Try to answer these questions without looking!
Rules:
- The estimates come from this Wikipedia page.
- If Wikipedia provides a range then I use the mean.
- The Sino-Japanese War is considered part of World War Two.
Q1. What war killed the most people?
Answer: World War Two [100 million]
Q2. What war killed the 2nd most people?
The Taiping Rebellion [45 million]
Q3. What war killed the 3rd most people?
The Three Kingdoms War [38 million]
Q4. What war killed the 4th most people?
Answer: The Mongol conquests [35 million]
Q5. 5th?
World War One [28 million] (including the Spanish flu but not including the Russian Revolution)
Q6. 6th?
The collapse of the Qing Dynasty [25 million]
Q7. 7th?
The An Lushan Rebellion [24.5 million]
Q8.9. 8th and 9th?
The Conquests of Timur [14 million]
tie with
The Dungan Revolt [14 million]
Q10. 10th?
The (most recent) Chinese Civil War [10 million]
Of the 10 most deadly conflicts in human history, 6 of them were Chinese civil wars. China isn't merely an important thread within human history. Chinese history is human history.
Western histories of China often focus on the Opium Wars, the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the rise of Communism and then the transition to capitalism. Chinese is thousands of years old. Beginning Chinese history at the Opium Wars is like starting a history of the United States with the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Western histories of China focus on recent Chinese history because the most significant direct interactions between China with the West happened in recent centuries. Western histories of China are often drawn from English-language sources, which produces an incestuous echo chamber. If you want to understand human history, the way to do it is by reading histories of China written from a Chinese perspective.
China: A History by John Keay
This is my favorite book on Chinese history. At 578 pages, it barely scratches the surface of Chinese history. But it's a quick read and it can give you a rough idea outline if you're brand new to the subject.
Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age by Stephen Platt
Imperial Twilight perfectly captures the smells and sounds of stepping off a ship into 19th century Fujian. Imperial Twilight feels like Treasure Island except it's all true. Imperial Twilight is relatively Eurocentric compared to the other two books. But the story is so cool I don't care.
The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry by Ji Chaozhu
The Man on Mao's Right is the story of a high communist official navigating the turbulent years following the Communist Revolution. It's basically Wei_Dai's tale from Communist China told from the perspective of a winner.
Can you try to motivate the study of Chinese history a bit more? (For example, I told my grandparents' stories in part because they seem to offer useful lessons for today's world.) To me, the fact that 6 out of the 10 most deadly wars were Chinese civil wars alone does not seem to constitute strong evidence that systematically studying Chinese history is a highly valuable use of one's time. It could just mean that China had a large population and/or had a long history and/or its form of government was prone to civil wars. The main question I have is whether its history offers any useful lessons or models that someone isn't likely to have already learned from studying other human history.
That 6 out of 10 of the most deadly conflicts were Chinese civil wars is strong evidence China had a long history and a gigantic population relative to the rest of the world. (I think it's evidence that China was prone to fewer, larger wars.) To me, history is the study of people. If most people are in a one place then that is where most of the history is too.
I think the crux of our intuitive gap lies in the identification of useful lessons and models. If Chinese history is a useful source of models then I should be able to think of several off of the top of my head. Here is a core dump. I doubt you'll agree with all of these ideas, but I hope it will at least get you a better understanding of how I extract value from this body of knowledge. This isn't a list of everything I gain from Chinese history—just the stuff I get from Chinese history which I don't get from European history, Islamic history, American history, Russian history, prehistory, etc.
China was somewhat unified and had a big chunk of the world's population and was more likely to record population levels -- though I'd guess there are huge error bars around the Three Kingdoms War and An Lushan Rebellion. If you control for political unity and population, were Chinese death rates in armed conflict higher than other regions?
Why draw the cutoff at thousands of years? And I'd guess recent institution building is much more relevant to EAs than ancient.
There were already the examples of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. (One could also consider European and South American states that were right-wing dictatorships).
Christian worlds? Secularism has been important in France since the French Revolution. What about India or Japan? What about Hellenistic culture or Rome?
The question is how much "memory" or "persistence" the time series has. Mostly history is screened off by the present and recent past. You wouldn't predict North vs South Korea by looking at Korean history for any time period up to 1930s.
I'd like to suggest adding three more bits of information for every answer:
This would make the ranking feel more relevant and informative.
Mongol conquests happened in China, Central Asia, Iran, East Europe etc. It was a number of different wars over a long period of time.
I haven't read the post, but I thought I should let you know that several questions have answers that are not spoiler'd.
I am 80% confident it's intentional. But that also means 20% confident that it's an accident.