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Data

Wars ranked by death toll, 1800-2011

About this data

Wars ranked by death toll, 1800-2011
The low estimate of the number of deaths over the duration of this war. Deaths of combatants due to fighting are included.
Source
Jason Lyall, Project Mars (2020) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
January 29, 2024
Date range
2011–2011
Unit
deaths

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Jason Lyall – Project Mars

This dataset records new data on 229 unique belligerents in 252 conventional wars fought between 1800 and 2011. Project Mars introduces new data about these belligerents, including their level of prewar military inequality, and new measures of battlefield performance, including desertion, defection, and fratricidal violence. The latest version is Version 1.1. (2022-02-08).

You can find more details on the dataset in its notes at https://web.archive.org/web/20230717140532/https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?fileId=5857673&version=2.0

Retrieved on
January 29, 2024
Retrieved from
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DUO7IE
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Lyall, Jason. Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020)

This dataset records new data on 229 unique belligerents in 252 conventional wars fought between 1800 and 2011. Project Mars introduces new data about these belligerents, including their level of prewar military inequality, and new measures of battlefield performance, including desertion, defection, and fratricidal violence. The latest version is Version 1.1. (2022-02-08).

You can find more details on the dataset in its notes at https://web.archive.org/web/20230717140532/https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?fileId=5857673&version=2.0

Retrieved on
January 29, 2024
Retrieved from
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DUO7IE
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Lyall, Jason. Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020)

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We have changed the names of two wars in the original dataset:

  • "Third Sino-Japanese War" -> "Second Sino-Japanese War"
  • "Second Sino-Japanese War" -> "Japanese Invasion of Manchuria"

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Wars ranked by death toll, 1800-2011”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from Jason Lyall. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Jason Lyall, Project Mars (2020) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Jason Lyall, Project Mars (2020) – processed by Our World in Data. “Wars ranked by death toll, 1800-2011” [dataset]. Jason Lyall, “Project Mars” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

Download

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-war-1800-2011-bar-chart.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear