The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (108 page)

American Civil War

1.
McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 854.

2.
Rough guess based on the following: McPherson,
Battle Cry for Freedom, p. 619, estimated 50,000. Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch (
One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 53–54) estimated that 1.6 percent of African-Americans died as a direct result of the war. Based on the 3.5 million blacks in the Confederacy, this would come to around 56,000 deaths. Even worse, General Howard, the head of the Freedmen's Bureau, estimated that one-fourth of blacks died in the war zone. Cherokee Indians were divided in their loyalties, and the miniature version of the Civil War they fought in Oklahoma reduced their population from 21,000 to 14,000. Thornton,
American Indian Holocaust and Survival, p. 107.

3.
D. H. Hill, quoted in McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 476.

Hui Rebellion

1.
Dillon,
China's Muslim Hui Community, p. 60. General Zuo reported to Beijing that only 60,000 of the 700,000 Muslims in Shaanxi survived the revolt. Colonel Mark Bell, a British observer, claimed that the population of Gansu plunged from 15 million to 1 million.

2.
Ibid., p. 62.

3.
Spence,
Search for Modern China, pp. 191–193.

War of the Triple Alliance

1.
Scheina,
Latin America's Wars, p. 331.

2.
Ibid., p. 314.

3.
Wilson, "Latin America's Total War."

4.
Scheina,
Latin America's Wars, pp. 313–332; Strosser and Prince,
Stupid Wars; Whigham and Potthast, "Paraguayan Rosetta Stone"; Wilson, "Latin America's Total War."

Franco-Prussian War

1.
Bodart, Westergaard, and Kellogg,
Losses of Life in Modern Wars,
pp. 144–152.

2.
Most by disease, hunger, and hardship. Among the published estimates are 590,000 excess deaths among French civilians (Bodart, Westergaard, and Kellogg,
Losses of Life in Modern Wars, p. 152), or 300,000 to 400,000 excess deaths among French civilians and 200,000 among German civilians (Urlanis,
Wars and Population, p. 265). Also: "Troop movements of raw unvaccinated recruits spread smallpox among the only one third vaccinated French population and 60-90,000 died. French prisoners-of-war carried the disease deep into Germany where it killed 162,000." Bray,
Armies of Pestilence, p.120. Numbers this high are hard to believe, but facts are facts. I picked Bray as a conservative estimate. I didn't include the fight for the Paris Commune.

3.
McEvedy and Woodroffe,
New Penguin Atlas of Recent History, pp. 28–33.

4.
Horne,
La Belle France, pp. 282–287.

Famines in British India

1.
The median estimates of deaths in these famines are 10 million (1769–70), 8.2 million (1876–79), and 8.4 million (1896–1900).

2.
Amartya Sen,
Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 16.

3.
Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, book 4, ch. 5, para. 44. Available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm
(accessed March 14, 2011).

4.
Sheldon Watts,
Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 177–178.

5.
Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 36.

6.
Ibid., p. 37.

7.
Ibid., p. 39.

8.
Ibid., p. 58.

9.
Ibid., p. 32.

10.
Ibid., pp. 38–39.

11.
Linden, "Global Famine of 1877 and 1899"; Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts.

12.
Linden, "Global Famine of 1877 and 1899."

13.
Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 33.

14.
Ibid., pp. 53–54.

15.
Ibid., p. 142.

16.
Wolpert,
New History of India, p. 248.

17.
Ibid., p. 267.

18.
Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 157.

19.
Ibid., p. 144.

20.
Ibid., p. 167.

21.
Ibid., p. 162.

22.
Ibid., p. 161.

23.
Ibid., p. 165.

24.
Ibid., p. 164.

25.
Ibid., p. 315.

26.
Ibid., p. 165.

27.
Ibid., p. 172.

28.
Ibid., p. 170.

29.
Wolpert,
New History of India, p. 267.

30.
Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts, p. 161.

Russo-Turkish War

1.
L. P. Brockett and Porter C. Bliss,
The Conquest of Turkey, or, the Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1877–8 (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1878), p. 697.

2.
McEvedy and Woodroffe,
New Penguin Atlas of Recent History, p. 38.

3.
Palmer,
Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire.

4.
Muir,
Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon, pp. 203–204.

5.
Dumas,
Losses of Life Caused by War, p. 55.

6.
Clodfelter,
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 1, p. 331.

7.
Sarkees,
Correlates of War Project,
http://www.correlatesofwar.org/cow2%20data/WarData/InterState/Inter-State%20War%20Participants%20(V%203-0).csv
(accessed April 10, 2011).

8.
Urlanis,
War and Population, p. 265.

9.
Justin McCarthy,
Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995). McCarthy is blindly pro-Turkish on these matters. Most notoriously, he won't admit to the Turkish genocide against the Armenians in 1915. Even so, this estimate is working its way into mainstream works, such as Dennis P. Hupchick,
The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism (New York: Macmillan, 2004), p. 265.

Mahdi Revolt

1.
McEvedy,
Penguin Atlas of African History, p. 110.

2.
Churchill,
River War, ch. 1.

3.
Green,
Three Empires on the Nile, pp. 144–146.

4.
Francis Mading Deng,
War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution,1995), p. 51 (population of Sudan fell from 7 million to 2 to 3 million); Jok Madut Jok,
War and Slavery in Sudan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 75 (from 8 million to 2.5 million); Deng D. Akol,
The Politics of Two Sudans: The South and the North, 1821–1969 (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 1994), p. 33 (fell from 8.5 million to 3 million); Edward Spiers,
Sudan: The Reconquest Reappraised (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998), p. 12 (6 million out of 8 million died); Henry Cecil Jackson,
Osman Digna (London: Methuen, 1926), p. 185 (population fell from 8.5 million to less than 2 million).

5.
Green,
Three Empires on the Nile, p. 207.

6.
Ibid., p. 209.

7.
Ibid., p. 229.

8.
Ibid., p. 211.