want to die in any of these ways, so I
count all killings, regardless of how they happened or to
whom.
You might wonder how I can possibly know the
number who died in an atrocity. After all, wars are
messy and confusing, and people can easily disappear
without a trace. The participants happily lie about
numbers in order to look brave, noble, or tragic.
Reporters and historians can be biased or gullible.
The best answer would vary on a case-by-case basis,
but the short answer is money. Even if a general is
reluctant to tell the newspapers how many men he lost
in a bungled offensive, he still has to tell the
accountants to drop 4,000 men from the payroll. Even if
a dictator tries to hide how many civilians died in a
massive resettlement, his finance minister will still note
the disappearance of 100,000 taxpayers. A customs
official at the harbor will be collecting duties on each
cargo of new slaves, and someone has to pay to have
the bodies carted away after every massacre. Head
counts (and by extension, body counts) are not just an
academic exercise; they have been an important part of
government financing for centuries.
Obviously these death tolls have a significant margin of
error, but a list of history’s one hundred biggest body
counts is not entirely guesswork. For one thing, big
events leave big footprints. Even though no one will
ever know exactly how many Inca or Romans died in
the fall of their civilizations, histories describe big battles
and massacres, and archaeological excavations suggest a
massive decline of the population. These events killed a
lot of people even if “a lot” can’t be defined precisely.
At the top of the scale, a million here and a million
there barely moves an event’s rank a couple of notches
along the list. Some people would disagree with my
estimate that Stalin killed 20 million people, but even if
you claim (as some do) that he killed 50 million, that
would move him from Number 6 to Number 2. On the
other hand, defending Stalin by claiming (as others do)
that he killed a mere 3 million will drop him down to
only Number 29, so for my purposes, there’s not much
point in arguing about the exact number. Stalin will be
on my list, regardless.
At the same time, some events won’t reach the lower
threshold no matter how much we dispute the precise
numbers. An exact body count is hard to come by for
Castro’s regime in Cuba, but no one has ever
suggested that he killed the hundreds of thousands
necessary to be considered for a slot on my list. Many
infamous brutes such as François “Papa Doc” Duvalier,
Vlad the Impaler, Caligula, and Augusto Pinochet easily
fall short, as do many well-known conflicts, such as the
Arab-Israeli wars and the Anglo-Boer War.
Some people would bring more cleverness to this task
than I do. They might track the world’s worst multicide
back to some distant root cause and declare that to be
the most horrible thing people ever did. They might
blame influential people for all of the evil done by those
who followed them. They would blame Jesus for the
Crusades, Darwin for the Holocaust, Marx for the Gulag,
and Marco Polo for the destruction of the Aztecs.
Unfortunately this approach ignores the nature of
historical causality. Yes, you can take an event (let’s
say, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks) and
track back through the chain of cause and effect to
show how this is the natural result of, say, the 1953
coup against the prime minister of Iran, but you can
just as easily track that same event back to the First
World War, the Wright brothers, D. B. Cooper,
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Henry Ford, the Russian
conquest of Turkistan, Levittown, the founding of Yale
University, Elisha Otis, the Holocaust, and the opening of
the Erie Canal. So many threads of causality feed into
any individual event that you can usually find a way to
connect any two things you want.
Aside from morbid fascination, is there any reason to
know the one hundred highest body counts of history?
Four reasons come to mind:
First, things that happen to a lot of people are usually
more important than things that happen to only a few
people. If I’m in bed with the flu, no one cares, but if
half of the city is stricken with the flu, it’s a medical
emergency. If I lose my job, that’s my bad luck; if
thousands of people lose their jobs, the economy
crashes. A few murders a week is business as usual in
a big city police department; twenty murders a day is a
civil war.
Second, killing a person is the most you can do to
him. It affects him more than teaching him, robbing him,
healing him, hiring him, marrying him, or imprisoning
him—for the simple reason that death is the most
complete and permanent change you can inflict. A killer
can easily undo the work of a teacher or a doctor, but
neither a doctor nor a teacher can undo the work of a
killer.a
Therefore, just by default, my one hundred multicides
had a maximum impact on an enormous number of
people. Without too much debate, I can easily label
these to be among history’s most significant events.
You may be tempted to dismiss the impact of these
events as solely negative, but that’s an artificial
distinction. Destruction and creation are intimately
intertwined. The fall of the Roman Empire cleared the
way for medieval Europe. The Second World War
created the Cold War and democratic regimes in
Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Napoleonic Wars inspired
works by Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, and Goya. I’m not
saying that the 1812 Overture was worth the half-million
lives lost in the Russian Campaign, morally speaking. I’m
just saying that as a plain historical fact, there would be
no jazz, gospel, or rock and roll without slavery, and
everyone born in the postwar Baby Boom of 1946–64
owes their existence to World War II.
A third reason to consider is that we sometimes forget
the human impact of historic events. Yes, these things
happened a long time ago, and all of those people
would be dead now anyway, but there comes a point
where we have to realize that a clash of cultures did
more than blend cuisines, vocabularies, and architectural
styles. It also caused a lot of very personal suffering.
The fourth and certainly most practical reason to
gather body counts is for risk assessment and problem
solving. If we study history to avoid repeating the
mistakes of the past, it helps to know what those
mistakes were, and that includes all of the mistakes, not
just the ones that support certain pet ideas. It’s easy to
solve the problem of human violence if we focus only on
the seven atrocities that prove our point, but a list of
the hundred worst presents more of a challenge. A
person’s grand unified theory of human violence should
explain most of the multicides on this list or else he
might need to reconsider. In fact, the next time
somebody declares that he knows the cause of or
solution to human violence, you can probably open this
book at random and immediately find an event that is
not explained by his theory.
Despite my skepticism about any common thread
running through all one hundred atrocities, I still found
some interesting tendencies. Let me share with you the
three biggest lessons I learned while working on this list:
1.
Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these
multicides result from the breakdown of authority
rather than the exercise of authority. In comparison to
a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and Saddam
Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill
hundreds of thousands, I found more and deadlier
upheavals like the Time of Troubles, the Chinese Civil
War, and the Mexican Revolution where no one
exercised enough control to stop the death of millions.
2.
The world is very disorganized. Power structures tend
to be informal and temporary, and many of the big
names in this book (for example, Stalin, Cromwell,
Tamerlane, Caesar) exercised supreme authority
without holding a regular job in the government. Most
wars don’t start neatly with declarations and
mobilizations and end with surrenders and treaties.
They tend to build up from escalating incidents of
violence, fizzle out when everyone is too exhausted to
continue, and are followed by unpredictable
aftershocks. Soldiers and nations happily change sides
in the middle of wars, sometimes in the middle of
battles. Most nations are not as neatly delineated as
you might expect. In fact, some nations at war (I call
them quantum states) don’t quite exist and don’t
quite not exist; instead they hover in limbo until
somebody wins the war and decides their fate, which
is then retroactively applied to earlier versions of the
nation.
3.
War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the
army is usually the safest place to be during a war.
Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men,
and they get the first choice of food and medical care.
Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically
massacred, they are usually robbed, evicted, or left to
starve; however, their stories are usually left untold.
Most military histories skim lightly over the massive
suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in
the middle, even though theirs is the most common
experience of war.b
The Ascent of Manslaughter
Where do we start? People have been killing each
other ever since they came down from the trees, and I
wouldn’t be surprised to find bodies stashed up in the
branches as well. Some of the earliest human bones
show fractures that must have come from weapons.
Early inscriptions boast of thousands of enemies
slaughtered. The oldest holy books record battles in
which the followers of one angry god smite the followers
of some other angry god; however, the small tribes and
villages caught in these ancient wars didn’t have enough
potential victims to be killed on a scale that could
compare with today. It took many centuries of human
history before people were gathered in large enough
populations to be killed by the hundreds of thousands,
so the earliest of history’s one hundred worst atrocities
didn’t occur until the Persians built an empire that
spanned the known world.
a
. “The evil that men do lives after them; The good
is oft interred with their bones.” (William Shakespeare,
Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene II)
b
. For example, standard reference works such as
The World Almanac and Wikipedia meticulously list the
number of American soldiers, sailors, and marines killed
in each of America’s wars, while ignoring civilian deaths
among merchant seamen, passengers, refugees,
runaway slaves, and, of course, Indians and settlers
along the frontier.
MAO ZEDONG
Death toll: 40 million
Rank: 2
Type: Communist dictator
Time frame: 1949–76
Location: China
Broad dividing line: new vs. old
Major state participant: People’s Republic of China
Who usually gets the most blame: Mao personally
and Communism generally
Another damn: insane people’s republic
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
really? only 40 million and rank 2? seems the author wasn't that confident and well researched...if mao's rank is at no.2, then who the fuck dares to claim to be the champ, oh, c'mon！
TRADITIONAL HISTORY IS ABOUT KINGS AND ARMIES
RATHER THAN PEOPLE. Empires rose, empires fell,
entire populations were enslaved or annihilated, and no
one seemed to think there was anything wrong with it.
Because of this lack of curiosity among traditional
scholars about the human cost of historical
extravaganzas, a curious person had nowhere to go to
answer such basic questions as whether the twentieth
century was really the most violent in history or whether
religion, nationalism, anarchy, Communism, or monarchy
killed the most people.
During the past decade, though, historians and
laypeople alike have gone to the sprawling website of a
guy on the Internet, Matthew White—self-described
atrocitologist, necrometrician, and quantifier of
hemoclysms. White is a representative of that noble and
underappreciated profession, the librarian, and he has
compiled the most comprehensive, disinterested, and
statistically nuanced estimates available of the death tolls
of history’s major catastrophes. In Atrocitology, White
now combines his numerical savvy with the skills of a
good storyteller to present a new history of civilization, a
history whose protagonists are not great emperors but
their unsung victims—millions and millions and millions of
them.
White writes with a light touch and a dark wit that
belies a serious moral purpose. His scorn is directed at
the stupidity and callousness of history’s great leaders,
at the statistical innumeracy and historical ignorance of
various ideologues and propagandists, and at the
indifference of traditional history to the magnitude of
human suffering behind momentous events.
—Steven Pinker
INTRODUCTION
NO ONE LIKES STATISTICS AS MUCH AS I DO. I
MEAN THAT LITERALLY. I CAN never find anyone who
wants to listen to me recite statistics.
Well, there is one exception. For several years, I’ve
maintained the Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century,
a history website on which, among other things, I’ve
analyzed statistics of changing literacy, urban populations,
casualties of war, industrial workforce, population density,
and infant mortality. Of those, the numbers that people
want to argue about are casualties.
Boy do they want to argue.
From the moment I first posted a tentative list of the
twenty-five largest cities in 1900, the twenty bloodiest
wars, and the one hundred most important artworks of
the twentieth century, I was swamped by e-mails
wondering how, why, and where I got my casualty
statistics. And why isn’t this other atrocity listed? And
which country killed the most? Which ideology? And just
who the hell do I think I am, accusing the Turks of
doing such things?
After many years of this, my website has become a
major clearinghouse for body counts, so believe me
when I say that I have heard every debate on the
subject. Let’s get something out of the way right now.
Everything you are about to read is disputed. There is
no point in loading the narrative with every “supposedly”
or “allegedly” or “according to some sources” that it
deserves. Nor will I make you slog through every
alternative version of events that has ever been
suggested.
There is no atrocity in history that every person in the
world agrees on. Someone somewhere will deny it ever
happened, and someone somewhere will insist it did. For
example, I am convinced that the Holocaust happened,
but that Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents did not. It
would be easy to find people who disagree with me on
both.
Atrocitology is at the center of most major historical
disputes. People don’t argue about nice history. They
argue about who killed whose grandfather. They try to
draw lessons from the past and speculate about who is
the most Hitleresque politician coming over the horizon.
On a particularly contentious topic, two historians from
the opposite poles of politics can cover the same ground
yet appear to be discussing two entirely different planets.
Sometimes you can’t find any overlap in the narratives,
and it becomes nearly impossible to fuse them into a
seamless middle ground. All I can say is that I have
tried to follow the consensus of scholars, but when I
support a minority view, I will tell you so.
Most people writing a book about history’s worst
atrocities would describe the “One Hundred Worst Things
I Can Recall at the Moment.” They would include the
Holocaust, slavery, 9/11, Wounded Knee, Jeffrey
Dahmer, Hiroshima, Jack the Ripper, the Iraq War, the
Kennedy assassination, Pickett’s Charge, and so on.
Unfortunately, just brainstorming a list like that will
usually reflect an author’s biases rather than a proper
historical balance. That particular list makes it look like
almost everything bad in history was done either to or
by Americans rather recently, which implies that
Americans are intrinsically, cosmically more important
than anyone else.
Other lists might make it seem like everything bad can
be associated with one root cause (resources, racism,
religion, for example), one culture (Communists, the
West, Muslims), or one method (war, exploitation,
taxation). Most people acquire their knowledge of
atrocities haphazardly—a TV documentary, a few movies,
a political website, a tourist brochure, and that angry
man at the end of the bar—and then proceed to make
judgments about the world based on those few
examples. I’m hoping to offer a broader and more
balanced range of examples to use when arguing about
history.
To be fair to all sides, I have carefully selected one
hundred events with the largest man-made death tolls,
regardless of who was involved or why they did it. To
emphasize the statistical basis of this list, I devote more
space to describing the deadliest events, while quickly
summarizing the lesser events. A death toll of several
million gets several pages, while a death toll of a few
hundred thousand gets a few paragraphs. The deadliest
event gets the longest chapter.
One of the standard ways to skew the data is to
decide up front that certain kinds of killing are worse
than others, so only those are counted. Gassing ethnic
minorities is worse than bombing cities, which is just as
bad as shooting prisoners of war, which is worse than
machine-gunning enemy troops, which is better than
plundering colonial natives, so massacres and famines
are counted but not air raids and battles. Or maybe it’s
the other way around. In any case, my philosophy is
that I wouldn’t want to die in any of these ways, so I
count all killings, regardless of how they happened or to
whom.
You might wonder how I can possibly know the
number who died in an atrocity. After all, wars are
messy and confusing, and people can easily disappear
without a trace. The participants happily lie about
numbers in order to look brave, noble, or tragic.
Reporters and historians can be biased or gullible.
The best answer would vary on a case-by-case basis,
but the short answer is money. Even if a general is
reluctant to tell the newspapers how many men he lost
in a bungled offensive, he still has to tell the
accountants to drop 4,000 men from the payroll. Even if
a dictator tries to hide how many civilians died in a
massive resettlement, his finance minister will still note
the disappearance of 100,000 taxpayers. A customs
official at the harbor will be collecting duties on each
cargo of new slaves, and someone has to pay to have
the bodies carted away after every massacre. Head
counts (and by extension, body counts) are not just an
academic exercise; they have been an important part of
government financing for centuries.
Obviously these death tolls have a significant margin of
error, but a list of history’s one hundred biggest body
counts is not entirely guesswork. For one thing, big
events leave big footprints. Even though no one will
ever know exactly how many Inca or Romans died in
the fall of their civilizations, histories describe big battles
and massacres, and archaeological excavations suggest a
massive decline of the population. These events killed a
lot of people even if “a lot” can’t be defined precisely.
At the top of the scale, a million here and a million
there barely moves an event’s rank a couple of notches
along the list. Some people would disagree with my
estimate that Stalin killed 20 million people, but even if
you claim (as some do) that he killed 50 million, that
would move him from Number 6 to Number 2. On the
other hand, defending Stalin by claiming (as others do)
that he killed a mere 3 million will drop him down to
only Number 29, so for my purposes, there’s not much
point in arguing about the exact number. Stalin will be
on my list, regardless.
At the same time, some events won’t reach the lower
threshold no matter how much we dispute the precise
numbers. An exact body count is hard to come by for
Castro’s regime in Cuba, but no one has ever
suggested that he killed the hundreds of thousands
necessary to be considered for a slot on my list. Many
infamous brutes such as François “Papa Doc” Duvalier,
Vlad the Impaler, Caligula, and Augusto Pinochet easily
fall short, as do many well-known conflicts, such as the
Arab-Israeli wars and the Anglo-Boer War.
Some people would bring more cleverness to this task
than I do. They might track the world’s worst multicide
back to some distant root cause and declare that to be
the most horrible thing people ever did. They might
blame influential people for all of the evil done by those
who followed them. They would blame Jesus for the
Crusades, Darwin for the Holocaust, Marx for the Gulag,
and Marco Polo for the destruction of the Aztecs.
Unfortunately this approach ignores the nature of
historical causality. Yes, you can take an event (let’s
say, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks) and
track back through the chain of cause and effect to
show how this is the natural result of, say, the 1953
coup against the prime minister of Iran, but you can
just as easily track that same event back to the First
World War, the Wright brothers, D. B. Cooper,
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Henry Ford, the Russian
conquest of Turkistan, Levittown, the founding of Yale
University, Elisha Otis, the Holocaust, and the opening of
the Erie Canal. So many threads of causality feed into
any individual event that you can usually find a way to
connect any two things you want.
Aside from morbid fascination, is there any reason to
know the one hundred highest body counts of history?
Four reasons come to mind:
First, things that happen to a lot of people are usually
more important than things that happen to only a few
people. If I’m in bed with the flu, no one cares, but if
half of the city is stricken with the flu, it’s a medical
emergency. If I lose my job, that’s my bad luck; if
thousands of people lose their jobs, the economy
crashes. A few murders a week is business as usual in
a big city police department; twenty murders a day is a
civil war.
Second, killing a person is the most you can do to
him. It affects him more than teaching him, robbing him,
healing him, hiring him, marrying him, or imprisoning
him—for the simple reason that death is the most
complete and permanent change you can inflict. A killer
can easily undo the work of a teacher or a doctor, but
neither a doctor nor a teacher can undo the work of a
killer.a
Therefore, just by default, my one hundred multicides
had a maximum impact on an enormous number of
people. Without too much debate, I can easily label
these to be among history’s most significant events.
You may be tempted to dismiss the impact of these
events as solely negative, but that’s an artificial
distinction. Destruction and creation are intimately
intertwined. The fall of the Roman Empire cleared the
way for medieval Europe. The Second World War
created the Cold War and democratic regimes in
Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Napoleonic Wars inspired
works by Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, and Goya. I’m not
saying that the 1812 Overture was worth the half-million
lives lost in the Russian Campaign, morally speaking. I’m
just saying that as a plain historical fact, there would be
no jazz, gospel, or rock and roll without slavery, and
everyone born in the postwar Baby Boom of 1946–64
owes their existence to World War II.
A third reason to consider is that we sometimes forget
the human impact of historic events. Yes, these things
happened a long time ago, and all of those people
would be dead now anyway, but there comes a point
where we have to realize that a clash of cultures did
more than blend cuisines, vocabularies, and architectural
styles. It also caused a lot of very personal suffering.
The fourth and certainly most practical reason to
gather body counts is for risk assessment and problem
solving. If we study history to avoid repeating the
mistakes of the past, it helps to know what those
mistakes were, and that includes all of the mistakes, not
just the ones that support certain pet ideas. It’s easy to
solve the problem of human violence if we focus only on
the seven atrocities that prove our point, but a list of
the hundred worst presents more of a challenge. A
person’s grand unified theory of human violence should
explain most of the multicides on this list or else he
might need to reconsider. In fact, the next time
somebody declares that he knows the cause of or
solution to human violence, you can probably open this
book at random and immediately find an event that is
not explained by his theory.
Despite my skepticism about any common thread
running through all one hundred atrocities, I still found
some interesting tendencies. Let me share with you the
three biggest lessons I learned while working on this list:
1.
Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these
multicides result from the breakdown of authority
rather than the exercise of authority. In comparison to
a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and Saddam
Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill
hundreds of thousands, I found more and deadlier
upheavals like the Time of Troubles, the Chinese Civil
War, and the Mexican Revolution where no one
exercised enough control to stop the death of millions.
2.
The world is very disorganized. Power structures tend
to be informal and temporary, and many of the big
names in this book (for example, Stalin, Cromwell,
Tamerlane, Caesar) exercised supreme authority
without holding a regular job in the government. Most
wars don’t start neatly with declarations and
mobilizations and end with surrenders and treaties.
They tend to build up from escalating incidents of
violence, fizzle out when everyone is too exhausted to
continue, and are followed by unpredictable
aftershocks. Soldiers and nations happily change sides
in the middle of wars, sometimes in the middle of
battles. Most nations are not as neatly delineated as
you might expect. In fact, some nations at war (I call
them quantum states) don’t quite exist and don’t
quite not exist; instead they hover in limbo until
somebody wins the war and decides their fate, which
is then retroactively applied to earlier versions of the
nation.
3.
War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the
army is usually the safest place to be during a war.
Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men,
and they get the first choice of food and medical care.
Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically
massacred, they are usually robbed, evicted, or left to
starve; however, their stories are usually left untold.
Most military histories skim lightly over the massive
suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in
the middle, even though theirs is the most common
experience of war.b
The Ascent of Manslaughter
Where do we start? People have been killing each
other ever since they came down from the trees, and I
wouldn’t be surprised to find bodies stashed up in the
branches as well. Some of the earliest human bones
show fractures that must have come from weapons.
Early inscriptions boast of thousands of enemies
slaughtered. The oldest holy books record battles in
which the followers of one angry god smite the followers
of some other angry god; however, the small tribes and
villages caught in these ancient wars didn’t have enough
potential victims to be killed on a scale that could
compare with today. It took many centuries of human
history before people were gathered in large enough
populations to be killed by the hundreds of thousands,
so the earliest of history’s one hundred worst atrocities
didn’t occur until the Persians built an empire that
spanned the known world.
a
. “The evil that men do lives after them; The good
is oft interred with their bones.” (William Shakespeare,
Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene II)
b
. For example, standard reference works such as
The World Almanac and Wikipedia meticulously list the
number of American soldiers, sailors, and marines killed
in each of America’s wars, while ignoring civilian deaths
among merchant seamen, passengers, refugees,
runaway slaves, and, of course, Indians and settlers
along the frontier.
MAO ZEDONG
Death toll: 40 million
Rank: 2
Type: Communist dictator
Time frame: 1949–76
Location: China
Broad dividing line: new vs. old
Major state participant: People’s Republic of China
Who usually gets the most blame: Mao personally
and Communism generally
Another damn: insane people’s republic
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
really? only 40 million and rank 2? seems the author wasn't that confident and well researched...if mao's rank is at no.2, then who the fuck dares to claim to be the champ, oh, c'mon！
January 25, 2012
This book had a good chance of being dry and rambling, given the subject matter, but the author's tone and way of explaining each event kept me reading. White does not pin down a single cause for all of the horrible things in his great big book, which I liked. It is a bad historian that does that; a good historian recognizes that the world doesn't function in terms of black and white.
August 17, 2014
Essentially what you have hear is a concise yet surprisingly richly detailed, informative and intriguing encyclopaedia of the last three thousand years as told through a chronological rundown of events ranked by body count.
When I first picked this book up I was under the misunderstanding that it would be a collection of the most depraved examples of man's inhumanity towards their fellow man (or woman). Rather than basing his countdown of the most inhumane acts based on perceived depravity, cruelty or such like, the author neatly and sagely sidesteps such moralising and instead bases his compilation on the various acts throughout history with the highest body counts - usually with around 100,000 as a minimum.
This way there is no procrastinating on yet more discussions of various serial killers or modern terrorist attacks. As grievous as these acts undeniably are, in terms of blood shed they pale into insignificance in comparison to say any of the Punic Wars or Josef Stalin's reign of terror.
Another element of this book that is worthy of praise is the fact that although each section is usually around four sides, the level of detail and engaging way it is written, prevents this being at all a detrimental affair, actually giving you all the incentive and more you could want for looking deeper into certain events in history.
Obviously with a book covering a few thousand years there's only so much depth the author could go into for each "achievement" listed but even then, it doesn't feel like you're being given the absolute bare bones but enough to get your brain ticking over and cover the key points.
There are more than a few instances where there are certain niggles or wrinkles that seem to differ from other historical accounts, probably to satisfy the author's own political beliefs - such as saying that the population of Palestine in 1948 was 2 million, utterly glossing over the heavy state sponsored immigration of Zionist jews and flee into exile of millions of Palestinian Arabs, and not a single mention of Israel's ethnic cleansing of entire villages, massacres and war of attrition which gets dressed up as a 'war of independence'. For a book on bloodshed and inhumanity towards our fellow humans, there's a pretty glaring oversight not only dodging mentioning the more credible population figures but choosing to ignore the bloodshed and partisan violence that accompanied and enabled that 'independence'. For that reason it gets downgraded from a 4/5 to a 3, as such notable instances of bias kind of ruined the book for me.
For any lover of history or historical fiction, particularly the manly stuff - probably not those lovers of all that twee medieval romance guff - should find plenty to enjoy in this book.
Due to the extreme length of this book - almost 700 pages - I wouldn't recommend trying to read it all the way through though as you'll be there for quite some time. Far better to dip in and out if you want to stay conscious.
When I first picked this book up I was under the misunderstanding that it would be a collection of the most depraved examples of man's inhumanity towards their fellow man (or woman). Rather than basing his countdown of the most inhumane acts based on perceived depravity, cruelty or such like, the author neatly and sagely sidesteps such moralising and instead bases his compilation on the various acts throughout history with the highest body counts - usually with around 100,000 as a minimum.
This way there is no procrastinating on yet more discussions of various serial killers or modern terrorist attacks. As grievous as these acts undeniably are, in terms of blood shed they pale into insignificance in comparison to say any of the Punic Wars or Josef Stalin's reign of terror.
Another element of this book that is worthy of praise is the fact that although each section is usually around four sides, the level of detail and engaging way it is written, prevents this being at all a detrimental affair, actually giving you all the incentive and more you could want for looking deeper into certain events in history.
Obviously with a book covering a few thousand years there's only so much depth the author could go into for each "achievement" listed but even then, it doesn't feel like you're being given the absolute bare bones but enough to get your brain ticking over and cover the key points.
There are more than a few instances where there are certain niggles or wrinkles that seem to differ from other historical accounts, probably to satisfy the author's own political beliefs - such as saying that the population of Palestine in 1948 was 2 million, utterly glossing over the heavy state sponsored immigration of Zionist jews and flee into exile of millions of Palestinian Arabs, and not a single mention of Israel's ethnic cleansing of entire villages, massacres and war of attrition which gets dressed up as a 'war of independence'. For a book on bloodshed and inhumanity towards our fellow humans, there's a pretty glaring oversight not only dodging mentioning the more credible population figures but choosing to ignore the bloodshed and partisan violence that accompanied and enabled that 'independence'. For that reason it gets downgraded from a 4/5 to a 3, as such notable instances of bias kind of ruined the book for me.
For any lover of history or historical fiction, particularly the manly stuff - probably not those lovers of all that twee medieval romance guff - should find plenty to enjoy in this book.
Due to the extreme length of this book - almost 700 pages - I wouldn't recommend trying to read it all the way through though as you'll be there for quite some time. Far better to dip in and out if you want to stay conscious.
March 22, 2018
Reading with hopes of an article on the value of statistics in understanding human atrocity--especially for those (like me) who tend to favour personal stories and even fictionalized accounts over this kind of data. We'll see what develops...
(Also: this is a whopper of a book, and while I don't often read eBooks, this one is helpful to have in this format; scrolling and searching is much easier).
Update: ended up writing a post on this topic here: http://thinkchristian.net/the-good-th...
(Also: this is a whopper of a book, and while I don't often read eBooks, this one is helpful to have in this format; scrolling and searching is much easier).
Update: ended up writing a post on this topic here: http://thinkchristian.net/the-good-th...
June 27, 2017
After reading some other reviews, and considering the very sensational cover and title of this book, I was afraid it would be tasteless and of limited scientific value. I was pleasantly surprised that the humor was snarky, but not in juvenile, and that the research was scholarly in the good sense of the term. This is an excellent history book and a must-read for anyone seriously interested in democides. The scope of it is enormous, yet the descriptions feel complete. Even comparatively minor events, like the actions of John Rabe, have occasionally been mentioned. For a book that looks like the worst of popular history, there's a lot of historical background information and surprisingly few descriptions of particularly brutal murders (fewer than in Death by Government). Unlike certain other authors, White goes to great lengths to make his book understandable for people that don't know every dynasty in Europe and cannot pinpoint the exact borders of 17th century Bohemia on a map. Of course, with the tons of data that went into this, it can still be overwhelming at times if you have no prior knowledge of an event.
There are some things that irked me about this book. For example, on the chapter about the famines in India and Bengal, he mentions the free market several times, when his own descriptions make it clear that there was nothing "free" about the market at the time. When the government blocks or taxes imports and exports, takes control of the infrastructure and creates legal monopolies, we're talking about war socialism or mercantilism, not capitalism. That's simply the wrong word for it.
His idea on anti-communist theories are even more confused. He correctly concludes from the historical record that communism is not desirable. The democides, famines and wars speak a clear language, and he says as much. His claims that theoretical arguments against communism should not be trusted, or are superfluous, are completely false, however. That they can be trusted can be seen when you compare the predictions made by opponents of communism with the results of communism when it was implemented. Hayek predicted the tendency of regimes with a planned economy to isolate themselves and to try and make people equal. That's what we saw in every planned economy that took itself serious enough, before and after Hayeks prediction. Mises foresaw that abolishing price signals will lead to economic chaos and shortages, even before such policies were ever implemented, and we saw just that, too, in famine after famine. Most impressive is the little book Pictures of the Socialistic Future, which predicted just about every typical feature of communist countries over twenty years before the Russian Revolutions. That the communist regimes survived for a while does not prove these predictions wrong, as no regime ever went all the way and abolished all price signals permanently or tried to plan every aspect of production. The ones that went too far in that direction suffered horribly for it. The enormous industrial capacity of communist countries, likewise, doesn't prove men like Mises wrong, least of all because it's only half true. Russia and China managed to keep up with the West by giving intensive care to their industrial sector, while the West increasingly treated it like a step child. Seeing as Russia imported much of its industrial equipment at various times, I would also say that price signals were still effective to a degree. When theory and practice conform to such a degree, it's generally silly to deride one or the other.
White also made a small comment on how the Nazis weren't socialists any more than the North Koreans are democratic. His arguments on that point are wrong. The Nazis weren't just trying to catch the working class with their anti-capitalist rhetoric, they were very sincere about it. At multiple occasions did Hitler and his underlings make remarks to the effect that capital and private property had to serve the community and not just a privileged few. Their policies reflected this, what with the increasing control of private property by the state and its commissioners, and the confiscation of companies and capital that wasn't used to their liking. As Hayek noted in his book The Road to Serfdom, many Nazi intellectuals and leaders also started out as orthodox Marxists. All in all, I think the "Socialist" part of the name is deserved.
Even with these little problems, I'm giving this book a five star rating. A good intellectual challenge is a healthy thing, and I think Atrocitology will be a very good challenge to anyone with a strong political opinion. He's not using blatant lies and sophistry, he draws all his conclusions from an honest interpretation of generally reliable historical data. Whether you find that he's wrong or not, you will most likely be better off for considering his perspective.
There are some things that irked me about this book. For example, on the chapter about the famines in India and Bengal, he mentions the free market several times, when his own descriptions make it clear that there was nothing "free" about the market at the time. When the government blocks or taxes imports and exports, takes control of the infrastructure and creates legal monopolies, we're talking about war socialism or mercantilism, not capitalism. That's simply the wrong word for it.
His idea on anti-communist theories are even more confused. He correctly concludes from the historical record that communism is not desirable. The democides, famines and wars speak a clear language, and he says as much. His claims that theoretical arguments against communism should not be trusted, or are superfluous, are completely false, however. That they can be trusted can be seen when you compare the predictions made by opponents of communism with the results of communism when it was implemented. Hayek predicted the tendency of regimes with a planned economy to isolate themselves and to try and make people equal. That's what we saw in every planned economy that took itself serious enough, before and after Hayeks prediction. Mises foresaw that abolishing price signals will lead to economic chaos and shortages, even before such policies were ever implemented, and we saw just that, too, in famine after famine. Most impressive is the little book Pictures of the Socialistic Future, which predicted just about every typical feature of communist countries over twenty years before the Russian Revolutions. That the communist regimes survived for a while does not prove these predictions wrong, as no regime ever went all the way and abolished all price signals permanently or tried to plan every aspect of production. The ones that went too far in that direction suffered horribly for it. The enormous industrial capacity of communist countries, likewise, doesn't prove men like Mises wrong, least of all because it's only half true. Russia and China managed to keep up with the West by giving intensive care to their industrial sector, while the West increasingly treated it like a step child. Seeing as Russia imported much of its industrial equipment at various times, I would also say that price signals were still effective to a degree. When theory and practice conform to such a degree, it's generally silly to deride one or the other.
White also made a small comment on how the Nazis weren't socialists any more than the North Koreans are democratic. His arguments on that point are wrong. The Nazis weren't just trying to catch the working class with their anti-capitalist rhetoric, they were very sincere about it. At multiple occasions did Hitler and his underlings make remarks to the effect that capital and private property had to serve the community and not just a privileged few. Their policies reflected this, what with the increasing control of private property by the state and its commissioners, and the confiscation of companies and capital that wasn't used to their liking. As Hayek noted in his book The Road to Serfdom, many Nazi intellectuals and leaders also started out as orthodox Marxists. All in all, I think the "Socialist" part of the name is deserved.
Even with these little problems, I'm giving this book a five star rating. A good intellectual challenge is a healthy thing, and I think Atrocitology will be a very good challenge to anyone with a strong political opinion. He's not using blatant lies and sophistry, he draws all his conclusions from an honest interpretation of generally reliable historical data. Whether you find that he's wrong or not, you will most likely be better off for considering his perspective.
August 17, 2021
This book was given to me by a coworker to read right after I finished the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, but I needed a break from being exposed to the absolute horror that is mankind, so I read some more lightweight books before gritting my teeth and bearing down on this one.
This book is awful.
Humans are awful.
I will never understand how people can say that humanity is good. Anyone who says that humans are inherently good is willfully ignoring the evidence to the contrary. Humans are awful. We kill each other, slaughter each other, humiliate each other, grind each other to dust through hard labor, rape, and starvation, and for what? In the name of...nothing. Half of the atrocities in this book were perpetuated on the basis of mistakes. The other half on sheer disdain for other humans. It's sickening.
It was sickening to see that cannibalism is far more common than I thought it was. I was shocked when I saw pictures of bodies being sold for food in the Soviet Union during the famine of Ukraine. But then I read this book and saw that time after time in other markets it's been the same. I suppose that in the grips of a famine people will do anything that they can in order to survive, and I don't see anything particularly wrong with eating the body of someone who has already died. But, that's not what he was talking about. He talked about people actively butchering living, screaming people to eat them. It happened. Many times. The Aztecs slaughtered and ate millions of people. How worthless would other humans have to be in your eyes in order to do that?
I learned more than I ever wanted to know about recent history. I learned that I was shockingly ignorant about what has happened in the world, especially the third world. I didn't know how many genocides have happened in the middle east, southeast Asia or the continent of Africa. I knew about Cambodia, China, North Korea, and Russia, but had never heard of the Armenian Genocide, or the Rwandan Genocide, or the morass that is the Congo. I didn't know about what went down in the Vietnam war, or that the U.S. helped Iran gain its current power. I had heard such things but mostly dismissed them as political mongering. Well, now I know that I need to go read more about these events.
Probably the major thing that I walked away with from this book is that no one's hands are clean. Basically every nation currently extant has participated in or looked away from one or more mass killing event. I got into a discussion with someone a few months ago, before reading this book, and they equated the Crusades with Genghis Khan. ..... ...... I am not saying that the Crusades were good! They weren't! But comparing the deaths of 3 million people across two hundred years to 40 million dead in 27 years thanks to the deeds of one man?!?! They are incomparable! Or comparing the Crusades to the Cultural Revolution?!? Why don't we compare the Gladiatorial Games, or the multicides of Peter the Great, or the Korean war to the Cultural Revolution? Just as many people died in those three as died in the Crusades, that makes it a legitimate comparison, right? It seems like when people are playing the 'what about' game they are trying to defend some person that they like or put down someone they dislike. Don't they see that what they are doing is essentially just watered-down tribalism? Trying to make the guy you are defending sound better by pointing out that the other guy did the same thing or worse doesn't make sense when we are talking about the deaths of millions of people.
He ended the book with a quote that really made me want to shove my fist into the sky in agreement. He said "We all hate Hitler. It doesn't take courage to denounce Hitler. He's safely gone and completely discredited. It takes more courage to denounce someone who has mainstream admirers, like Ataturk, Arafat, Mao Zedong, or Robert E. Lee." He is completely correct here. It's fine to sit in our armchairs discussing the horrors of Hitler and King Leopold and Pol Pot. They are safely dead, and out of power. But what about the warlords of Pakistan? What about the Chinese government that is today running on the forced labor of political dissidents? What about North Korea where entire families are disappeared because one of their second-cousins-twice-removed made a joke about the 'Eternal Leader'? What about Venezuela? What about the religious cleansing of Christians in the Middle East and Africa? What about Myanmar?
What about the millions of children around the globe that aren't even allowed to draw their first breath?
Whenever human life is ripped away from innocents, it should be stood against, even if it's not politically popular.
This book is awful.
Humans are awful.
I will never understand how people can say that humanity is good. Anyone who says that humans are inherently good is willfully ignoring the evidence to the contrary. Humans are awful. We kill each other, slaughter each other, humiliate each other, grind each other to dust through hard labor, rape, and starvation, and for what? In the name of...nothing. Half of the atrocities in this book were perpetuated on the basis of mistakes. The other half on sheer disdain for other humans. It's sickening.
It was sickening to see that cannibalism is far more common than I thought it was. I was shocked when I saw pictures of bodies being sold for food in the Soviet Union during the famine of Ukraine. But then I read this book and saw that time after time in other markets it's been the same. I suppose that in the grips of a famine people will do anything that they can in order to survive, and I don't see anything particularly wrong with eating the body of someone who has already died. But, that's not what he was talking about. He talked about people actively butchering living, screaming people to eat them. It happened. Many times. The Aztecs slaughtered and ate millions of people. How worthless would other humans have to be in your eyes in order to do that?
I learned more than I ever wanted to know about recent history. I learned that I was shockingly ignorant about what has happened in the world, especially the third world. I didn't know how many genocides have happened in the middle east, southeast Asia or the continent of Africa. I knew about Cambodia, China, North Korea, and Russia, but had never heard of the Armenian Genocide, or the Rwandan Genocide, or the morass that is the Congo. I didn't know about what went down in the Vietnam war, or that the U.S. helped Iran gain its current power. I had heard such things but mostly dismissed them as political mongering. Well, now I know that I need to go read more about these events.
Probably the major thing that I walked away with from this book is that no one's hands are clean. Basically every nation currently extant has participated in or looked away from one or more mass killing event. I got into a discussion with someone a few months ago, before reading this book, and they equated the Crusades with Genghis Khan. ..... ...... I am not saying that the Crusades were good! They weren't! But comparing the deaths of 3 million people across two hundred years to 40 million dead in 27 years thanks to the deeds of one man?!?! They are incomparable! Or comparing the Crusades to the Cultural Revolution?!? Why don't we compare the Gladiatorial Games, or the multicides of Peter the Great, or the Korean war to the Cultural Revolution? Just as many people died in those three as died in the Crusades, that makes it a legitimate comparison, right? It seems like when people are playing the 'what about' game they are trying to defend some person that they like or put down someone they dislike. Don't they see that what they are doing is essentially just watered-down tribalism? Trying to make the guy you are defending sound better by pointing out that the other guy did the same thing or worse doesn't make sense when we are talking about the deaths of millions of people.
He ended the book with a quote that really made me want to shove my fist into the sky in agreement. He said "We all hate Hitler. It doesn't take courage to denounce Hitler. He's safely gone and completely discredited. It takes more courage to denounce someone who has mainstream admirers, like Ataturk, Arafat, Mao Zedong, or Robert E. Lee." He is completely correct here. It's fine to sit in our armchairs discussing the horrors of Hitler and King Leopold and Pol Pot. They are safely dead, and out of power. But what about the warlords of Pakistan? What about the Chinese government that is today running on the forced labor of political dissidents? What about North Korea where entire families are disappeared because one of their second-cousins-twice-removed made a joke about the 'Eternal Leader'? What about Venezuela? What about the religious cleansing of Christians in the Middle East and Africa? What about Myanmar?
What about the millions of children around the globe that aren't even allowed to draw their first breath?
Whenever human life is ripped away from innocents, it should be stood against, even if it's not politically popular.
December 16, 2014
This is quite possibly the most important history book I've ever read.
White has a particular perspective: that the human cost of human actions should be quantified and studied thoroughly. This book uses a systematic approach to provide an overview of human events which does not ignore any of the ugliness in history. His use of a simple definition and exquisite sourcing give the reader quite a bit to digest - from the Punic wars to the Congolese civil war to the Three Kingdoms to the Atlantic slave trade - presented in a chronological manner rather than by region.
As all historians do, he has some decisions to make: does the Holocaust stand alone or as part of World War II (the latter)? Do the British-caused famines make it in? (India yes, Ireland no). In all of the cases, he meticulously sources the range of estimates for body count and provides a rationale for his decisions (along with notes to check against), and he provides analysis of what these things have in common (less than you might have thought).
I think this should become a textbook: it is refreshingly free of ideology and is a wide-enough survey that it can provide the spine of a world history class. It's easy to read, and divided into digestible chunks.
This is excellent, highly recommended, and easily one of the better nonfiction books I've read in my life.
White has a particular perspective: that the human cost of human actions should be quantified and studied thoroughly. This book uses a systematic approach to provide an overview of human events which does not ignore any of the ugliness in history. His use of a simple definition and exquisite sourcing give the reader quite a bit to digest - from the Punic wars to the Congolese civil war to the Three Kingdoms to the Atlantic slave trade - presented in a chronological manner rather than by region.
As all historians do, he has some decisions to make: does the Holocaust stand alone or as part of World War II (the latter)? Do the British-caused famines make it in? (India yes, Ireland no). In all of the cases, he meticulously sources the range of estimates for body count and provides a rationale for his decisions (along with notes to check against), and he provides analysis of what these things have in common (less than you might have thought).
I think this should become a textbook: it is refreshingly free of ideology and is a wide-enough survey that it can provide the spine of a world history class. It's easy to read, and divided into digestible chunks.
This is excellent, highly recommended, and easily one of the better nonfiction books I've read in my life.
June 22, 2012
For people who appreciate military history and the great battles waged here on Planet Earth, this is probably going to entertain you, as it did me. The personalities, settings, and sheer number of those involved with these 100 atrocities make for some fantastic non-fiction reading. However, be warned that the author does not hold back in describing some intensely gruesome scenarios -- millions of wasted souls fly out of these pages. It got me down a bit, close to the end of the book, reading about these record-holding "multicides," as the author refers to them.
Most memorable chapter: Timur the Lame (Tamerlane) and his lofty piles of human skulls.
Most memorable chapter: Timur the Lame (Tamerlane) and his lofty piles of human skulls.
April 17, 2012
This is a surprisingly fascinating examination of the dark side of human history- the ways in which large numbers of humans die at the hands of other humans. We learn among other things that 3 million or more people died in the Roman gladiatorial games over some 700 years. Who knew? White may not be a Harvard professor, but he is clearly a bright man who has done a lot of research and thought deeply. It is well worth reading. This turns out to NOT be a freak show or a list of horrors- it is an honest effort to understand how and why human nature can veer into the dark areas of genocide, war, and forced starvation.
Currently reading
April 3, 2012So far so good...some best lines I read so far:
"While fighting over land is quite common, the land in dispute usually provides some practical resource - minerals, crops, harbors, farms, strategic location, exploitable labor, or sheer size. Palestine has none of these. The sole resource of the Holy Land is heritage. There's no gold, no oil, very little fertile land, and few natives, nothing but sacred sites, so in essence, the Crusades killed 3 million people in a fight to control the tourist trade." - p.106, Matthew White.
"While fighting over land is quite common, the land in dispute usually provides some practical resource - minerals, crops, harbors, farms, strategic location, exploitable labor, or sheer size. Palestine has none of these. The sole resource of the Holy Land is heritage. There's no gold, no oil, very little fertile land, and few natives, nothing but sacred sites, so in essence, the Crusades killed 3 million people in a fight to control the tourist trade." - p.106, Matthew White.
March 9, 2012
This guy writes with so little emotion about world events, it's hilarious. For example, he describes the Crusades as a fight to control the tourist trade. Also, it's comical how easily humanity resorts cannibalism. Loved it.
February 20, 2012
This was an amazing book. I learned so many things about history that I never learned in school. Basically anything having to do with African or Asian history was news to me. The writing was also quite witty for being about horrible atrocities.
April 21, 2012
I like lists, I like
History. This book combines
Them exhaustively.
History. This book combines
Them exhaustively.
October 26, 2019
It is a review (ranked) of the atrocities of history. Megadeaths caused by humanity to other parts of humanity. As you can tell by the amount of time I took to read the book, it's better dipped into than read straight through. He goes into detail on his methodology as well, both in determining how to delineate horrible things, and how he attempts to come up with death numbers. All in all, interesting -- if not exactly the thing you want to read when you despair at humanity.
March 2, 2020
Well researched and written. Wasn't very apparent in the title, I must admit. Enough details in the snippets to satisfy a history buff, but not too much to overwhelm a casual reader. You get a satisfying overview of world history, albeit only of atrocities. Occasionally, you get a trite comment, but I can let that pass in view of the overall satisfaction from the book. Highly recommended for those who can spare the time and effort for this rather long book.
November 11, 2022
Not at all the boring encyclopedic list I anticipated. It was rather an entertaining take on the 100 most terrible atrocities in human history.
As you complete this tome, you also get a rough idea of world history as it is written in a chronological order.
Highly recommended.
As you complete this tome, you also get a rough idea of world history as it is written in a chronological order.
Highly recommended.
May 8, 2020
This was actually more interesting than i thought it would be, but what a cruel cruel world we livein! Took me a while to read but glad i did!
January 11, 2020
Una lista infernal.
El escritor parece un tipo al cual algunos crímenes son más crímenes cuando son cometidos por los incivilizados que por los otros.
Bueno, este no es un libro para relajarse
El escritor parece un tipo al cual algunos crímenes son más crímenes cuando son cometidos por los incivilizados que por los otros.
Bueno, este no es un libro para relajarse
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