Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about Charles ‘Moth’ Eaton’s career, in collaboration with the flier’s son, Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John Burton’s Fortnight of Infamy.

Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined with custom website design work.

“After ‘the war to end war’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace.’” Archibald Wavell (later Field Marshal Earl Wavell), an officer who served under Allenby in the Palestine campaign, commenting on the treaties bringing the First World War to an end.

War Deaths in Modern History

While data on the beginnings and ends of wars are generally available, data on casualties in both systems are quite scattered and typically involve rough estimates rather than actual figures. The quality of European data is not much better. Pitirim Sorokin, one of Jack Levy’s sources, emphasizes that “the data for most of the wars of the period before the seventeenth century are estimates and therefore inaccurate.” Jack Levy’s data set on early modern Europe reports total battle deaths of all participating great powers in aggregated wars.

According to Levy, battle deaths before the Thirty Years’ War were limited to a few thousands or at the most a few tens of thousands. The figures climbed up to 1,151,000 in the Spanish-French portion of the Thirty Years’ War (1635–1648), 1,251,000 in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713), 992,000 in the Seven Years’ War (1755–1763), 663,000 in the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), and 1,869,000 in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). As the Thirty Years’ War established a high baseline, Levy concludes that “in general there [was] no significant increase in the total losses of life from wars involving great powers” and that the average number of battle deaths in each war doubled only “every 110 years or so.”

Levy, Jack S. 1983. War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.