Several
empire
An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outpost (military), outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a hegemony, dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the ...
s in
human history
Human history or world history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Early modern human, Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers. They Early expansions of hominin ...
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 fairly precise definition and can be feasibly measured with some degree of accuracy. Estonian political scientist
Rein Taagepera, who published a series of academic articles about the territorial extents of historical empires between 1978 and 1997, defined an empire 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 owing to a lack of available data for several empires; for this reason and because of the inherent uncertainty in the estimates, no rankings are given.
Largest empires by land area
For context, the land area of the Earth, excluding the continent of
Antarctica
Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), it contains the geographic South Pole. ...
, is .
Empires at their greatest extent
Empire size in this list is defined as the dry land area it controlled at the time, which may differ considerably from the area it claimed. For example: in the year 1800, European powers collectively claimed approximately % of the Earth's land surface that they did not effectively control. Where estimates vary, entries are sorted by the ''lowest'' estimate. Where more than one entry has the same area, they are listed alphabetically.
Timeline of largest empires to date
The earliest empire which can with certainty be stated to have been larger than all previous empires was that of
Upper and Lower Egypt
In History of ancient Egypt, Egyptian history, the Upper and Lower Egypt period (also known as The Two Lands) was the final stage of prehistoric Egypt and directly preceded the Early Dynastic Period (Egypt), unification of the realm. The concepti ...
, which covered ten times the area of the previous largest civilisation around the year 3000 BC.
Timeline of largest empires at the time
Largest empires by share of world population
Because of the trend of increasing world population over time, absolute population figures are for some purposes less relevant for comparison between different empires than their respective shares of the world population at the time. For the majority of the time since roughly 400 BC, the two most populous empires' combined share of the world population has been 30–40%. Most of the time, the most populous empire has been located in China.
See also
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Lists of political and geographic subdivisions by total area
This is an index of a series of comprehensive lists of continents, countries, and first level administrative country subdivisions such as states, provinces, and territories, as well as certain political and geographic features of substantial area ...
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List of countries and dependencies by area
This is a list of the world's countries and their Dependent territory, dependencies, ranked by total area, including land and water.
This list includes entries that are not limited to those in the ISO 3166-1 standard, which covers sovereign s ...
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List of countries and dependencies by population
This is a list of countries and dependencies by population. It includes sovereign states, inhabited dependent territories and, in some cases, constituent countries of sovereign states, with inclusion within the list being primarily based on ...
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Political history of the world
References
Further reading
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Largest Empires
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Empires
Empires, largest
Empires
Largest things