Except for Annette Becker's essay (Chapter 31), my obligation seems to be the only one that is unabashedly comparative in conception. By that very fact, my anxiety level along with my responsibility are considerably raised since it seems I am expected to provide the fundamental justification for this Conference! (It is only fair to the organizers of the conference for me to admit that their suggestion was only that I would keep the conferees from making “premature comparisons.”) Yet, behind the project stands the implication that there is a sound reason for bringing these two military activities into historical comparison. It is true that they happen to occur in a narrow time frame. Yet a common time frame is hardly a sufficient basis for comparison. For, if it were, why not include the Taiping Rebellion in China, which was both contemporaneous, occurring between 1850 and 1864, and much more costly in loss of life - always a good historical measure for significance, after all - than the American Civil War and all three of the German Wars of Unification taken together. It has been reliably estimated that more than 30 million people perished before the Taipings were put down.

Moreover, the Chinese struggle, like the American Civil War, was a rebellion, whereas the German wars were said to be conflicts to create a new Empire rather than to disrupt or change an established one. Furthermore, the official name of the American conflict is the War of the Rebellion, a title which, on the face of it, seems to make it have more in common with the Chinese struggle than with the three German wars, especially when this conference places the latter under the rubric of Wars of Unification.