World Wars

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I’ve long felt that we should alter the numbering of world wars (shooting wars, at least). The Seven Years War was, by any metric, a truly global conflict. It lasted almost seven years, took place on four continents, involved more than twenty belligerents, and resulted in more than one million casualties.

Shouldn’t this qualify as ‘The First World War’?

Boru

[brewer]

I vote #1 as the Genghis khan years.

[polymath257]

I vote #1 as the Genghis khan years.

The Mongol years didn't manage to involve the Americas or Africa.

[Deesse23]

I vote #1 as the Genghis khan years.

The Mongol years didn't manage to involve the Americas or Africa.

One could argue the Mamluks were seated in Cairo/Africa.

But yeah, strictly speaking no global war could have happened before 1492.

[polymath257]

The Mongol years didn't manage to involve the Americas or Africa.

One could argue the Mamluks were seated in Cairo/Africa.

But yeah, strictly speaking no global war could have happened before 1492.

Well, unless it involved the Vikings. I don't recall the Normans having African territory, though. And they didn't really get further east than Rus.

[The Grand Nudger]

They held a part of North Africa from Sicily, didn’t they?

[Anomalocaris]

If a world war is to be defined as involving major active belligerents from almost all the inhabited continents,  as opposed to merely involving major active belligerents from one or two continents whose mutual struggles spilled over onto almost all the inhabited continents, then I would say WWI was still the first to qualify as aworld war,  while WWII was a much more thorough going world war.  I would argue WWI and WWII was in fact one single world war with a 21 year ceasefire in the middle, where it took the second part to resolve issues that launched the first part.

If a world war is to be defined as a war in which majority of the world’s population, or large portions of the population from each of the inhabited continents, had major skin in the game, then WWI and WWII I think also qualify as the first real world wars, where as 7 years war or napoleonic war were regional war that happen to involve mutual skirmishes that occurred outside the core regions of the major belligerents.

[polymath257]

They held a part of North Africa from Sicily, didn’t they?

I know they held Sicily, but I'm not sure about any North African holdings. I believe the Arabs were in control of the whole coast at the time.

[The Grand Nudger]

Tunisia, and parts of Algeria and Libya. 1146-1148. It would fall to the caliphate within a decade.

[brewer]

I vote #1 as the Genghis khan years.

The Mongol years didn't manage to involve the Americas or Africa.

It was their world at the time. Anyplace else and they would have fallen off the edge.