I recently came across a fascinating graph of war deaths across history and societies. The graph is shown below.
It’s from a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) by Stephen Pinker, a celebrated atheist and cognitive psychologist at Harvard University who is a big advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind, focusing on language.
But in this book Pinker branched out to look at larger issues, largely because he feels that modern society is increasingly under attack by pre-modern beliefs that he had thought were being buried. He wanted to make another demonstration of why our modern societies are better than historic ones by looking at the simple statistic of warfare and war deaths (also murder and other violence) and how these have been reduced over time by philosophical and material progress.
Better Angels theorises that violence in human societies has generally steadily declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the most important being the humanitarian revolution brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason
Some of the data is pretty extraordinary and I’m a little surprised that the Maori “Musket Wars” are not listed there since the estimates of 20,000 – 40,000 deaths over a thirty year period, starting with a Maori population of 100,000 easily puts them onto this graph at between 670 and 1,300 deaths per 100,000 people per year.
It should be noted that many on the Left are not as happy with Pinker as they used to be when he was only bashing Christians in particular and religion in general and that this dissatisfaction started with “Angels”:
such as whether deaths per capita was an appropriate metric, Pinker’s liberal humanism, excessive focus on Europe (though the book covers other areas), the interpretation of historical data, choice of methodologies, and its image of indigenous people.
Well of course; this is part of the Modern Left’s general move away from Western thinking on a whole variety of issues, including even the basic Western Epistemology of objective truths that can be discovered via rational thought and observation.
No Minister 
Look at the number from PNG!!!
Tom, I suspect the “muskett wars” are viewed more as a continuation of centuries long inter-tribal squabbles, albeit with better technology as time goes by, rather than an actual war.
Perhaps, but given some of those other wars would have seen similar technological progression I don’t see that as a reason.
In any case Pinker’s whole theory is that we’ve vastly reduced societal murder and war deaths due to our advances in law, government and almost all areas of life thanks to reasoning our way towards more rational systems despite the same thing producing ever better weapons of war that can kill far more people far more quickly than ever before in human history.
You can actually apply that exact theory to the situation of Maori; their systems of governance and law were outpaced by new weapons of war, resulting in mass death before things start calming down with the influence of colonialism and the steady integration of Maori into many aspects of it – although we can’t forget the factor of sheer exhaustion.
And of course an analysis and conclusion like that is exactly what Pinker is making across all human societies and exactly what gets up the noses of Maori radicals and their Woke Lefty White comrades here in NZ.