Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500-2000

Rating:
Summary: The single best reference book on war
Review: As a scholar who has been collecting statistics on all civil wars fought from 1816 to 2000, I can heartily recommend this book to serious students seeking reliable figures on casualties, battles, and armies during the period under study. I paid [$$$] for a USED copy of the 1st edition and still feel the money was well-spent -- though for the casual reader, this book is simply far too expensive to justify. The format is a brief description of each war (with much more thorough sections on the big ones from a European/American perspective: 30 Years, World Wars, Napoleonic, Vietnam, etc), followed by lists of battles and statistics (for very minor wars, the only statistics he provides are some figures in the war descriptions). What makes his work especially valuable is that he generally does a very good job at digging up the most reliable estimates for use in this volume. This second edition expands a small amount of the 1648-1990 material that was in the first, but generally makes few revisions, instead opting to add new material for 1500-1648 and 1990-2000. The 1985-2000 material is nothing to write home about, but then again that's available in lots of other places and the 1500-1980 stuff is fantastic. If obscure wars interest you, or if you are a scholar researching war and peace, this book is really a must-have reference work. For anyone else, it's likely to be expensive overkill.