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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

After the war I'm sure they took note. The US Army of the North was then the largest army in the world. That had to be concerning.

Second place? The US Army of the South.

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Looks like the troop strength was 200-600K on each side. I'm not sure that would have been the largest army in the world.

source: https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm#:~:text=In%20July%201....

It wouldn't be. Russia had a larger army. Only if you consider both sides a single army do they outnumber the Russian forces.

Luckily the US Navy wasn't doing so hot, and so the only real places to get worried were Canada and Mexico, as neither army had worked out how to walk on water.

Japan completely transformed their society, largely in response to a visit from that navy.

without facts, I would expect some central Asian horse army to have 200,000 humans, far earlier than that.. Persian and Egyptian armies were large at different times too.. sounds uninformed..

The OP says largest army at the time, not largest ever

Really? In 1865? Which one of those was in existence and larger?

The Qing dynasty (i.e., China), which had just put down a massive rebellion, probably had many times that number of men under arms.

As far as I know Qing military organization was weird for the time. There was no single central Chinese Army as such. There were some forces which officially reported to the Imperial government (the Green Standard and the Eight Banners), but these were of limited use. The armies that put down the Taiping Rebellion were raised by local governors, and were loyal to them not to the Emperor.

Asia has held the bulk of human population for quite a long time.

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