Читать книгу Atrocitology - Matthew White - Страница 7

TRADITIONAL HISTORY IS ABOUT KINGS AND ARMIES RATHER THAN PEOPLE. Empires rose, empires fell, entire populations were enslaved or annihilated, and no one seemed to think there was anything wrong with it. Because of this lack of curiosity among traditional scholars about the human cost of historical extravaganzas, a curious person had nowhere to go to answer such basic questions as whether the twentieth century was really the most violent in history or whether religion, nationalism, anarchy, Communism, or monarchy killed the most people.

During the past decade, though, historians and laypeople alike have gone to the sprawling website of a guy on the Internet, Matthew White—self-described atrocitologist, necrometrician, and quantifier of hemoclysms. White is a representative of that noble and underappreciated profession, the librarian, and he has compiled the most comprehensive, disinterested, and statistically nuanced estimates available of the death tolls of history’s major catastrophes. In Atrocitology, White now combines his numerical savvy with the skills of a good storyteller to present a new history of civilization, a history whose protagonists are not great emperors but their unsung victims—millions and millions and millions of them.

White writes with a light touch and a dark wit that belies a serious moral purpose. His scorn is directed at the stupidity and callousness of history’s great leaders, at the statistical innumeracy and historical ignorance of various ideologues and propagandists, and at the indifference of traditional history to the magnitude of human suffering behind momentous events.

—Steven Pinker