Spent on war 2024 USD$0no reliable estimates before 1775
Wars recorded so far0
3000BCE
5,000 years · one map
warhistory
Every recorded war we could reasonably count, played across the planet in time. The lives. The money. The land taken, and who it was taken for.
Space to pause · ← → to move through time · drag the timeline
The present
And it is not over.
Method & sources
This is a curated record of notable wars, not a complete one. Many conflicts — especially before writing, and outside the empires that kept archives — left no countable trace. A quiet map in antiquity is a gap in the record, not a gap in the violence.
Deaths are rounded mid-range estimates of total deaths (military and civilian, including war-driven famine and disease where historians include them). Ranges for many wars span an order of magnitude; we take a defensible middle.
Displaced, enslaved or deported is counted only where scholarship gives a figure.
Spending is shown only where reasonable estimates exist (mostly from the 18th century on), converted roughly to 2024 US dollars. It excludes reconstruction, veterans' care and interest, so it understates the true cost.
Weapons on the map are illustrative of the era, not of specific battles.
Drawn from: Correlates of War Project; Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP); Our World in Data; Brown University Costs of War; Matthew White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things; Encyclopaedia Britannica; standard academic histories of each conflict.