2021 Sir Michael Howard Center annual lecture. My name is Dr. Mark Kondos, and I'm one of the co-directors of the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War, alongside my colleagues, Professor Joe Maolo, Dr. Christina Golter, and as you'll see, Dr. Jonathan Fennell. For those of you who just joined, I'd like to note that this evening's seminar is being recorded, so please do keep that in mind when you're asking or writing questions after the talk. So since it's founding in 2014, the Sir Michael Howard Center has promoted the scholarly history of war in all of its dimensions, while also fostering a vibrant and diverse research community undertaking numerous projects and conferences on the history of war and its multifaceted impact on human societies. This year is a special one because it marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Department of War Studies at King's College London by Sir Michael Howard. And as such, it provides an important opportunity to both reflect and build upon his remarkable achievements and legacy. Sir Michael Howard's greatest contribution to the history of war was his insistence on moving beyond the battlefield in order to examine the wider political and social contexts in which wars were fought. So to this end, Sir Michael Howard Center this year has launched a new and exciting fortnightly seminar series entitled New Directions in the History of War and Violence, which brings together a range of influential and young scholars to reflect on the state of the art in the field of the history of war and also to point towards new and innovative ways of researching, writing and thinking about the history of war. So if you're interested in this, please do check out our recorded talks on the Sir Michael Howard website and also do make sure to join us for next term when the series will continue on Wednesday evenings. However, tonight you are of course all here for the annual lecture. We've been very fortunate in the past for the annual lecture to be graced by very distinguished range of speakers, including Richard Overy, John Horne, Helen Parr, Joe Fox, David Armitage, and most recently, Hugh Strong. I'm now gonna turn it over to my colleague, Dr. Jonathan Fennell, who will introduce this evening's equally distinguished picker. Jonathan, please take it away. Thanks, Mark. Good evening, everyone. I am delighted to introduce our speaker this evening, Professor Erica Charters. Any and all intellectual and social interactions are to be welcomed during this time of COVID. But we have another reason to celebrate this evening. Erica has just been promoted to full professor. So going forward, Erica will be professor of the global history of medicine at the University of Oxford.  That really does sound really rather wonderful. And Erica tells me she's a little sad, however, that she did not manage to squeeze the history of war into her new job title. But it is the history of war that she's going to talk about to us this evening. And indeed, the history of war has been a central element of her research trajectory over the years. Erica's research examines the history of war, disease, and bodies, particularly in the British and French empires. Her monograph disease war and the imperial state, the welfare of British armed forces during the Seven Year War, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014, traces how responses to disease-shaped military strategy with medical theory and the nature of British imperial authority during the Seven Years War. It was awarded the American Association for the History of Medicine 2016 George Rosen Prize and the Society for Army Historical Research 2014 Best First Book Prize. She's also co-editor of two imposing volumes, Disease War and the Imperial State, a global history of early modern violence published by Manchester University Press in the last year and Civilians and War in Europe, 1618 to 1815, published by Liverpool University Press in 2012, as well as coordinating the Oxford and Empire Project and co-directing the interdisciplinary project Bodycance. She directs the Oxford Center for Global History and the Oxford Center for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology. She's also Senior Vice President of the Navy Records Society and an Executive Committee member of the Society for the History of War. She is on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Military History and Centaurs. But it does not stop there. Erica also engages with more contemporary issues and she's currently in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, coordinating a multidisciplinary project on how epidemics end funded by the Wellcome Trust. I think as part of this project, Erica was invited to co-author a common piece in nature, five ways to ensure that models serve society and manifesto. I think I can say with a little fear of contradiction that there are not too many historians with a piece of any kind in nature. So frankly, we have a superstar to talk to us today, one who joins us, Mark pointed out the August company of Professor Sir Hugh Strong, Professor Helen Parr, Professor David Armitage and giving the Sir Michael Howard Centre annual lecture. Today, Erica is going to talk to us about the metrics of war, excess mortality, and the politics of counting. She'll talk to us for about 40 odd minutes and then we'll open to questions. So can I suggest that those who want to pose a question put it in the Q&A boxes as early as possible, that way you'll have the best chance of it being asked. Right, over to you, Erica. Thank you very much, Jonathan. Thank you for that very kind introduction, but also thank you very much to the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War for this invitation to speak. And thank you all for attending and especially for those of you who've been adjusting to the changing circumstances of 2021 in terms of an online talk. So I'm speaking to you during an unusual time, the arrival of COVID-19 in our lives and the nature of reporting on its progress since January 2020 has encouraged us to talk and to reason with numbers. How does morbidity compare with mortality? What does excess mortality even mean? What does it mean for a vaccine to have a 95% efficacy rate? And how do you calculate the infectiousness of say the Omicron variant? Right now, we are highly numerate. This does not mean we are now all mathematicians. Numeracy means that you are able to understand and to use numbers. We all understand, however, that if you are literate, you can understand and work with written words and language, but this does not mean that you are therefore a sophisticated author. With the rise of general education, literacy and numeracy have become widespread across much of the world. Numeracy, like literacy, does not mean we are experts with numbers and words. Instead, numeracy simply means we can understand and reason with numbers. In times of crisis, we crave numbers. Our governments demand data and more numbers to crunch, and we the public also hunger for numbers and statistics that will let us know where we are and where we are headed. Whether during an epidemic or during a war, uncertainty per fades our lives. Numbers, by contrast, offer certainty and suggest clear guidance. During the Vietnam War, for example, American military and political officials used what were called body counts, that is, numbers of enemy killed in action to measure military effectiveness as well as to demonstrate strategic success. The use of body counts grew out in part of the nature of warfare in Vietnam. It was difficult to judge operational effectiveness during a war of counterinsurgency when territory won or lost could not be measured. At the same time, American battle units had short tours of duty. Numbers of casualties, particularly ones where the losses of the enemy Viet Cong could be compared with those of American losses, provided quantitative data that demonstrated unit effectiveness and military progress. These numbers were tangible measurements of progress for military commanders and for an American public following the war through television and through newspaper reporting. Body counts were part of a broader strategy of attrition, attempting to measure the crossover point, the point at which enemy combat strength would be exhausted and thus American success would be achieved. As historian Gregory Datis has shown, body counts were part of a general array of numerical measurements used to assess and to track military, American military and political effectiveness throughout a challenging war. Yet this desire for numbers often resulted in what he describes as a deluge of data. Data, after all, needs to be analyzed and tangibly linked to strategic objectives in order to make sense. As Datis points out, the US military assistance command, the MACV, by measuring everything in a real sense, measured nothing. But this was not the only way in which these metrics proved problematic. Quantitative data could also undermine the war effort. More precisely, the publication of exact numbers of troop, especially of US troop casualties on a regular basis, while the conflict was still ongoing, played a significant role in the erosion of American public support for the war. This evening, I want to outline how numbers came to play such a central role in our understanding of modern war. It was the particular nature of early modern European war that encouraged precise counting, particularly counting of soldiers and of military casualties. Yet these numbering practices did not remain confined to the sphere of warfare. Military counting spread outwards geographically as well as conceptually. Warfare's counting of manpower expanded across the world through the practices of European imperialism and also diffused beyond warfare into modern political practices such as population surveys and censuses. Counting soldiers and casualties was not only about understanding the course of war. As the use of body counts in the Vietnam War demonstrates, numbers are also used to evaluate and to assess war. And so I'll conclude my talk by making use of methodologies from the history of science and medicine from those who think conceptually about numbers to discuss the concept of excess mortality as applied to war. But I want to start first with what is the opposite of numbers and that is with words. Here you can see two typical examples of what historians of early modern war will recognize as musters. Musters were in many ways the first step in preparing for battle. They acted as detailed roll calls in which all troops were arrayed and reviewed and the strength of an army was recorded for financial and for strategic purposes. Musters can be glorious affairs in which all soldiers were on display. Indeed, the term muster or mantra in French shares its etymology with demonstrate or in Latin, monstrer. So to muster thus meant to display one's goods or power just as an array of troops was a clear account of national strength. The most sophisticated muster records of this time could contain a wealth of information. French musters, for example, over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries gradually transformed into what are called les gistres de control pictured here. These detailed records that provide information on individual soldiers, including name, age, hometown, occupation and physical characteristics such as height and hair color. Social historians have made extensive use of the goldmine of information that such records provide, publishing an enormous amount of data extracted from these records about ordinary French men. These records with their amazing wealth of detailed describing soldiers were designed to ensure that individuals could be identified. This is because of course, musters formed the basis of payment from central authorities to captains in their countries. Musters thus functioned like receipts. Indeed, two copies were often made. So one for the captain of the unit and one for whomever was paying for the troops. And hence, musters provided a detailed account and record of the goods exchanged. The detailed descriptions of individual soldiers and the identification of individual soldiers that musters allowed were an attempt to curb corrupt practices and armies and make them more transparent and cost effective. Captains of units were well known to try to boost their profits through false that is through inflated musters. In 1587, for example, Dutch authorities announced that companies were to be mustered at the same time and all in the same place to prevent officers from borrowing one another's troops to fraudulently boost numbers. In the French army, such imposter soldiers were called pas-volants, men who were not soldiers but rather valets who had dressed up as soldiers in order to falsely boost numbers. At the same time, desertion was one of the chronic manpower problems for early modern European armies. Civilian and military authorities thus used the physical descriptions in musters to identify and to track men throughout civilian society as well as to ensure that they did not try to join another unit. Musters are therefore impressive, I think even beautiful historical records. They demonstrate the economic and commercial nature of early modern European war, wars in which leaders hired trained soldiers and managed a sophisticated financial system of logistics that stretched across borders, including the buying and selling of military labor. Historians such as David Parrott and Fritz Friedlich have even described military officers as entrepreneurs motivated to go into battle by financial profit and organizing the necessary wherewithal of warfare, especially bodies of troops on a business basis. Musters were a pragmatic reflection of this financial nature of early modern European war and the cost of training soldiers in this period. But musters are also impressive for their mountains of words. Whether full of detailed physical descriptions or just lists of names, musters are primarily about words. What is noticeably absent are numbers. Musters stand in stark contrast to these types of military records that are pictured here, which are known as returns. Unlike musters, returns focus entirely on numbers. These austere quantitative summaries were likely the original form of musters first used in 13th century Italy. Serving as contracts between those buying and those selling troops, Renaissance military historians note that these early records almost always indicate the number of men comprising the company, names are rarely inscribed. Various German and Dutch forces using numerical returns appear throughout the 17th century, but they were often kept only by low-level officers who had immediate control of troops. Captains indeed were keen to keep such precise numbers out of the reach of central authorities given that they could contradict official musters. Returns with us a kind of low-level basic paperwork. They were practical records that tracked an army's everyday operations in the field often discarded by archivists due to their lowly status and their transitory nature. By the 18th century, these Germanic forms have become integrated into standard British military records available to buy as pre-printed blank forms, returns featured column headings of fit for duty, sick, prisoner, total, and other categories under which officers recorded the number of each for rank and file troops. Returns are thus a peculiar type of military record. They are completely different from the wordy descriptive detailed musters, but they are also not the same as general states or official accounts of troops that were used in general planning and published in newspaper reports at the time. For those, officials counted by battalion or by regiment using approximate round numbers such as 500 or 1,000. As historians have long pointed out, such paper estimates differed greatly from actual men in the field, although armies might start off at full strength when they were first recruited. Disease, combat, desertion, and false mustering reduced available manpower. Historians suggest that this difference was significant with effective manpower on average 30% lower than what was recorded in these reports. So whereas musters focused on identifying individuals, returns instead provided precise numbers. Yet because of their structure, returns provided more than just precise numbers. Their numerical and tabular form meant that they provided snapshots of manpower that could be serialized, allowing military administrators to easily compare rates of effectives and wastages between weeks and between months. Indeed, returns allowed military officers and state officials to see a moving picture of manpower month by month or even week by week over the course of a campaign. After all, early modern political arithmeticians had espoused tables in part because they provided easy comparison between data and the ability to track change over time, identifying shifts and patterns. Through returns, for example, officials calculated precisely when were the sickly seasons as well as precisely where sickly regions were located throughout the world and planned campaigns accordingly. And likely because any officer could fill these quickly out and send them in, returns were submitted monthly and regularly during campaigns from the 1700s onwards across Dutch, German and British armies. By the late 18th century, most European armies had adopted and integrated returns into their military practices. It's worth us reflecting on the nature of these records. To our eyes, they look modern, perhaps even sophisticated. After all, we are a numerate society that takes for granted the usefulness of numbers. The use of numbers by political authorities is often used as a historical hallmark of modern statehood. Historians and political scientists habitually contrast modern states whose authority emanates from their broad and their deep administrative reach with pre-modern states whose power rested on brute force. In this historical development, numbers hold a privileged position as a particularly modern form of state knowledge which legitimize state power. The prevalence of metrics as a tool of modern governance has even prompted criticism of what some describe as a tyranny of measurement. From this perspective then, the use of precise numbers seems profoundly modern. Yet in the eyes of those at the time, these quantitative returns were considered basic, low-level paperwork, even perhaps archaic. They were not even saved in order to be kept in the archives. Returns were not considered as impressive as detailed descriptive musters. They were unsophisticated. Indeed, returns were likely implemented precisely because it was often too difficult to complete full musters. They were rudimentary, if not crude records. Yet even if unsophisticated, it became clear that returns were useful. Returns seem to have developed soon after the European implementation of a key practice in modern accounting and economics, which is double entry bookkeeping. Growing out of the spread of Arabic numerals and likely shaped by the practice of Islamic merchants, historians have traced the diffusion of double entry bookkeeping in Europe from the 12th century onwards. From its initial appearance in the international commercial centers of Venice, Florence, and Amsterdam, it's spread across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its advocates boasted that the system of keeping duplicate entries of each transaction, that is of recording a sale as both a debit to stock and credit to cash, as you can see on the two sides pictured here, meant that by keeping two entries, merchants could have complete knowledge of their business. As Luca Pacioli's famous renaissance treat us on mathematics and accounting explained, now you will understand how to do accounting for accounts are nothing else than the expression in writing of the proper order of your affairs. You will know all about your business and whether or not it is going well. Double entry bookkeeping enabled knowledge of one's business, even when directly not on site, neatly encapsulating the basic definition of knowledge as a means for presenting something remote as if it were present. Historians of science have pointed out that the growth of double entry bookkeeping was not simply based on its practical functionalism. While its conceptual basis was novel because the European view of numbers had not encouraged the correlation of numbers with actions and facts, double entry bookkeeping made a broader social claim regarding the honesty, the trustworthiness and the social respectability of merchants and the merchant community as a whole. After all, it was used to keep track of long distance and international commerce in which it was crucial to establish the credibility and more explicitly, the creditability of merchants stationed far away from the owners of the business. Full and detailed accounts of all transactions thus provided the basis for credibility and thus credit. Given that double entry's bookkeeping ability to provide overall accounts of profit and loss and full balance sheets was not exploited until many years after it had become a common mercantile practice. Historians argue that its use was not directly tied to its functionality as a method of calculation. Instead, double entry bookkeeping and the development of modern accounting are considered a social practice or even a form of rhetoric, a method of argumentation that selects some data while ignoring others. In other words, rather than a system that simply records and collects useful information, double entry bookkeeping is understood as a system that prioritizes certain forms and certain types of knowledge over others. Returns are a similar form of accounting. They too keep track not only of resources going out of the number of casualties, but also how many are coming in and thus how many are available and fit for service at any one time. Rather than counting goods and cash, however, returns counted manpower. They keep track of trained soldiers, which was one of the most valuable resources to these early modern officials. By tracking and counting soldiers, returns made manpower the focus of these accounts, meaning that manpower is the commodity here, not money. Returns represented manpower as a resource that could be identified, categorized, tracked and thereby commodified and exploited. Returns conveyed detailed knowledge about manpower to officials, even when stationed far away across oceans and continents. As modern economics demonstrates, the reason for collecting data is that once a sufficient amount is accumulated, it provides patterns, which can thereby help to predict future behavior. And although economics and meteorology repeatedly remind us that prediction can be unreliable, what it does accomplish is to turn something that is unknown and uncertain into an issue of probability and calculated risk. Returns did this for manpower. They captured fluctuations in manpower levels, whether due to seasons, geography or the duration of campaigns, and thereby turned these fluctuations into patterns that allowed officials to prepare accordingly. By the 19th century, most European armies used almost exactly the same form to record their manpower levels, allowing authorities to compare and contrast patterns of manpower and wastage across the globe, and indeed, even to pull this information together to share European-wide strategies to fighting in overseas territories. But these practices, these methodologies of tracking manpower and its mobility did not remain confined to arms. Instead, they influenced broader practices of accounting and the management of populations. Historians of Atlantic slavery have increasingly focused on the methods applied to enslaved populations in order to link slavery with the rise of capitalism. In her award-winning book, Accounting for Slavery, Caitlin Rosenthal has traced how Atlantic slave plantations developed the methods of scientific and accounting management and their everyday activities tying modern business practices to Atlantic slavery. But as you can see with this record here, it takes a format that should be familiar. It follows a military return. As the historian of the Caribbean, Trevor Bernard long ago pointed out, managing a plantation called for similar skills to overseeing a regiment of soldiers, including brutal forms of physical discipline. Military officers often drifted between the two occupations across the Atlantic world, hired on as plantation managers outside of campaigning seasons, or settling there more permanently when a war ended. It should not surprise us then that military methods of manpower accounting were implemented into other colonial arenas that also attempted to control, count, and manage other laboring populations. The methods of military returns were also directly applied to civilian populations after the conclusion of a war as part of the usual practice of taking stock of available resources. For example, after the British conquest of French Canada in 1760, General James Murray was tasked with producing a map of the St. Lawrence Valley to enable newfound British administration of the colony. Murray's map though charts not just territory, but also a census of colonial manpower recording numbers of men of military age in different locations. It was thus a fulfillment of the state's demands for, in their words, a full and particular account of the overseas territories conquered by the British. Larger versions of the map were sent to King George and to William Pitt to be displayed as war trophies in a grand hall, while smaller ones were used by colonial administrators for practical and administrative purposes. Murray's map thus neatly articulates quantitative knowledge of manpower as both symbolic and practical. Regular military and colonial practices of surveying military manpower and peacetime continue to expand across the 18th and 19th centuries. What were initially called statistical returns and what initially only recorded numbers of young men who were fit for military service soon developed into broader civilian population censuses that tracked all numbers of a given population. The statistical practices of modern states, what Ian Hacking has described as the avalanche of numbers. And Ted Porter has termed the trust in numbers that developed across the 19th century. These statistical practices of modern states have long been studied by historians to trace the origin of our modern numerate and metric world. But for the most part, the experience of war has not been fully integrated into this history. Yet military practices and military pressures, the counting of manpower of casualties and effectives were a crucial part of the spread of this modern statistical term. Conceptually, although military tabular returns initially developed as checks on financial corruption, they soon became focused on manpower rather than finances through their use of numbers and their tabular form. They made men themselves the currency being counted. And as observers of capitalism point out, whatever is counted ends up being prioritized and hence valued. These manpower returns therefore were very useful to central authorities. They allowed officials to identify and track their resources and plan political and military strategy accordingly. But exact numbers could also be dangerous. In 18th century France, the population of the nation was a state secret. Its exact figure kept confidential. This is because precise counting could challenge and even undermine authority. In the Duke of Marlboro's last field battle, the Battle of Malplaqué in 1709, we can trace how precise numbers were used to challenge official accounts. The Battle of Malplaqué and the victory of the Allied forces under Marlboro's command can be seen as a great victory and characteristic of Marlboro's remarkable military leadership. Faced with an impressively organized French army under the leadership of the Duke of Villars, Marlboro encountered some 80,000 enemy forces that were positioned in a way that made them virtually undefeatable. And yet over hours with stupendous leadership, Marlboro led the Allied army of 95,000 men through repeated assaults until he achieved what is considered one of the most extraordinary military victories of the period. The army's position on the battlefield and the French retreat left no doubt that Marlboro was the victor, yet at what cost. 18th century newspapers were full of war reports. Just a day after the battle, European newspapers were filled with accounts of the battle, but they also noted as Marlboro himself had observed, the loss has been very great on both sides. Over the next few weeks, French and British reports battled over the precise number of casualties. The public used these figures to argue over the significance of the battle. French letters reprinted in various European newspapers even accused the Allies of hiding the true number of casualties and then altering them to claim lower losses. With reports suggesting that the French had 12,000 casualties out of an original force of some 80,000, in contrast with 20,000 Allied casualties and another 4,000 still missing, the use of numbers was used by the French as well as by English Tories who were critical of Marlboro to undermine Allied claims of a straightforward victory. Likewise, after the 1747 battle of Lofeld, groups in Paris demanded precise numbers of troops killed and wounded. Although a French victory over the Dutch was declared and celebrated by the King, rumors persisted that more French than Dutch troops had been lost. Whereas initial official reports claimed that the French had only lost 8,000 killed and wounded compared with the enemy's 14,000 killed and wounded. Unofficial reports suggested French losses of 9,200 or even 14,000 compared with only 10,400 for the Dutch undermining assertions of a French victory. Numbers challenged the royal narrative and thereby royal authority. Officials understood that precise numbers in the wrong hands, foreign or domestic, could damage much needed recruitment drives and jeopardize financial and public support for the government and the war effort. They therefore took care to keep precise number counts from the public. Yet numbers taken from military returns increasingly entered into public debates from the late 18th century onwards. These numbers were indeed crucial to reformers who were critical of existing government policies and who use numbers to mobilize public opinion. Florence Nightingale, for example, made extensive use of military manpower returns from the Crimean War alongside military returns from India in her public campaign to improve military sanitation, nursing, and health in colonial garrisons. With the help and expertise of medical statistician, William Farr, Nightingale publicized exact figures on morbidity and mortality to argue her case that disease, not wounds, was the major and preventable threat to manpower in arms. In doing so, she challenged medical, military, and political authorities. As she proclaimed, the inexorable figures of the army returns have dissipated this prejudice forever. Even more visually striking is Charles Joseph Menard's portrayal of Napoleon's army as it made its way across Russia. This visualization of manpower described by Edward Tuft as perhaps the best statistical graph ever drawn traces Napoleon's 1812 invasion and retreat from Russia through the dwindling thickness of a colored column that corresponds to the numbers in regular reports of effective troops. As Menard here powerfully shows, whereas French manpower started out at half a million men, six months later, only 10,000 soldiers struggled back to Poland in December, 1812. Contrary to traditional portrayals of warfare which show a battle scene, one second frozen in time, Menard's portrayal captures the unfolding of an entire campaign across multiple months. As a result, what Menard's visualization captures is the cost of war, not in terms of finances, but its exorbitant expense in terms of manpowering. With numerical returns, wars, especially overseas war that cost much in terms of manpower could be assessed not simply through one battle or through territorial and material gains and losses, but through their cost in manpowering. Military returns made the balance sheets of war and empire calculable in stark terms of numbers lives lost, something which reverberated in humanitarian objections to wars, especially overseas and imperial wars in ways that continue today. Yet when we reflect upon the nature of these criticisms, what becomes clear is that there is no tangible numerical threshold that makes the cost of a war problematic. These numbers are part of debates, not widely accepted statements. The cost of Marlboro's Battle of Malplaquet received its most trenchant criticism in 1711, that is two years after the battle had taken place. By 1711, Marlboro had become a controversial political figure with opposition Tories increasingly vocal in their criticism of his lengthy and expensive war. The body count of Malplaquet strengthened Tories in the election of 1710 and by the end of 1711, the new Tory government had begun peace negotiations with France and Marlboro was dismissed from command. While there was a flurry of debate already in 1709 over the high number of casualties in the Battle of Malplaquet, with the battle often described by historians as one of the bloodiest battles of the 18th century, it was only in publications from 1711 and 1712. And so during these peace negotiations that Marlboro was excoriated for the high wastage of his military tactics. As Defoe argued, the decision had been one to sacrifice the lives of a brave body of men to the glory of a general and to butcher their men for the mere name of a victory. Likewise, when Britain's strategy and military conduct in the American Revolution became increasingly controversial in the later stages of the war, opposition politicians demanded that military returns be made public so that full and informed discussions of the war could be held. Yet having more quantitative data did not provide opposition leaders with a clear message on foreign policy. As Nightingale knew well, the numbers made an argument only when placed in comparison with other figures. Her trick was to show military fatalities here pictured as the bars in red, side by side with mortality rates among young men in Britain, which are the small bars in black, and thus to use these colorful visualizations of mortality rates in context alongside a host of other material in a widespread campaign as to what should be seen as unacceptable and thus as excess mortality. Numbers have therefore become central to debates over acceptable rates of mortality and thereby also what should be considered excess mortality. During the Iraq War of 2003 to 2011, the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, published studies that calculated excess mortality during the war. The most well-known and likely most controversial was one that calculated that as of July 2006 and so 40 months after the invasion of 2003, there were 654,000 and 965 excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war. This study built on previous Lancet articles such as one that calculated mortality in the cause of a wars of the 1990s which used epidemiological calculations in order to underline the mortality crises of overseas wars. More generally, these studies build on the 19th century origins of the medical journal The Lancet which saw disease as fundamentally tied to social and political contexts and thus 19th century Lancet articles could be as much about social and political reform as they were about medicine. Indeed, the term excess of deaths stemmed from 19th century calculations of what were called vital statistics in which so-called natural rates of births and deaths were often contrasted with what were described as the artificial and therefore unnecessary and therefore preventable rates of disease and death found in unsanitary urban settings. But as studies in the Lancet, whether from the 19th century or more recently all demonstrate, it was not simply the calculations of death that proved controversial. Many were critical of what was offered as the natural rates of mortality. For the 2006 Lancet study on the Iraq War, pre-invasion mortality was calculated at 5.5 per 1,000, a rate that as critics pointed out was lower than most nearby countries. Indeed, the average death rate of the United Kingdom in this period fluctuated somewhere around 8.7 per 1,000 people. In other words, just as we see during the current pandemic, quantitative evaluations of excess necessarily become mired in broader debates about what are normal and therefore acceptable rates. The threshold between epidemic and endemic disease is defined not through a particular or precise number, but instead in the words of public health authorities when there is an increase often sudden in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected. That is, that's what defines an epidemic. Numbers may be crucial to this definition, but what is still required is agreement as to what is normally expected. Indeed, it can become a course and even disturbing debate to be arguing whether the excess mortality of the Iraq War is say merely 110,000 deaths instead of 654,000 deaths. As renowned statisticians, David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters recently observed in their numerical overview of the COVID pandemic, even with a mass of data, sometimes we just cannot find answers to our questions. Numbers, particularly precise numbers are powerful. Yet their authority derives not from themselves, but from the context in which they are set by those who present them. That is the case when merchants present their account books to their partners and predators, when generals outline numbers to their superiors as they propose military policy and when governments, opposition leaders and social reformers make their pitch to the citizenry. Indeed, knowing precise numbers has become an essential component of one's credibility as an authority on a given subject. As United Nations guidance makes clear, the precise recording of casualties is indeed one of the crucial responsibilities and thus definitions of modern statehood. But the history of numbers as a source of authority reminds us that numbers are meaningful only within a social and political context. This is particularly apparent with regard to the concept of excess mortality. As the historian of medicine Margaret Pelling reminds us, it is natural to assume that an excess of disease must always arouse concern, a justified sense of risk and some kind of action. However, historical examples suggest that it matters if, how and why an excess is defined and even by whom. When one states that 100,000 people died of COVID, how can we know if that is a lot or a little? When one finds that 10,000 people are hospitalized annually with food poisoning, should one be alarmed is 10,000 a lot or a little? When citizens are told that 5,000 soldiers lost their lives in a war, how do we assess if that's a lot or a little? And when we're told that a war is costing 100 million pounds a year, should we commend the government for its economy or condemn it for its wastefulness? Is 100 million pounds a lot or a little? The answer to these questions is determined by how we assess and calculate the normal rate of spending, hospitalization and death. In the case of disease, this assessment is built into the definitions of epidemic and endemic disease. And epidemic is defined as a disease that produces extraordinary or excess morbidity. Epidemics thus end, not when the disease is eradicated, but when disease rates decline to endemic levels. That is to a level that the local population considers acceptable. The concept of excess mortality reminds us of both the power of numbers as well as their limitations. Numbers taken out of context cannot tell observers if a war is too costly or too deadly or if a disease is endemic or epidemic. Instead, advocates use numbers to argue for or against a certain force of action by demonstrating that the costs of a given policy are acceptable or unacceptable. Military returns focused on manpower, thereby encouraging us to focus our attention on the certainty of precise numbers. But these records do not on their own define what is excessive mortality. Wars like epidemics thus spark contentious debates over who sets the bar for acceptable losses and costs and how the costs of war should be defined and measured. Numbers do not provide answers to these questions. They are instead the tools of this debate, a debate that is political, ideological, and moral. We do not argue about numbers. Instead, we argue with numbers about values and beliefs as was the case in Marvel's victory at Mel Plaquette, Nightingale's account of the Crimean War and the Lancet's analysis of the war in Iraq. One of the most common questions I've been asked during this pandemic as a historian of disease is how have epidemics in the past changed society? And I often struggle to explain why I think that is the wrong question to ask. But it is, of course, a similar question to the one that military historians are often asked. That is, how have wars in the past changed society? And while we may feel compelled to answer with reference to democratization and female suffrage, nationalism, nuclear energy, or other textbook answers, most of us are uncomfortable with the model such questions assume. After all, as Sir Michael Howard himself so often pointed out, war like disease is not something that takes place outside of society. It does not come from elsewhere. It does not act upon society like a meteor striking the earth. War is fundamentally a part of society and politics, whether for good or for ill. Wars like epidemics are not something that happens to a society. But something that reflects the changes that society is undergoing. It's internal tensions and fault lines. It's technological capabilities and it's cultural sensibilities. Thank you very much. Many thanks, Erica. I've no doubt there's raucous applause echoing across living rooms and studies around the globe. And, you know, a call to historians to engage with the data. I think there's musters and returns. We need to hone our numerical skills and learn better how to evaluate statistics and numbers. Erica's going to take the questions in the Q&A box herself. So please start paring them in. And I will sit on the sidelines and jump in if and when. So back to you again, Erica. All right. Thank you very much, Sheldon. And thank you for the questions. So I see a first question about the financial question. And I entirely agree that there's obviously huge financial pressures to know exact numbers of soldiers as well as for logistical planning. And I think this is a very important point about the role of logistics in shaping a lot of military practices. To me, the other point, of course, is that all of this demands on knowing precise numbers of the men who are actually going to be fighting. And so I think this is where you can kind of see the focus on manpower. So I actually agree that there's a real question about, if I've understood the question correctly, thinking about the financial data that's required, but how that's also often focused on knowing exact numbers of manpower as well as how those are fluctuating. And of course, I agree that the, as we can see with recent events, one of the interesting points is how much those numbers fluctuate during what we might call the fluctuations of combat and the fluctuations of war and of course, during a campaign. Very funny doing questions without seeing the person. So you'll have to ask another question if I don't answer it properly. So the question of when the numbers of dead and the meanings of their death are themselves politicized, is political reconciliation among warring populations possible? It's a great question. I think I, so I will confess here that I focus much more on the 18th century as a historian, but of course, as you can see with this talk and with this project that I've been working on with a colleague, Benoît Pouchet based in France, we've been trying to trace in some ways the kind of longer history of thinking about the recording of casualties and how they are used because it's quite clear that for the international community today, there's a strong emphasis on identifying all casualties involved in wartime and recording them as part of the process of reconciliation. So it's an interesting point that you can see how a lot of recent conflicts, part of the kind of what we might call the process after a conflict is actually trying to have precise numbers and to think about the methods that are used for that. But of course, that strikes me as being an interesting modern assumption about numbers giving us some kind of closure or giving us some kind of answers, but I think it's because it's often tied to a notion of political and legal responsibility. So it's a very good point that of course, in many ways, numbers are political. Whether we like it or not, there's just different ways than of thinking about what that means. Have I come across instances of excess mortality that have attempted to hide the principle of distinction in war? For example, civilians and combatants. That's a very good question. One of the things that I've noticed and people who work on modern war will likely know much more than me is obviously you'll see during the 18th century, the focus is on counting combatants casualties, but obviously there's a question too about civilian casualties. And indeed, I would say if you look at UN practices today, there's a lot of emphasis on thinking about how to count civilian casualties as a way of assessing the nature of war. So I was talking with a colleague about the Sri Lankan Civil Wars in the early 2000s and how a lot of the debate over what should have been done was based on exactly this kind of messy area, especially when we think about civil wars, wars of counterinsurgency, that the distinction between the civilians and combatants are, of course, actually part of the process of the war and much of the political debate that's happening. And so I think one of the broader questions we have is whether that distinction between civilians and combatants can always be sustained or even maintained. It might seem very clear cut, but even in the 18th century, I would suggest that sometimes there's a lot of fluidity depending on where you are. So I don't necessarily know of specific examples, but it's quite clear for the counting that there's always a debate about who is a civilian and who's a combatant and therefore in some ways a kind of legitimate target. All right, loads of questions. How do I think our understanding of man powers of resource may change as we move forward into an era where there may be less mortality? Increase, for example, increasing the unmanned warfare. It's a very good question. I love when there's an optimistic hope that I can predict things because I'm a historian. One of the things I've been struck by when I was working on this is that there's a way in which as historians, there's a kind of assumption of a linear narrative in which as we become more modern, there's a decrease in the mortality of our wars because we kind of assumed that that is the way the modern world is going. Many people have written about a modern sensibility of risk, how we kind of have a decreasing acceptance of risk as we become more modern. But I think what's actually interesting is when we look at wars today, of course, that's far too neat a narrative to actually hold up to what we see. And partly we can think about with the previous question, probably thinking about who we're counting. So civilian casualties can obviously be very great. I think one of the interesting points with those Lancet articles is they've been trying to measure the effect of war by thinking about broader effects such as starvation, disease, the breakdown of infrastructure in places and counting that within what we would call the mortality associated with the war. And so of course, once we're thinking on that broad scale, then there's a real question as to what we count and over how many years we count it. So on the one hand, I think it's true that there's been this point about the kind of precision killing and the use of technology. But I often wonder if to me that sounds kind of like a trope that we might have heard in the early 20th century where there was a notion that with increased technology, we would therefore have these wars that were quick and efficiently conducted. And of course that wasn't actually the case. So I suppose it's an interesting one. And of course, I never want to predict the future even though I like wondering about it, but a very good point. Was Stalin accurate in describing 1 million as a limit where tragedy turns into statistics? Yeah, so this is this point about the kind of, when numbers get so large, then we cannot. Then in some ways they become beyond our grasp. I've been thinking about this a lot and I hope other people have been thinking about this in terms of COVID and numbers because I think it's been something where on the one hand we have a lot of numbers. On the other hand, there's been also a strong push to think about the individual cases. And I think it's the same thing when we think about how we calculate risk, how we think about our own lives and what we're moving through. It's obviously, I think it's an interesting point about what number is meant to shock us. And I think this to me is this real question with this notion of excess mortality and the debate that one gets into when trying to say, what is excessive? What do we think is too high a cost when conducting a war or for any kind of issue? So I guess I would say probably, I don't think there's one number, right? Because you can see it in even some of the discussions when people talk about a hundred thousand which seems like such an abstract number. But to me the question is, is there actually a number as the point just at a certain point the numbers themselves are very hard for us to comprehend which says something about the limits of numbers as well as the power of numbers and how we think. That's as good an answer as I'm going to be able to give on that one. I'm sorry. All right, a question about the uncertainty managing uncertainty. Presumably uncertainty means something different in war than in epidemics to the extent that wars wage by actors who make active decisions whereas an epidemic is not as predictable. Does this matter for how you conceive of uncertainty? Very interesting question. So well, one of the interesting things I would suggest is I actually, look, I might be biased because I work on the history of war and the history of disease and so I've been tending to see them as the same. But I actually think that what's interesting about an epidemic is of course, as much as we think about diseases being something that has its own agency when we think about, when we're thinking about epidemics of course actually diseases only take place within the actions of a human society. And so I think it's something that have been struck in the way that we talk about the epidemic right now that we tend to have a kind of passive way of talking about it as if it's just kind of going on. When of course actually when we think about the course of its unfolding, it's quite clear that it is something that's been interacting with the way that we've been living. And so in the same way, I think war is very similar. So we can get into the habit of kind of talking about it as if it's something that's just unfolded and happened. But I think this is where historians of war would suggest that actually of course what we want to think about is where people were making various decisions even if they were kind of maybe less thoughtful decisions or unconscious decisions. And so I think uncertainty in that case might apply to both very often in both cases we're trying to predict human behavior and human decision-making. And that's one of the things I found very interesting with those returns so much of military strategy even from someone like Clausewitz I think is thinking about this notion that in war there's this kind of fog of war, right? That there was a lot going on but also there's a lot of data and one of the issues is trying to pin down and figure out which data one should therefore be using. And to me it's a very interesting point that in both cases during epidemics, during wars there are kind of crises in which very often we have more information than we know what to do with. And so actually our decision-making is trying to focus that down. So I would actually suggest in some ways that there's active decision-making in both cases but obviously uncertainty is just something that can be managed rather than answered. So thank you for that. A question from Charles. Hello Charles. The counting of casualties, constructs and weapons during World War I lead to different conclusions from the 18th and 19th century wars. Good question. So I will first confess that this is when I would love someone who's a 20th century military historian to come in. But what I think is interesting, so I had a, I was emailing back and forth with Hugh Straughn on this because he wrote a really wonderful piece I think last year talking about trying to count casualties from 1918 and especially the overlap with of course the influenza pandemic that happened at the end of the war. And what I thought was very fascinating is on the one hand we have this assumption that in the modern period we have precise numbers. And yet what's interesting is Hugh Straughn pointed out he has an article that's online saying this that the closer you get the harder it becomes to actually feel that there's reliable numbers because there's such overlap. There's constant movement and debate even about whether one is a casualty of the war whether one the death is caused by something else or is related to the war. And of course very mobile populations and of course keeping in mind that the numbers we do have that are somewhat precise are really only for certain parts of the world usually in the Western world. So I'm interested in how on the one hand we often assume that we have precise numbers especially for the modern period and yet actually those might be not as precise as we assume, but it is an interesting point as to whether then we think those precise numbers let us think about wars differently. And that's why I think again the First World War is a good example when you think about the notion of excess mortality where people knew that there were quite high rates of death and yet of course that didn't necessarily undermine support for the war. So it kind of challenges this narrative we have about numbers in and of themselves making decisions for us. So thank you Charles. Martin, very nice to have a question for you. To what extent are states in the 18th century involved in dealing with the families of deceased soldiers as we see in the following centuries? Did muster records serve to meet families? The families desire to know what happened to their loved ones in the war? Very interesting question. I don't know enough about that. It is true that especially in the French case these detailed musters and the detailed record keeping we have of something that really is the French state is so impressive in the 18th century in terms of its paperwork. Anyone who's worked in the archives will know they produced a lot of paperwork and one thing they were very good at producing paperwork on are not only the details of soldiers but also thinking about their pensions. And so there's a way in which I think the state did have very good bureaucratic knowledge of the course of someone's career but very often for financial reasons rather than necessarily for personal reasons. So it's a good question as to whether this would have answered families questions as to what had actually happened. And that part I don't know. My guess is given the way that 18th century societies were I think in some ways rather callous about the lives of normal people that they probably did not follow up very carefully but it is interesting because the data is there. So one could trace them I think if one wanted. So, but it's very interesting question and kind of reminds us of different sensibilities across time. Erica, we've a separate question in one of the chat boxes which I'm just gonna throw into the mix from Jimmy Antia. And can you speak more about the relationship between slavery, military manpower, stroke readiness and accounting? During the 16th to 18th century is there any clear division between military and slaveholding enterprises or are they two sides at the same coin? Great question. And so obviously I cited Trevor Bernard's work. Trevor might be out there right now and I feel like he will know even more than I do but I think it's an interesting point. So they obviously in some ways are different in that one is run by the state, one slaveholding enterprises were much more organized by individuals even though they might have been sustained through other forms of state support. But I would say what I've been interested in and obviously this work is kind of just looking at some of this is especially the practices of colonialism more broadly and thinking about how manpower fits into this because it's of course clear that all of these practices of exploiting manpower were very necessary to any kind of activities especially pre-industrialization. So pre-late 18th century, you needed manual labor for most tasks. And so we can see that in some ways thinking about military labor, colonial labor, enslaved labor, they are all part of the attempt for various groups including political authorities that are desperate for labor and for manpower. And so they're often kind of sharing resources. Sometimes they're competing for resources and I think they're using similar infrastructure and similar techniques. And we can see this of course, even in terms of how armies and navies are often recruiting in and asking to recruit in enslaved populations and then having debates with those local local governors and local power and plantation owners who don't wanna give up what they see as being precious labor. So I think although they aren't the same, I think it's very useful in a kind of historical way to think about this period in which actually we're looking at shared pools of sometimes exploited labor. So thank you for your question. I'll jump in again because Dean has a kind of sprawling question, it's easier for me just to read it while you're speaking. So he's interested in change over time and by region. So the question broadly is, do the historical statistics allow differentiation between killed in action, grave wounds with infection or recovery risk and diseases as a three band analysis in which you can observe statistical improvements in lowering, for example, killed in actions and grave room mortality rates percentage wise versus diseases and infections or is it stable? Great question. I need more time to do a large scale giant study that would let me answer that. But I think, so this to me is a kind of interesting point. So the categories I think are there surprisingly early on about this notion that there's actually, so this is why I became so interested in these returns because they're one of the early examples in which they have a category just for sick. And so obviously somebody works on the history of disease. It was amazing to see that separated out as its own category and then to get therefore very detailed morbidity rates in ways that probably otherwise you just wouldn't be able to differentiate from wounded and also that they have categories that are for killed and categories that are for dead.  So again, it's very nice to separate those out. And on the one hand, of course, you could argue, well, there's more attention being paid. Someone like Knight and Gail is putting public attention on some of these statistics. But of course, on the other hand, this is why I think it's so hard to craft a kind of straightforward narrative towards the modern period as a notion of progress. Because of course, in the 19th century, we also see expansion of garrisons and of activities into other parts of the world that have much higher rates of sickness. And again, I think this is where in the 20th century, obviously we have very mortal conflicts happening all the time. I was thinking how when I was discussing with a colleague, the Sri Lankan Civil Wars, what I thought was very interesting is a lot of the criticism that people might have seen from public opinion was about how the mortality rates were so high in the Sri Lankan Civil Wars and that they never would have been accepted if they had happened in a Western part of the world. And so I think that's an interesting point about how this, right? It's not just a chronological question. It might also be a geographical or political question. And in this case, of course, I think it's an interesting point even with disease rates. Because you could of course argue that overall we've clearly have an increase in human life expectancy, but of course that varies very much by location. And of course there are various periods in time in which we see sudden dips. So even if we were to say there's a kind of drift towards progress across the modern period, I think wars are much harder because of course, then you need to think about which wars you're going to compare it with. Can you do an average? Is it actually useful to do, say, an average of all wars? And I'd also emphasize one of the most interesting points we have, and this is also the case with diseases where we don't have reliable data. Again, with a lot of these places, so again, the Sri Lankan Civil War was a very good case. But one of the debates was that there was no data because journalists and other people were not allowed in to actually see what was going on. And so what we're dealing with might be kind of sophisticated modeling, but in some ways we're dealing with a lack of data. And that's actually of course a reality of many wars and many parts of the world. Next question, do you think that the narratives we craft around the meaning of numbers hold particular weight in politics? Do you think it's useful for societies to focus on excess mortality? So definitely, I think it's very true that numbers hold a particular role for politics. And this is where I think Ted Porter's work on trusted numbers, especially where he very much ties it to the rise of modern forms of politics and decision-making in some ways. He has this very nice point about how what numbers let you do is it appears when you use numbers that you yourself are not making the decision but the numbers are making the decision for you, which is a kind of interesting form of modern politics, that instead of you actually making the decision, you've just followed the numbers. So I think it is true that there's a kind of narrative about that, which is why I think it's so interesting to have us think about how we use these numbers because of course it's not that numbers mean nothing, it just means that we need to think very carefully. And so this question of focusing on excess mortality. I mean, in some ways I think it's a very useful question because it makes us think about this context which is what we wanna think of as being normal mortality or acceptable mortality. And as a historian, I think it's a really important point to think about what we study and what we don't study. So it strikes me that it's true that we're... So Margaret Pelling had this really nice line in our article where she points out that historians are drawn to the drama of excess. And in her case, she was talking about epidemics, but we can think about that also when we think about which wars we study and how we want to understand those wars. So I think it's justifiable in some ways that we focus on questions about excess mortality, but only if then that means that we're also thinking about what that relies upon, which is also of course an assumption about what we might call normal or acceptable mortality, because that's obviously something that we don't want to take for granted if that somewhat answers your question. Oh, question on Sri Lanka. What are my thoughts on how to accurately distinguish between civilian and combatant on what parameters to consider? I am not an expert at all on that. So I will not answer this except to say, and of course I think that's one of the major points in so many of these debates, right? The categorization and that's what kind of fascinates me. So those returns fascinate me because they have those clear categories and those categories let us make these analyses. And but of course the categories assume so many important, well, important principles. And so exactly right as to how we distinguish between civilian and combatant. But of course, this is I think also an age old question within the history of war. Certainly in the 18th century, it's very active, perhaps not so much in some of the European wars, but certainly in the conflicts that I look at that take place anywhere outside of Europe and certainly the kind of range of warfare in which very often you have two sides that are fighting who really do have a different understanding of what kind of war they're waging. So I wouldn't want to be the person who sets those parameters, but I think it's very important to realize the significance of the categories when collecting numbers. Thank you for that. Erica, I'm gonna quickly ask you a question and Dean, I can see you're kind of continuing the chat there with Erica, could you kind of add a little bit there to make your question a bit more clearer perhaps? And then we can come back to Erica and she can address it. So while you're having a think, Dean, I'll throw one into the mix. So when it comes to history, we often disagree over who matters, right? So we can talk about individuals, especially those at the top. And you can arguably, we also really need to explore the behavior of cohorts of individuals. And I wonder, are these statistics a useful and reliable way to talk about collective human agency? Can you kind of theorize a bit more about, I mean, I think what you're doing in terms of inserting another level arguably into how we understand change and continuity. Yeah, so thinking about how statistics in some ways kind of shape our assumptions about agency in some ways by focusing on... But tell us also about what individuals are doing. Yeah. And we can read the diary of a soldier in a slit trench. And it's very hard to link that into a narrative of outcome. That's very true. Yeah, and I think, so it's a really interesting point for historians who work on the rise of statistics and the rise of really statistical thinking is of course exactly that, then it becomes a question about the law of averages, right? And so both that, then one is thinking about what does an average person do? But then there's also, I mean, some theorists would even point out what that means is that anyone who's not average therefore becomes not just not average, but abnormal outside the normal. And so what it means to be outside the norm and what it means then about standardization of behavior and action. And so I think it is, right? This is something where I think Foucault was very excited about the notion of thinking about these modern ways of thinking and what it means to think at the level of population rather than at the level of just a collection of individuals and how that changes some of our decision-making. And so I think it is obviously there. I think, and that's what I find very interesting when we look at those returns on the one hand, there's a way in which we want to say those are very cold calculations, right? That military officials in some ways are simply sitting in some room with these pieces of paper saying, so we're going to lose 20,000 with this campaign. So that's why we need to move these over here to just kind of put them into that force. But I think there's also an interesting point then about how of course we also invest in some of these sources. So I would argue there's a flip side to that, right? Which is that also these are very valuable resources. And so as much as one might be making these cold calculations, one is also making the cold calculations that they're valuable, and therefore one needs to invest in keeping them alive and effective. Now, whether that is a better way of decision-making and of thinking about military campaigns than one that's more focused on individuals and on agency, I think then you start to get into these broader debates about decision-making. But I do think what's interesting is to see the historical development of this, especially across the 18th century and how decision-making changes, as you're saying, because people can think in the notion of larger numbers and thinking about populations, and therefore think really across broader categories. So I think it's true that there's both a kind of dehumanizing aspect. But then I think like in the commemoration practices, I was struck by how so many of the post-war commemoration practices are to take these numbers and then to turn them into names and individual stories. And you see this with the Vietnam War and the US press where they're very keen on having names and pictures of every individual to kind of push back against having a numerical version of the war. And so there are different methods for that. Thank you, Jonathan. Oh, Mark has a hand up. Hi, Erica. Sorry, can you hear me? Yeah. All right, so I have a question, because you alluded several times in your talk to sort of military methods and techniques sort of expanding into sort of wider collodial systems of rule. And I was wondering if you could just maybe speak a bit more to that, because as someone who's interested in an empire and who does sort of 19th century Algeria and India, that seems to gel exactly with what I look at. Algeria for the first several decades is ruled directly by the military. It's military officers running things like the Buho Ahab in charge of enumerating and saying how many Algerians are there, similar things in India where officers are doing trigonometrical surveys, censuses, collecting other forms of data. Is that what you see in other colonial contacts in the early modern period and also in different geographic areas as well? Yes, and I think to me like this is the fascinating point that it's quite clear that, and it shouldn't be surprising, if the first kind of contact and practice that we see in colonial for European colonies is through militaries, then of course we also have military practices. And so censuses I think are always a very good example of this because one of the, there's constant attempts in Europe to try to have censuses, some more successful than others, especially in Northern Europe. But what we do see is very early censuses that happen in colonial locations. And of course it seems fairly obvious maybe just to me that these are tied to military concerns as much as they are tied to kind of colonial territorial political concerns and that the two conflate. So I think there's a very interesting way in thinking about the overlap between the military and the colonial practices. And there's been a lot, especially written on censuses, but also statistical practices as a form of colonial method keeping, say in British India in the 19th century. But it always strikes me interesting to kind of step back and think about how many of these are actually picking up on military interests even about the mapping of landscapes. Of course, because again it's a similar way of thinking about resources. I mean there's also of course the flip side which is that it's quite clear that, and especially we see this with military officials that one then produces something that looks like a very impressive census map or bit of knowledge, but actually of course sometimes I think it might be more impressive for the bureaucrats than it actually is realistically accurate. So I think there's always a question when we see these impressive bits of paperwork that seem to have mapped out populations. And that seems very very sophisticated in their statistical techniques. And I think we should always kind of be a little skeptical as to whether this is accurate. Because of course then you often read the records of those who are actually living there saying, no one actually came to speak to me for 50 years. So I don't know why you think you know the population. So it's an interesting point too about how these become I think, and I don't wanna denigrate them, but there are also symbolic practices about having authority over populations and over a territory, but yeah, I think very much so, I agree with that. If I can just add one other thing quickly, your talk really reminded me a lot of sort of the opening of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage where there's the sergeant complaining that there's never any order in society unless you have a war, right? Because you have to have muster roles, you have to count how many cows there are. And it seems to me, when you have outside war, the soldiers doing the same functions, then there are very interesting implications for how civil society ostensibly is governed, particularly in colonial situations, which have large military elements. But I'll leave it there and maybe we can do some more questions. No, that's great. Thanks very much. So Dean has done exactly as I asked and I'll kind of summarize, and I think it's good questions. We're coming back to this issue of kind of rates of mortality and sickness and how they've changed over time and place. And I think the fundamental question is to what extent is technology determinant of these changes? And I know you've written about this kind of stuff. We talk about culture and expertise and everything as well. Well, as a good historian of science, of course, I would say, but technology also is going to be part of culture and society just like wars and epidemics might be. So I think it's an interesting point, right? And I think this gets back to, there's a kind of longstanding discussion about whether medicine, right? Whether how we should see medicine in war is a kind of, it develops all these innovations, these medical innovations that helps civilian society in various ways. We can think about penicillin and so on, but then also, of course, that it's in some ways used to kind of keep wars going and the lethality wars and so on and how this is used. And I think it's a historian, Roger Cooter, who kind of pointed out, look, all of these suggest that somehow these are taking place in separate spheres. And I suppose I would suggest the same thing with their question of technology, right? Because in some ways, I would say for historians of science, they talk about something called paper technologies, which is those forms that I was portraying those returns can be described as a kind of technology in the sense that they're kind of tool, they make us think differently, they help us in terms of how it shapes our knowledge. And so there's ways in which all of these things are technology in that we use them and we integrate them in terms of our culture and our society. So I think, so it's a very good question, but I think it's also this kind of underlying question of, do we really think that technology is driving these things or actually do we think that people select from different parts of technology and therefore it's actually decision-making within there? So I'm keen to think about technology within this context. And of course, David Edgerton is probably someone who has written the most convincingly on these questions. And I would say very much if you want to think about, to kind of have a step back and think about how we use technology to try to explain things. You know, he would be the person that kind of challenges some of our assumptions and helps us to rethink technology. So thank you very much for that. Drones. Assuming one side has drones and the other doesn't, will drone users be more casual about, sorry, casual about conducting wars because the other side will suffer more? So one of the themes that I think is very interesting throughout has been the role of public opinion in the conduct of war. And I think if we think about, one of I think the implications of having precise numbers has been about the ability to shape public opinion, mobilize public opinion and the question of access mortality or when the public feels that it's a problematic war. And in some ways I suppose in the same way that I think there's not a certain answer when something is problematic, I suppose I would like to think that what we see, especially from the 18th century onwards is that war is always conducted within the context of a kind of scrutiny of the public or of opposition politicians. And so I think again, although we talk about effectiveness in terms of causing casualties, I think we should also always be aware of the restraints that are placed on various groups because there's an expectation that if they don't conduct war appropriately, not only will there be kind of legal repercussions but just you can lose support for your war. And I think that's been a very crucial part of the nature of modern war. So I wonder if we insert in some of this notion of public opinion, then that might help us to think about how we assess or how we might be predicting activities during war. But that's my kind of historical take on what I see from the 18th century. Thank you for that, Carol. Angeliki, very nice to see you on here. How can we think through the metrics of war and excess mortality when the sources and numbers are unreliable as they can be for 18th century North America? And that is because Angeliki is working on 17th and 18th century North America. Yes, good questions. So one of the things I think is very interesting is of course in some ways, numbers and sources might still be unreliable. There's often a lot of debates and discussion we have today even in where we might have sophisticated political infrastructure about the reliability of numbers and the reliability of the categories that we've been talking about who classifies and how they're classified. And I think to me that's one of the interesting points is when it is that people can become very interested in having precise and what they see as reliable numbers. I think returns are one way that those in the 16th, 17th and 18th century tried to produce what they thought were reliable numbers but obviously they're only as reliable as those who are recording them. And in some ways, I think there's an interesting point that what returns does is instead of people having to rely on whether or not an individual was trustworthy and instead to construct a system that attempted to make to take away some of that authority from the individual and instead to have the system produce reliability which is something that we can see very much in modern scientific methods. So in some ways, some numbers, even for earlier periods, we could suggest are somewhat reliable or at least can be compared with each other. And then we can also think about whether any of our numbers, how reliable are they? And I think like all skeptics or otherwise known as researchers, right? We can always want to think about the sources for our numbers because to me it always strikes me that historians sometimes might be more willing to trust numbers than they might be willing to trust narratives. And that's an interesting assumption and I don't know why that is because of course numbers can be just as easily falsified as a subjective account by an individual. Thanks Angeliki. So it's not the case that the level of significance attached to numbers depends on whether the numbers are subsumed within a certain narrative or otherwise. Yes, I agree. And the kids of Sri Lanka, the 4th and 20th and more, especially between 2008 and 2009, the number of casualties and the level of human suburb was subsumed within a counter-terrorist narrative. COVID-19 is yet another illustration of how states could control the significance attached to numbers. So I agree that numbers only make sense to us within a context. And as you point out, in some ways, we can think about that context as a narrative. I think that you're right that it's an interesting question about who, as people say, who controls the narrative. And so I think it's an interesting point that it's not just about the availability of numbers, but then how we mobilize the context. And I think it sounds like, you know, much more about the Sri Lankan Civil Wars than IG, but one of the things I've noticed is of course, like campaigns in general to change public opinion or to mobilize political support, a lot of it has been about not only obtaining numbers, but then to mobilize those numbers and to put them, as you say, within a narrative. So obviously there's been documentary films made, books published in which people in some ways are trying to reach an audience and to explain why it is that it's significant. And so I think it's an interesting point, as you say, states might be able to control the significance attached to numbers, but I think there's also been a way in which, right, one would argue that many people have attempted, therefore, in some ways to rest those numbers back from states. And that's why I find so interesting about the returns during 18th century wars where on the one hand, they were very useful to political authorities, but then of course, if they got into the wrong hands, opposition politicians could use them for their own goods to actually undermine that political authority. So I think as you say, it's about context, but that's why they can be mobilized and used as tools on both sides of debates. So thank you for that. Do I have thoughts in relation to genocide where the destruction of a group of people has often been accompanied by the destruction of the documentation or counting of the people who were killed? Yeah, how do we understand them? So yes, so it's an interesting point, isn't it? So this is where I've really been struck by, obviously this point about counting and having numbers and what having precise numbers does to the argument about whether something is a serious calamity, say, or a crisis, and it's an interesting point of needing documentation. There's been a lot of studies done on the attempts obviously in some ways to ignore or to destroy documentation and partly because of the legal repercussions which we're now starting to see in which the courts are actually an avenue in which people use the documentation and use the numbers to try to make that argument. So I think to me it's an interesting point why it is that we think that having precise numbers will help to answer obviously what is a kind of tragedy and there's been a lot of work done on what it means not to be able to document and even in some ways to identify, especially as you say this question of genocide and then of course whether one needs some kind of number in order to say this is a genocide versus this is just something that's very sad. But it's a very good point except I would of course say and of course these are all modern categories in some ways. People weren't necessarily thinking about things in terms of a genocide in the 18th century though they often would mobilize the notion of numbers to think about whether a tragedy had taken place. So but it's a good example of thinking about this kind of the politics of numbers. So the use of numbers within the Prussian military compared with others. Now you've got me there because I don't necessarily work on the Prussian military. I will say if this is for the, especially for the 18th century what does seem clear is that what I haven't quite figured out and this is where it's a call out to all historians out there who will definitely know more than I do. One thing I'd love to know is for people to send in and this is where I have a lot of the images and that I used in the talk today is people sharing the archives of the armies that they work on. Because of course this is when I realized that actually many armies who are fighting each other use the same paperwork and same forms as each other. And so it seems as if somewhere by the later 18th century most European armies are somewhat standardized. And this makes sense also if we think about an earlier period in which they often had mercenary soldiers. So very often, for example, the Swiss mercenaries you see having the forms that are kind of being moved around and shared among European powers. So I don't necessarily know specifically about the Prussian military. My guess is that of course it's following a general European trend or perhaps even setting part of those trends because it's very hard to tell from the archives is who is starting some of these practices and who is following them. But I just find it fascinating that there's a co-current shared system even among those who are fighting each other. So thank you for that. So we have a question from Jesse. And what I suggest to the audience is if anybody else wants to throw in a last question or two far now. So we give Erica, she's answered over 20 questions already which is fantastic. Thank you, Erica. So maybe answer Jesse's. If anybody else wants to get one quickly, great. Otherwise we'll call Stumps soon enough. So Jesse, great question. Do I think the systematization of war has made it more severe? Does the reliance of politicians and those in power on these numbers cause them to view people's lives in the abstracts a bit like what Jonathan was raising? Has that made war today more atrocious today than it was before the 20th century when genocide was less common or non-existent? So there's a very interesting thing here about how to measure violence. And of course it's a real question. Obviously Stephen Pinker had the big book kind of arguing on the decline of violence but there's also been this debate on what we're measuring when we say violence in wars, what we're defining as a war. This is a typical academic question, right? You just start getting burrowing down deeper and deeper. But I think, so on the one hand, and I think this goes back to Jonathan's point, how there's this way obviously that when we see statistics and numbers, it seems as if we've kind of dehumanized the practice of war. But of course, I think it's also interesting we could argue the opposite, right? That having precise numbers, especially those of casualties might make us more attentive to the costs of war and might open people to more criticism because they have precise numbers. Now, I suppose what I'd also wanna emphasize though is apart from finding that it's very difficult to assess this because I think what's difficult is to actually compare, right? And one of the interesting points about the use of numbers was that it's supposed to make things comparable but at the same time it means that we need to know for measuring the same things. And what's interesting with the rise of returns is of course it means that really only at least in Europe, it's only from the 18th century onwards that we have precise numbers before that. And you can see this in the records very often. We have very kind of general, some might say even symbolic accounts of how many people were fighting and how many people died. And so it's actually of course very hard to know also in the context of population numbers that are very uncertain whether those wars are less or more destructive than wars today. So I think it's a really interesting question about can we even measure what we think is more atrocious or less atrocious? And then also do we actually think that numbers within them contain some kind of guide because I would suggest that the numbers themselves are actually neutral. They could go either way when we see the numbers, right? And I think this is this interesting point about excess mortality. Just in and of itself, a number isn't a very good indication for us whether it's shocking or not. It's in the context of other data that then we can start to make those decisions. But so I think it's very hard to have a clear historical narrative but that certainly shouldn't stop us from trying to think about how we're making those comparisons and on what basis. And I think thinking very carefully about where we have data and especially quantitative data and where we don't have quantitative data which might be for much of the historical record and also actually for much of the world. So thank you for your question, Tassim. Right, let's call it a day there. I've no doubt again that there is enthusiastic clapping and whooping no less across studies and everywhere for those who's listening. You've provided us with an excellent talk, Erika. Thank you. You've engaged fully with the questions well over, I think 20 at this stage. You've made us think about sources, methodology, ideas, it's a big night for us and this is Michael Howard Center and you delivered. So thank you for that. Thank you for everybody who attended. We have more events coming up. As Mark said, please have a look at the website. Please sign up for our mailing list and you can come along to more exciting and brilliant history of war in the future. So that leaves it to me to say good night, everybody. Stay safe, stay well. Cheers now, bye-bye.