The 20th Century Was the Most Murderous in Recorded History
The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history. The total number of deaths caused by or associated with its wars has been estimated at 187m, the equivalent of more than 10% of the world’s population in 1913 … The period from 1914 to 1945 can be regarded as a single “30 years’ war” interrupted only by a pause in the 1920s … This was followed, almost immediately, by some 40 years of cold war, which conformed to Hobbes’s definition of war as consisting “not in battle only or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known”.