I am specifically speaking of deaths during the construction phase, not an accident afterwards, or even the intended consequence of correctly using a product (so nuclear bombs, firebombs or chlorine gas doesn’t count).
The current candidate as far as I can see is the Panama Canal. When the French started it during the 1880s they lost 22,000 men before giving up, mostly due to malaria. The United States took over several years later and took great measures to eliminate the causes of malaria. By the time the Canal was finished another 6,000 men had died, bringing the total to 28,000 people.
although you don’t really have credible sources, the great wall of China supposedly cost millions of lives. I gotta imagine that the pyramids took out more than the 30 thousand on the Panama canal
I’m gonna go with the Great Wall as well. Not that it is the guaranteed truth or anything, but I saw a TV show about the Great Wall just the other day that claimed that one person died for every three feet of Wall.
The Wall is 3,948 miles miles long. That ciphers out to about 7 million dead.
Thanks for the info guys. I didn’t know much about either the White Sea-Baltic canal or the Burma Railway so that was some good stuff. It looks like the great wall wins just because it took such a long time to make. I don’t think you can really lump every single pyramid ever made and call it one project. I suppose it could be reasonable that one pyramid could be comparable to a Panama Canal but we don’t really have the numbers to make such a solid conclusion, do we?
I doubt that the Egyptian pyramids - even taken together - come anywhere close to the totals for White Sea Canal or the Burma Railway. There’s been a lot of attention in the last couple of decades on the workforce of pyramid builders and the consensus these days about their conditions bears little relation to the popular picture:
Nor would the deathrate from disease have been much different from normal life in the Nile valley.
Clearly a pyramid building site would have been a dangerous place. But I doubt it was much more dangerous to be a builder on one than on, say, Chartes cathedral.
While virtually nothing is known about the conditions on the Great Wall, this may even be a similar case. A workforce mainly made up of peasants doing a short annual stint on the project, together with a set of specialist artisans. The issue is complicated by the fact that it was never one project. What we now lump together as “the Great Wall” was built in stages in very different styles - from simple earth embankments to monumental dressed stone - at very different times.
The original part of the great wall was supposed to have led directly to around 100,000 deaths. Possible still the greatest killer among construction projects, but not absurdly lethal. And that was mostly due to the Qin fanatacism for forced labor - they did similar things (with a less lethal result) on the Grand Canal project.
Whether or not the stories are true is unknown, since they Qin were pretty brutal but definitely skewed in history by their many enemies, and certainly the succeeding Han dynasty.
Surely the results of Stalin’s Five Year Plans, such as the Dnepr Dam and “Road of Bones”, built buy gulag slave labour at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, would win this hands down.
griffin1977, the problem I see with including those projects is that one can make the argument that the deaths were the planned result, with the constructed edifaces being simply an unavoidable byproduct of the efforts.
I wouldn’t say that… The gulag workers were expendable in the extreme, and absolutely no attempt was made to prevent their deaths, but they were not death camps in the way German concentration camps were.
Couple more cites on the pyramids. Seems like they keep revising the numbers needed downward as they learn more. It’s also considered very unlikely at this point that slaves were used in any significant numbers to build them. The workforce was treated fairly well, judging from settlement remains. The pyramids may have been public works projects to provide work and support during the off season. Or the workers could have been required to contribute as part of a labor tax, which would make things semi-voluntary. Either way, slaves don’t seem to come into the picture and the death toll from working conditions doesn’t seem to be particularly high, as you would expect if they were using workers who they would be depending on for other labor during the growing season.