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History's darkest chapters weren't just tragedies – they were turning points that forever altered humanity. Join us as we examine the catastrophic events that decimated populations and reshaped our world! Our countdown includes the Black Death, World War II, Genghis Khan's conquests and more! Which event do you think had the biggest impact on civilization?
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00:00Six months after the plague invades Europe, thousands are dead.
00:05Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at events that not only took millions of lives,
00:10but also reshaped civilizations, redrew borders, and changed the course of human history forever.
00:15Africans had become a hot commodity in a thriving transatlantic slave trade.
00:21The Bengal Famine.
00:22While World War II raged across continents in 1943, a silent catastrophe unfolded in British-ruled India.
00:28I do think that it is one of the examples of brutality and, you know, oppression, exploitation of the British government.
00:43A deadly combination of wartime rice export policies, cyclone damage, and market manipulation served as a trigger for mass starvation across Bengal.
00:52Villages were emptied as millions wandered in search of food.
00:55I don't know how many people are in our family, but I don't know how many people are in the world.
01:03I don't know how many people are in the world.
01:07Eyewitness reports described roads lined with skeletal figures and collapsed families beside marketplaces they couldn't afford to buy from.
01:14Official estimates for the death toll on the Bengal Famine are between 2 and 3 million, though some argue higher figures.
01:20The famine was a haunting example of the consequence of political negligence over basic human survival.
01:26But I don't think we can blame Churchill for causing it.
01:29What we can say is that he didn't alleviate it or send relief when he had the ability to do so.
01:37We can blame him for prioritizing white lives and European lives over South Asian lives.
01:45The An Lushan Rebellion
01:47While overshadowed by better-known wars, the An Lushan Rebellion during China's Tang Dynasty is among the deadliest conflicts in human history.
01:54The apocalyptic eight-year rebellion of General An Lushan, which saw the end of the Tang dream of a greater China.
02:04The conflict began when General An Lushan revolted against imperial rule.
02:08The revolt spiraled into a chaotic civil war that resulted in famine, plague, and mass displacement.
02:15Ancient records estimate 13 to 36 million deaths.
02:19The Great Rebellion of the An Lushan period was extremely hard on China.
02:26An enormous number of people were killed or displaced.
02:30While a wide range, it was likely somewhere around 15% of the world's population at that point in history.
02:35Cities were abandoned, farmlands destroyed, and trust in the once-glorious Tang Empire was shattered forever.
02:42While few recall the rebellion outside of East Asia, the devastation it left behind permanently weakened imperial China and altered dynastic politics for centuries.
02:51As government broke down, eight years of horror unfolded.
02:56It was a national catastrophe.
02:58The Taiping Rebellion
02:59Hang Zhuxuan was a man who believed that he was the brother of Jesus Christ.
03:03With this belief, he led the Taiping Rebellion, a 14-year conflict aimed to build a heavenly kingdom of great peace.
03:10Centered in southern China, the rebellion delivered unimaginable carnage.
03:14Entire provinces were scorched, cities leveled, and fields stripped bare.
03:19The battles of the rebellion weren't the only reasons for the massive death toll of 20 to 30 million.
03:23The ensuing starvation and spread of disease also claimed millions.
03:27The Qing Dynasty survived, but only barely.
03:30It was profoundly weakened.
03:31The Taiping Rebellion was a war of visions, where ideology became as deadly as bullets.
03:37Spanish Flu Pandemic
03:38The aftermath of World War I saw the world dealt a massive blow in the form of a pandemic that infected nearly one-third of the global population.
03:46But there's another horror unfolding in the shadow of war.
03:51A deadly virus sweeping the world.
03:54The Spanish Flu killed the young, and healthy, with terrifying speed.
03:59Some victims died within 24 hours of symptoms.
04:02Outpacing even the Black Death and annual mortality, the Flu claimed tens of millions of lives.
04:07For those to actually infect another person, you'd need the person to be pretty close, less than one meter for sure.
04:13And therefore, it's not surprising that people living in very densely populated areas are much more likely to catch flu from one another.
04:21Streets were emptied, bodies were buried in mass graves, and doctors fell alongside their patients.
04:27The medical field was unprepared for the pandemic.
04:29Antibiotics didn't exist at this point in history.
04:31A misinformation spread as fast as the virus.
04:34Though overshadowed by war, this pandemic forever changed global public health, leading to modern disease surveillance systems.
04:41Even with a serious virus emerging, the idea behind all of these plans is that that sort of case fatality rate would not be seen.
04:49World War I.
04:50The war to end all wars introduced industrialized killing on an unimaginable scale.
04:55The First World War is fought on a scale never before seen in the whole of human history.
05:00With between 15 and 22 million deaths, World War I oversaw trenches filled with gas, shellfire, and mud in a moment of mechanized horror in human history.
05:10Empires such as that of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German crumbled.
05:15It is a war between empires that destroys empires.
05:20It is a war in which the old rulers pay scant regard for the lives of ordinary people.
05:25New nations emerged from the ruins.
05:27The global war reshaped borders, economies, and ideologies.
05:31But peace proved elusive.
05:33The Treaty of Versailles, meant to end the war, instead set the stage for the next global catastrophe.
05:38World War I didn't just end in age.
05:40It opened in the wounds of the 20th century.
05:42The First World War changes the course of human history.
05:47Out of it comes communism and fascism.
05:50Out of it comes votes for every citizen, the foundation of modern democracy.
05:56Genghis Khan's Conquests.
05:58The rise of Genghis Khan saw the Mongol Empire unleash a storm of conquest that tore across Eurasia.
06:04The Mongolian tribes exploded out of the Central Asian steppes with a ferocity never seen before,
06:09on a campaign of bloodthirsty conquest that would last for the next 100 years.
06:15With nearly 40 to 60 million deaths, the attacks shrank the world's population by as much as 11%.
06:21But this was not just any ordinary war.
06:23More than casualties, the Mongols practiced psychological warfare.
06:27The Mongolian battlefield tactics and their remarkable courage and resilience have become the stuff of legend.
06:33The Horde demanded surrender or annihilation.
06:36Victims had no alternative.
06:38Yet the empire's legacy wasn't only destruction.
06:40They built trade routes, promoted religious tolerance, and connected the East and West under a single empire.
06:46The paradox remains.
06:47One of humanity's bloodiest forces also birthed one of history's most connected worlds.
06:52The Mongolian army proved themselves to be adaptable, resourceful, astute, and disciplined.
06:58The Atlantic slave trade.
07:00For over three centuries, around 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic in chains.
07:0613 million innocent victims, just like Equiano, would be stolen from their homes and sent into slavery.
07:13Millions more died during raids, marches, and the brutal Middle Passage, where the victims were crammed in shipholds.
07:20Disease, starvation, and despair claimed the lives of many in those closeted spaces.
07:25Being black in the United States was at some level a mark of slavery.
07:30Blackness was understood to be a mark of degradation, which went along with slavery.
07:38Beyond the deaths, the transatlantic slave trade inflicted generational trauma.
07:42It was an event symbolic of cultural rupture and economic exploitation on a global scale.
07:48Nations were built on the backs of stolen labor, while entire African societies were depopulated.
07:53Unlike other historical events, the Atlantic slave trade was not only a single catastrophe.
07:57Rather, it was a system of exploitation, one meticulously constructed to profit from human suffering.
08:03People tend to believe that slavery is a thing of the past.
08:07And interestingly, you know, in the United States particularly, we tend to pat ourselves on the back and say,
08:11well, we got rid of slavery.
08:13But there are something like 27 million people in slavery today.
08:17World War II.
08:17When considering massive short-term destruction on a global scale, no event in history matches up to World War II.
08:23On 1st September, 1939, Hitler launched an attack on Poland, marking the start of World War II.
08:32For the first time, foreign leaders recognized the extent of Hitler's madness.
08:37With 70 to 85 million deaths, about 3% of the world's population, the war spanned every ocean and continent.
08:44From Tokyo to Dresden, cities burned.
08:48Genocides, atomic bombs, and total warfare redefined humanity's capacity for devastation.
08:53When the Allied forces turned up at the camps, places like Belsen, the world was horrified when they saw the footage that emerged.
09:02Despite the war's ending, its legacy persisted in an era of global transformation.
09:07Decolonization, the new balance of superpowers, and the onset of the Cold War saw a world divided.
09:13World War II wasn't just a war.
09:15It was a pivot point that split modern history into a before and an after.
09:20But following victory, the Big Three, Britain, America, and the Soviet Union, fought each other for supremacy.
09:26The shape of the world we live in today is the legacy of events of 1945.
09:31European Colonization of the Americas.
09:34When European explorers arrived in the Americas, they unleashed one of history's deadliest demographic collapses.
09:39Disease, slavery, warfare, and displacement decimated indigenous populations in the Americas, with communities witnessing a decline up to 90%.
09:49This was an estimated 56 to 100 million lives that perished in the onslaught of Western colonization.
09:55Diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza traveled faster than armies.
10:00Ancient civilizations like the Aztec and Inca were shattered.
10:04Beyond the massive death toll, entire cultures, languages, and histories were erased.
10:09The world's balance of power shifted.
10:11New empires rose, built on the foundation of colonization.
10:15This wasn't just first contact, but an irreversible collision of worlds.
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10:35The Black Death, the most lethal pandemic to ever strike in world history, swept across Eurasia and North Africa,
10:42killing an estimated 75 to 200 million people.
10:45More than two out of every three persons you knew in Siena were gone.
10:52Families decimated, clans decimated, everybody decimated.
10:58The disease wiped out up to 50% of Europe's population.
11:01Bubos, fever, and sudden death terrorized medieval society.
11:05And mass graves filled up faster than prayers.
11:08So many died that all believed it was the end of the world.
11:13The horrific aftermath of the pandemic transformed the world.
11:17Labor shortages led to peasant uprisings.
11:19Wages rose, and the feudal system gradually began to show cracks and crumble.
11:24The Black Death not only ended many lives, but also an entire era,
11:28setting the stage for the modern world that followed.
11:30All over Europe, great cities lie deserted.
11:35Which of these events do you think shaped civilization the most?
11:38Let us know in the comments and subscribe for more history that shook the world.
11:43Let us know in the comments.
11:49Let us know in the comments.
11:50We'll see you next time.
11:51Bye bye.
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11:52We'll see you next time.
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