Edward Crankshaw has argued that the emancipation of serfs in Russia had been an initiative taken by Tsar Alexander II primarily in a bid to strengthen the Tsardom. The Crimean War, fought at the eve of Alexander II’s ascension, had proved to Europe that the prestige as a great power gained from the Napoleonic wars was overblown. The British and the French had also shown a disregard towards Russian interests that according to the Tsar’s younger brother Constantine- made Alexander “uneasy”. To match the strength of the British and French, radical changes were needed. The Crimean war showcased to Europe how of the 1 million standing army that the empire boasted, the limited railroads only allowed some 40000 to mobilise in time. The nature of military service in Russia also made the the average Russian soldier considerably older than their British counterparts. The Rifle to soldier Ratio had also proved a hinderance: 1:15 for the Russians and 1:2 for the British.

The Tsar believed that industrial growth would solve most of these problems, but the rampant serfdom, itself a delicate issue, made it impossible to introduce reform. His father Nickolas I had famously noted that serfdom is an “evil palpable to all”, but had refused to tackle it when trying to better the lot of crown peasants. While Westwood has argued that emancipation was intended to strengthen the military of the empire, there are speeches of Alexander II where he argues that this “revolution from the top” is favourable to a “revolution from below” from which most Marxist interpretations of the emancipation derive.

The American Civil War, however, had been more a matter of individual strength of the component states of the Union and derived more from legalistic and economic factors. The Union was divided between states that permitted the ownership of slaves and states that didn’t. The civil war simply emerged as a bid for political parity between these states when a disturbance in the balance of power lead to the cessation of the agrarian states of the South leaving behind the industrial Northern states. As such they are events that happened mostly independent of each other.