Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0511: Anti-trivia: Biggest wars by number of deaths

Episode Date: February 22, 2016

This “anti-trivia” episode lists the biggest wars by number of deaths. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 5.11 Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today we're doing another anti-trivia episode. So we're basically looking at little trivia facts and going, well what's really important? What numbers can we look at to contextualize this piece of trivia and put it into a larger framework of knowledge? So first of all, here's the piece of trivia that you might hear that we're going to base this episode on. Although a lot of people died in World War I, the Great War, the fact is that in China,

the Qing Dynasty, in conquest of the Ming Dynasty, created a war in which more people died than in all of World War I. So if you prioritize deaths not by political movements, but by actual number of people killed in the war, the Qing Dynasty's conquest of China killed more people than World War I. You may consider that trivial or you may consider that very important, but let's go ahead and look at these numbers and look at which wars killed the most people. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to, I'm actually going to name the top 15 wars throughout history by death count. But I'm going to go from smallest to biggest. And right off the bat, the U.S. Civil War, as important a war as it was, isn't going to be on the list at all because not even a million people died in the U.S. Civil War. So we're going to go from the number 15 down to number 1,

along with the estimated number of deaths in the war. First of all, we have the Thirty Years' War in Europe. Now, it's not known exactly how many people died here. It's somewhere between 3 million and 11 million, somewhere in there. And that was in the 1600s. Then we have the Napoleonic Wars, with about 3 to six million people dying. Then we have the Russian Civil War in the 1900s, you know, 1917 to 1922, starting with the Russian Revolution. We have the Russian Civil War and foreign intervention with the Russian Civil War. Between five and nine million people died in that

war. Next we have the most recent Chinese Civil War, which was between 1927 and 1949. About 8 million people died in that war. Next we'll go back to the time around 1400 with the conquests of Tamerlane, and we have about 8 million to 20 million deaths. That's pretty rough, but not as rough as some of the estimates we're going to go with in a little bit, as you'll see. Going over to China, we have the Donggan Revolt in the 1800s, 1862 to 1877, around the same time as the U.S. Civil War. And there are between 8 million and 20 million deaths. And that's compared, again, with the U.S. Civil War's death toll of less than a million. The next one is very confusing because it's listed as number nine, but it might be number

one. So this is the conquest of the Americas, and we're talking about the deaths of indigenous peoples in the Americas as European peoples took over. Now, the reality is that we have no clue how many people died here. It's extremely difficult to tell. It could have been as few as eight and a half million people, or it could have been as many as over 130 million people, which would make it by far the biggest, you know, death toll event in the whole history of the world, or the known history of the world, I should say. Now that's between 1500 and 1700. So how many people died in the conquest of the Americas? We'll probably never ever know or really have any clue between 10 million and over 100 million. Next, let's go back to China, and this time to the 8th century in China. In the span of

about 10 years, between 13 million and 40 million people died in the An Lushan Rebellion. Then going to World War I, this is number seven on the list, approximately, we have about 20 million people dying worldwide in World War I. So that's the 19-teens. Next, in China, the Taiping Rebellion in the 19th century, you know, 50 years before World War I, between 20 million and 100 million people, maybe even more than that, died in the Taiping Rebellion. Next, still in China, but back in the 17th century, between 1616 and 50 years later, we have that Qing dynasty's conquest of the Ming dynasty, where about 25 million people were killed. Next on the list, and tied with that at fourth place, we have 25 million

people killed in the late 1930s, early 1940s in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. So this is China and Japan, and this was basically happening during World War II, so you might consider this a part of World War II, which, you know, just as a hint, is going to be higher up on the list. Next, we have the Three Kingdoms War in China in the 100s and 200s AD, and that's in China. Between 36 million and 40 million people died during that war, so obviously death tolls like that are not a modern thing. And speaking of which, we have the Mongol conquests in Eurasia. And there, this might be number one, we have between 40 million and 70 million deaths. And I'm going to recommend,

you know, Dan Carlin's show again, Hardcore History. He has a great series on the Mongols. It's called The Wrath of the Khans. But basically, the Mongols took over more of the world than anybody in history has ever taken over. So that's the Mongol conquests between 1200 and 1300 or so, you know, something like that, between 40 million and 70 million deaths. Now, number one is World War II, and it's a worldwide war, of course, and between 60 million and 85 million people died. So there you go, another list of anti-trivia facts to contextualize the little things you hear about number of people dying in different wars. This maybe gives you some perspective on that. My biggest takeaway for me

probably was that, you know, item at number nine, the conquest of the Americas, where we really don't know whether it was eight and a half million people or about 140 million people who died in the Europeans' conquest of the Americas. Our next episode is going to go over the most spoken native languages in the world. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.