I was mildly interested until the 1800's rolled up and Napoleon got busy. Obviously WWI and WWII positively explode the whole continent of Europe.
It's always kinda fun to have time conceptualized in this manner. It reminds me of the video done detailing every single nuclear bomb detonation since the bomb was invented.
posted
Yeah, was pretty cool. I wonder if the lack of any battles between 1000 and 1400 in the Americas and Africa was just lack of good info. That's a very long time for an entire continent to go without any war. Maybe there was some sort of minimum battle size for consideration though.
But with how many battles happened in Europe after that date compared to those continents, however, maybe its plausible.
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posted
I don't think we have anyway of accurately describing all the battles in the Americas up until European colonialism, so they don't bother too much.
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posted
I wouldn't think too much about comparisons between continents. The blurb says that he just got the information from Wikipedia articles around "List of Battles."
But due to the demographics of the editors involved, there's a lot more information on European battles than say Chinese battles, especially on casualties which he uses to scale the explosion sizes. It doesn't take long to find an article where the English article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming%E2%80%93Kotte_War is missing troop strengths in the infobox but the Chinese article does have it for both sides. And there's always the Great Firewall.
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posted
Also you have to keep present in your mind that the development of societies in the Americas pre 1400s was so completely distinct from that of Europe, Africa and Asia, that it's entirely possible those civilizations simply didn't ever evolve the kinds of political and economic systems that caused empires to go to war with each other in the way that they did in Europe. Particularly as I recall from my last reading of Guns Germs and Steel- a fair bit of this had to do with agriculture, and geography- Europe is built for wars over resources, and America just sort of isn't.
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posted
The list is apparently drawn from Wiki's list of battles, so there's an obvious selection bias. But even if it were compiled by professional historians they'd have very little information about pre-Columbian American wars. It's all archeology and inference, which is ok for cultural traits and what people ate but not so good for dates and sizes of battles. In North America you'd mainly have tribal skirmishes anyway with maybe ten, twenty casualties on each side; when the likes of Hastings and Stamford Bridge shows up with the smallest explosion, that wouldn't register. The Aztec and pre-Aztec flower wars are another question.
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posted
But they didn't have a lot of casualties, as such, per warrior involved. Unless you count the prisoners as casualties, since they were all sacrificed. But then they weren't exactly dead in battle.
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posted
Yes but there has been some recent studies done with (not joking) piles of dirt, that have demonstrated that the Amazon rain forest could in fact have supported many more people than traditionally was believed.
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quote:Originally posted by Xavier: Yeah, was pretty cool. I wonder if the lack of any battles between 1000 and 1400 in the Americas and Africa was just lack of good info. That's a very long time for an entire continent to go without any war. Maybe there was some sort of minimum battle size for consideration though.
It's not just America and Africa that are missing. During the 13th and 14th century, the Mongols conquered nearly all of Russia and their are no battles associated with this.
I also noted that the US civil war, in which over 1 million people were killed, warranted only a few tiny flashes with letters to small to read whereas the Yom Kippur war, which cost somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 lives, had a flash covering half the mediterranean and letters bigger than the entire Spanish Civil War (~500,000 dead).
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
The American civil war I'm pretty sure was only 500,000 casualties, but if their measuring this in terms of firepower/gdp spent on munitions then it would make significantly more sense
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quote:Originally posted by Xavier: Yeah, was pretty cool. I wonder if the lack of any battles between 1000 and 1400 in the Americas and Africa was just lack of good info. That's a very long time for an entire continent to go without any war. Maybe there was some sort of minimum battle size for consideration though.
It's not just America and Africa that are missing. During the 13th and 14th century, the Mongols conquered nearly all of Russia and their are no battles associated with this.
I also noted that the US civil war, in which over 1 million people were killed, warranted only a few tiny flashes with letters too small to read whereas the Yom Kippur war, which cost somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 lives, had a flash covering half the mediterranean and letters bigger than the entire Spanish Civil War (~500,000 dead).
I do not necessarily defend the details of their scaling, but I think your objection here is wrong. Observe that they were listing battles, not wars. Further observe that as late as 1900, wars killed more people by disease than wounding. Then note that 10-20k dead and wounded in one battle is unusual for the Civil War; I can't be certain without checking, but I think that only Antietam and Gettysburg reached that level in one battle. The ACW killed a lot of people, but not in single big slaughters that would show up as big booms in the animation.
Of course this raises the question of what is a battle and what is a campaign. It may be that American selection bias is actually disfavouring the continent here; by splitting up ACW campaigns into many battles while lumping the Yom Kippur war into one boom, the latter is made to look disproportionally large.
The Mongols fought battles in Russia, but were they large in terms of men engaged and casualties taken? The Mongol armies were never very big, in spite of European reports of 'hordes'. They won by superior communications, logistics, and tactical mobility, not numbers; and the piles of skulls they built were from cities sacked, not armies defeated. And if you started including massacres of civilians, you'd have a lot more work to do.
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