Michael Solka, M.A. is an author and historian. He works mainly for the TXT media agency, and is also involved with the 'Word' programme produced by the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation. He has written fifteen books on American Indians and American military history for a German publishing company, but this is his first book for Osprey. He lives in Upper Bavaria, Germany.

Darko Pavlovic was born in 1959 and currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. A trained architect, he now works as a full-time illustrator and writer, specialising in militaria. Darko has illustrated a number of books for Osprey and he has also written and illustrated titles for the Men-at-Arms series on the Austrian army of the 19th century.

The crushing victory by Prussia and her German allies in the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71, destroyed one empire and created another. It finally unified the German states into an empire under Prussian leadership - an empire proclaimed in the very halls of captured Versailles. In 1870 Prussia's reformed mobilization system put enormous armies into the field with unprecedented efficiency. The confidence which the victory encouraged among German militarists, and the intolerable humiliation it inflicted upon France, ensured that an even more destructive war was soon inevitable. This, the first of two titles, lists and illustrates the units of Prussia and her North German Confederation, the powerhouse of a formidable military machine.