The Demographic Impact of Early Modern Warfare

Abstract

Sir George Clark (1947: 98) once remarked that “during the whole course of the seventeenth century there were only seven complete calendar years in which there was no war between European states.” The impact of the longer land wars on civilian mortality during this period was often extreme. The reasons for this had little to do with the fighting itself. Wartime civilian mortality crises were precipitated by fatal epidemic diseases and starvation. Modern demographic historians attribute the starvation to military supply systems that stripped civilians of food and the means to acquire it, and the epidemics to decreased resistance to disease caused by undernutrition and to increased rates of disease transmission brought about by troop movements and civilian refugee flows (Flinn 1981: 52–53).