Violence and War : measuring Homicide in Belgium (1900-1950)

Vesentini, Frédéric [UCL] Rousseaux, Xavier [UCL] Vrints, Antoon [Université de Gand]

Ever since the appearance of Ted Gurr’s famous graph presenting homicide rates for 100,000 inhabitants of England, from the 13th to the 20th century, many historians and social scientists have been fascinated by the multi-secular trend described by its curve. Initially focused on English data, the debate spread around the Western World (from Finland to Amsterdam, and to the United States). Pieter Spierenburg gave the first synthetic interpretation of this trend, based on Amsterdam archival material (Spierenburg, 1994, pp. 701–716). Manuel Eisner has recently published a complex interpretation of the data and the theories built around it (Eisner, 2003, pp. 83–142).