Largest empires in the context of "British Empire"

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⭐ Core Definition: Largest empires

Several empires in human history have been contenders for the largest of all time, depending on definition and mode of measurement. Possible ways of measuring size include area, population, economy, and power. Of these, area is the most commonly used because it has a relatively precise definition and can be feasibly measured with some degree of accuracy; nevertheless, even area is limited in this regard because of the difficulty in defining the boundaries of empires due to things like the indirect nature of imperial control and sparsely inhabited or even uninhabited areas that may nominally have been controlled by an empire but not meaningfully ruled by it.

Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera, who published a series of academic articles about the territorial extents of historical empires between 1978 and 1997, and a book in 2024, defined an empire in this context as "any relatively large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign" and its size as the area over which the empire has some undisputed military and taxation prerogatives. The list is not exhaustive as there is a lack of available data for several empires; for this reason and because of the inherent uncertainty in the estimates, no rankings are given.

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Largest empires in the context of Ancient Rome

In modern historiography, ancient Rome is the Roman civilisation from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), the Roman Republic (509‍–‍27 BC), and the Roman Empire (27 BC – 476 AD) until the fall of the western empire.

Ancient Rome began as an Italic settlement, traditionally dated to 753 BC, beside the River Tiber in the Italian Peninsula. The settlement grew into the city and polity of Rome, and came to control its neighbours through a combination of treaties and military strength. It eventually controlled the Italian Peninsula, assimilating the Greek culture of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) and the Etruscan culture, and then became the dominant power in the Mediterranean region and parts of Europe. At its height it controlled the North African coast, Egypt, Southern Europe, and most of Western Europe, the Balkans, Crimea, and much of the Middle East, including Anatolia, the Levant, and parts of Mesopotamia and Arabia. That empire was among the largest empires in the ancient world, covering around 5 million square kilometres (1.9 million square miles) in AD 117, with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants, roughly 20% of the world's population at the time. The Roman state evolved from an elective monarchy to a classical republic and then to an increasingly autocratic military dictatorship during the Empire.

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← Ancient Rome ← Ancient Roman ← Roman era ← Roman times ← Ancient rome ← Roman State ← Roman-era ← Roman antiquity ← Ancient Roman society ← Classical Rome
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British Empire → Mongol Empire → Empire → Human history → Rein Taagepera →