That is very much the right question to ask. How can we best find the answer?
Perhaps a timeline of major wars, together with the casualty figures (both as raw numbers, and as a percentage of estimated combatants) would provide that answer.
Hmmm… of the top ten wars by death toll, according to a Wikipedia list self-described as incomplete, the range of deaths-per-war ranged from 8-12 million (no. 10) to 60-78 million (no. 1, WWII). This is about an eightfold difference. The second war on the list is the 13th-century Mongols, and the earliest on the list is the Warring States Era, in China, in around 400 B.C. (10 million, estimated, 9th on the list).
Glancing over the data, I notice that most of the wars in that list are either world-spanning, or took place in China. This, I imagine, is most likely because China has a large population; thus, there are more people to get involved in, and killed in, a war. A list rearranged by percentage of involved soldiers killed might show a different trend.
I also notice that there is a very wide range of dates; but the century with the most entries in that top-ten list is the twentieth century. That may be influenced by the fact that there were more people around in the 20th century, and also by the scale of some of the conflicts (WWI and WWII, for example).
I’m not sure whether the data supports the hypothesis or not, though. Given the wide range of dates, I’m inclined to think that you may be right; that advances in war change the manner of death more than the number of deaths.
That is very much the right question to ask. How can we best find the answer?
Perhaps a timeline of major wars, together with the casualty figures (both as raw numbers, and as a percentage of estimated combatants) would provide that answer.
Hmmm… of the top ten wars by death toll, according to a Wikipedia list self-described as incomplete, the range of deaths-per-war ranged from 8-12 million (no. 10) to 60-78 million (no. 1, WWII). This is about an eightfold difference. The second war on the list is the 13th-century Mongols, and the earliest on the list is the Warring States Era, in China, in around 400 B.C. (10 million, estimated, 9th on the list).
Glancing over the data, I notice that most of the wars in that list are either world-spanning, or took place in China. This, I imagine, is most likely because China has a large population; thus, there are more people to get involved in, and killed in, a war. A list rearranged by percentage of involved soldiers killed might show a different trend.
I also notice that there is a very wide range of dates; but the century with the most entries in that top-ten list is the twentieth century. That may be influenced by the fact that there were more people around in the 20th century, and also by the scale of some of the conflicts (WWI and WWII, for example).
I’m not sure whether the data supports the hypothesis or not, though. Given the wide range of dates, I’m inclined to think that you may be right; that advances in war change the manner of death more than the number of deaths.