Friday, June 15, 2007

Why do people fight ?


I happened to collect some data on wars and was curious to chart their trend with time. And i came up with this chart.

Its pretty interesting to see the war trends and speculate about the reasons as to why wars increased or decreased at some times.

Of course this is the data the we have recorded and there might have been many wars which could have gone unnoticed. But i am assuming that this data is mostly correct.

By and large, the wars before 500 BC were very less and looks like people hardly fought, as the population was very less and there was no need to fight. But we can see that people still fought. I think these wars must have been fought, solely, to establish supremacy over others and nothing else.

But the wars began to increase from 800 AD. I associate this closely with the increasing population and decreasing resources. People were also exploring a lot and that eventually lead to a lot of conflict.

Then we see a meteoric rise in the number of wars fought starting from 1500 AD. This must have happened because of the technological advancements made at this time and looks like the wars are never going to end.

I guess the 2nd world war was the bloodiest and most of the wars nowadays are usually conflicts and not full scale wars.

We cannot afford a full scale war now with all the nuclear, biological and what not weapons. Cities can disappear within hours and they are going to be costly.

What i have written is just a birds eye or a satellite eye view of the wars. I am sure it will make an interesting study to chart wars along with other factors. But as Ford said 'History is mostly bunk'. What historians write is history. The data is unreliable. With the advent of internet and
online media nowadays, i can say that events are being recorded with a high degree of precision and accuracy. We can rely on data nowadays.

But yes, Time can distort anything!!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Good One Sreedhar :-)

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