Quote Originally Posted by The Darknight Detective View Post
Take our casualties in WWII compared to the Civil War - they're roughly the same in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of the US population, the latter was unquestionably more damaging to the citizenry than the former. In fact, you can combine both WWII and WWI casualties and they still don't remotely approach the Civil War numbers as a percentage.
Part of this is also due to the massive population explosion the world has gone through in the past couple centuries.

in 1750 the global population was 700 million, hitting 1 billion for the first time in 1804 (1.2 billion in 1850), 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, and so on. But the population only grew from 200 million at the BC/AD flip to 275 million in the year 1000. So smaller total numbers in the past are likely to be larger percentages of the whole than larger total numbers are today.