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Are the rates different though? Huge numbers lose statistical significance when everything else is huge.
The greatest centuries in history
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innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Well, the 19th century had the Taiping Rebellion...
England's bloodiest war was the 17th Century "English Civil War" (actually our third), which was worse than World War I and World War II when talking about the percentage of population lost during the fighting.
And both of those matter.
But the latter matters much more, if you want to make a valid, meaningful comparison
Frank Drebin
Police Squad!
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the 4th was quite neat.
Considering it is also the first century in which substantial, meaningful efforts to end these things were even possible, it is.
Possible, perhaps. But not seriously attempted as a policy by most states.
Well we are referring to several different things here, but putting an end to by far the worst, genocide, has been very seriously attempted by nearly every nation on the planet, and certainly almost every developed or developing nation save a few.
Bluemofia
F=ma
I don't know... Those Mongols did a pretty good job of decimating the Khwarazm empire, creating starvations in the Middle East by destroying irrigation infrastructure, and general wanton destruction to enforce rule by fear.
I'm not entirely certain, but I don't think any war in modern day history resulted in a depopulated city with pyramids of skulls of men, women, children, and animals.
The French Revolution with Napoleon running around also did a number on the populations of Europe; less so than the Modern era because everyone had big armies, but it far outweighs the damages done in previous wars.
But seriously, in the past it was considered obvious that when a city resisting an army falls, the men are to be killed, women raped and sold into slavery, and children sold into slavery. Genocide was *expected* back then. Only unusual circumstances where people spared this.
I don't think you understand what the word "genocide" means. Hint: it is not the same as "mass murder", "mass executions", "large-scale destruction of life and property", or "war deaths".
Bluemofia
F=ma
Bah, technical development is easy! The real hard thing is social change. And while the spread of new social rules can cause terrible wars and be its most visible and impressive aspect, the real challenge is to get social change started.
So I'm again defending that the 19th century was far more important than the 20th.
Consider: the idea of popular sovereignty; representative democracy; the end of slavery (after centuries of excuses about "oh, it's an evil thing but we can't do without it); the separation between church and state; the end of political "tyranny" and the multiplication of the new "constitutional regimes"; the whole industrial revolution and the shift in economic power from ownership of land to capital and industry; the shift from agriculture to urban life; the separation of the Americas as independent nations, signaling the impossibility of (maintaining) world-spanning empires within the new liberal political framework.
As technical achievements: the spread of the aforementioned industrial revolution; the final exploration of the whole world, filling in the age-old banks on world maps. A system of worldwide trade which finally penetrated inside continental landmasses and connected virtually all human communities (for better and for worse). The first real-time communications with the first transoceanic telegraph cables. Electrical motors and power generation.
Many of these changes clearly had their seeds in the 18th century. But they were truly adopted, they irreversibly spread, in the 19th century. The 18th century intellectual innovations could have failed, as (for example) individual abolitionists wanting to end slavery were ignored for centuries; but after the revolutions and wars of the late 18th/early 19th centuries all these changes really took root, and there was no going back. The 20th century was largely about dealing with the irreversible spread of these changes, and technical refinements of 19th century technology. The who big technical innovations were space travel (and from that only satellites turned out to have some impact on the welfare of mankind so far) and computers, but I really don't feel that those outweigh the ones of the 19th century.
I suppose. Though, I wouldn't want to live in the 19th century while they were in the final steps of ironing out those ideas. The development of those ideas are crucial to the 20th century, but they weren't well treated when they were initially developed. I sort of interpreted it as "greatest century to be alive in". If it is "greatest developments in those times" it would be close between the 19th and 20th, as the greatness of the 20th is built on the 19th's innovations.
You could also argue we are in the middle of a social change as well, for we've got the internet now, and that's creating a huge new medium for social interaction and cultural mixing without going to war (Crusades, WWI and II to an extent)
Possibly more of it was written down. Certainly more of it was recorded on film.
Bluemofia
F=ma
Systematic destruction of a culture/ethnic group.
As this (Greek/Roman) was pre-nationalism, much of culture/ethnic groups in the ancient times were city-states, and that is similar to genocide when you conquer one of those.
For the Mongols, they didn't explicitly commit genocide, (dead people pay less taxes than live people) but they did systematically depopulate regions which resisted them, which is borderline genocide (but not quite).
Just because the word wasn't coined yet doesn't mean "genocide" wasn't widespread before the last couple centuries.
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