Given my interest in military history, it’s not surprising that I’ve also always found empires a fascinating subject of history, again from the fortunate perspective of being well removed from the sharp end of them. Empires are typically creatures of military conquest or power, and rise and fall by war.

Indeed, the two books that define my historical (and political) worldview are Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yes – I know I’ve shortened the title for the latter) – so it’s not surprising that their subject matter, war and empires, also define my primary interests in history.

Not all empires are equal, however. Not even the same empire, as like the proverbial river of Heraclitus, you cannot step into the same empire twice.

Of course, that is perhaps implicit in their rise and fall, particularly when the fall of one empire is at the hands of the rise of another – such as when you have a tale of two empires, in a strikingly memorable phrase (for the 1945 Soviet offensive against Japan in Manchuria), one “at the absolute top of its game” and the other “dying and insane”.

So these are my Top 10 Empires of History. These are not ranked by how large, populous, rich, powerful or influential they are, but by my historical interest in them – although this tends to overlap with the former criteria. For example, of the ten largest historical empires by area at their greatest extent, all but two of them pop up in my Top 10 (with the other two in my special mentions).

Just some further notes, as with my Top 10 Wars, I have some ratings within each entry:

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

I have to admit that my particular interest in empires is not so much in their robust rise, but in their decline and fall. But again, not all empires are equal in their decline and fall. Some empires seem to collapse almost overnight, but others hold the line over incredible areas or incredible periods of time (or both), even rebounding or bouncing back. My interest is in the latter, so just how impressive or tenacious was each empire’s decline and fall?

 

THE EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

On the other hand, rating the empires by their temporal span, particularly for that arguably never fell, or still haunt the world as ghosts or shadows.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

Rating the wars by their geographic scale as world empire. It was famously said of one empire as descriptive of its extent that the sun never set on it. Actually it was said of at least one other empire before that, with precursors even before that, but never mind that now.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

Yes, yes – they’re all evil. But just how evil?

But seriously, no empire rises to or maintains its power by being nice. They do it by crushing their opponents or rebellious subjects – “they make a desolation and call it peace”. Hence rating how brutally or ruthlessly they did so – just how evil was each empire?

But also seriously, history usually does not repay moral judgements, particularly contemporary moral judgements. Almost every empire proclaims itself to be spreading civilisation or bringing some benefit to its subjects – and all but the most destructive have at least some merit in those claims. Empires were often the only means for any political unity above the tribal level, or indeed peace from inter-tribal warfare, although of course both were typically achieved by an imperial “tribe” or nation subjugating others, usually with great death or destruction, even if it subsequently absorbed or adopted the latter as citizens or soldiers of empire.

Also, prior to modern concepts of ethnic national self-determination, I tend to regard all polities as imperial in nature, at least in so far as they comprised any more than one ethnic group, and generally even in the case of more homogenous or tribal polities over their own members, in the absence of any concept of participatory representation.

 

So these are my top ten empires in history. And yes – this is another of my deep dive top tens, counting down from tenth to first place and looking at individual entries in some depth or detail of themselves.

But wait – there’s more! The subject is prolific enough for my usual twenty special mentions per top ten and for honorable mentions beyond that, but they’ll be featured separately.

 

 

 

(10) INDIA – MAURYA EMPIRE (322 – 184 BC)

The Maurya or Mauryan Empire ranks in top spot among Indian empires, mostly due to my fandom of its emperor Ashoka, held in semi-legendary regard as one of India’s (and history’s) greatest emperors, as well as the first state to rule almost the entire Indian subcontinent (except the southernmost part that consistently held out against other Indian empires except their own and the British).

The Indian subcontinent has seen the rise and fall of numerous empires that could well be the subject of their own top ten, even if most are little known outside Indian history – reflecting that they almost never extended beyond the subcontinent, at least in direct territorial extent. In fairness, the Indian subcontinent has always been virtually a world of its own, particularly as a proportion of world population and economy (the latter at least until the ascent of Europe).

There are a number of candidates for top spot among Indian empires. There’s the Gupta Empire, from the fourth to later sixth century (and therefore contemporary to the declining west Roman empire), often considered the golden age empire of classical Hindu India.

There’s the early modern Islamic Mughal (or Mogul or Moghul) Empire, which might well be considered the height of empire in pre-British India as well as that best known in general history, not least because it gave India its most iconic landmark, the Taj Mahal.

And of course there was the crown jewel of the British Empire that was the British Raj – although that is usually not ranked among Indian empires as such.

However there can only be one empire for this entry and that is the Maurya empire, which one might consider the Roman Empire of India, or at least the equivalent of the rising imperial Roman republic with which it was a contemporary.

And its founder for which it was named, Chandragupta Maurya, ranks almost as highly in legendary esteem as Ashoka – or Rome’s Romulus for that matter – rising from humble origins from a cowherd and essentially to bandit leader to defeat the Nanda Empire (which had faced off none other than Alexander the Great) and forge his own empire instead.

Back to Ashoka, he extended the empire to its greatest extent before, as it is told, being sickened by the violence of the Kalinga War (against the Kalinga state on the Bay of Bengal), he converted to Buddhism and pacifism, thereafter ruling with legendary benevolence.

Although his empire extended only throughout the subcontinent, its influence extended well beyond that through his patronage of Buddhism and Buddhist missionaries, which arguably played the same role expanding that religion as Roman imperial state patronage did for Christianity.

One of Ashoka’s edicts proclaimed the territories “conquered by the Dhamma”, from the Buddhist term Dharma and reflecting the moral law or sphere of influence within Buddhism, to extend to the west through the Hellenistic kingdoms to Greece itself

The empire declined and fell within fifty years of his death, which shows you where pacifism gets you as an empire. In fairness, that was due as much to the subsequent line of succession, although it hasn’t stopped some historians alleging that Ashoka’s pacifism undermined the “military backbone” of the empire – while others assert that the extent or impact of his pacifism was “greatly exaggerated”.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

Nothing to see here – it all fell apart quickly after Ashoka. That’s where pacifism gets you – I guess it’s a Darwinian world after all

 

THE MAURYA EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

On the other hand, the Maurya Empire never fell – arguably having the most enduring influence of any Indian empire through its patronage of Buddhism.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

The sun obviously set on the Maurya Empire, which was limited in physical extent, as almost all Indian Empires were, to the Indian subcontinent. However, I think it might properly be reckoned as a world empire, particularly in its “territory conquered by the Dhamma” or influence through Buddhism – a world religion on which the sun does not set.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

One of the few empires, at least under Ashoka’s legendary benevolence, that avoids the tag of evil empire, albeit arguably at the cost of its endurance.

In The Outline of History, H.G. Wells wrote “Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Ashoka shines, and shines, almost alone, a star.”

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(9) CHINA – QING EMPIRE (1644 – 1912)

 

The last Chinese empire, lasting into the twentieth century with perhaps the most spectacular decline and fall on the world stage in modern history.

Like India, China has seen the rise and fall of numerous empires over millennia that could well be the subject of their own top ten, although Chinese empires are probably better known to general history and more coherent imperial states than their Indian counterparts.

Similarly to India, there are a number of candidates for the top spot among Chinese empires – the Qin and Han empires were its definitive empires (giving their name to China itself and its predominant ethnicity respectively), while the Tang, Song and Ming empires all vie for status as classical Chinese empires or golden ages. The Ming empire is particularly reputed for being on the threshold of becoming a maritime empire with its fabled fleets and expeditions, before turning back to the usual landbound nature of Chinese empires.

The Yuan Empire – the dynasty of Kublai Khan and China’s Mongol conquerors – could also argue its claim for top spot, and depending on how you reckon it, may well qualify as China’s largest empire.

However, I award the top spot to the Qing Empire. Firstly, it is the Chinese empire of modern history, its last empire that survived until falling in the early twentieth century, as well as the empire that interacted most with European powers as they increasingly encroached upon it.

Secondly, my particular fascination with empires is with their decline and fall – and few things were as spectacular in modern history , or loom as large in the hindsight of a Chinese revolutionary regime succeeding it and adapting its imperial forms, as the decline and fall of the Qing Empire.

And by spectacular, I mean the grand spectacle playing out on the world stage of it desperately trying to fend off foreign powers it previously saw as barbarians or tributaries, but even more so fighting the endless rebellions within itself, until it was ultimately overwhelmed by the final one.

Of course, it didn’t start off that way – like every empire, it had its robust rise, essentially as a conquest of Ming China by one of those northern non-Chinese minorities that bubbled up occasionally to rule China, in this case the Manchus (for which Manchuria is named).

At its height in the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was the largest Chinese empire in history (depending on how you calculate the Mongol Yuan Empire) – and indeed fourth largest empire in history, as well as the most populous state and largest economy in the world.

And then came its decline and fall, in the so-called century of humiliation – usually reckoned to start with its defeat by Britain and France in the Opium Wars, which heralded ever more depredations by foreign powers, as well as ever more dangerous rebellions against the empire.

I’ve heard it said that the Qing Empire literally faced a peasant rebellion an average of every hour or so. I don’t know the truth of that assertion, which probably tallies up the hours in the numerous historical rebellions against the Qing, although I also suspect that many or most rebellions were too limited or localised to have any serious consequence.

Not so the Taiping Rebellion, in which a cult with a leader proclaiming himself the younger brother of Jesus and declaring his own Heavenly Kingdom, slogged it out with the Qing in the bloodiest civil war in history, with casualties to rival the First World War or even the Second World War.

Although it was in the Boxer Rebellion that China’s humiliation by foreign powers perhaps reached its nadir. That or its defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War. It was one thing to lose to European powers – it was another to lose to another Asian state, a former Chinese tributary, that had been in a similar position to China vis-a-vis European powers only a generation or so previously

Qing China finally fell to rebellion or revolution in 1911, which abolished empires in China altogether (even if many of their features were to recur in their successors), with the last Qing emperor abdicating in 1912.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

As the decline and fall of empires go, Qing China ranks up there with the most spectacular and tenacious of them, holding the line despite the odds – and when it did fall, at least it fell to internal revolution rather than conquest. Particularly as they did it on a shoestring – apparently they were never able to raise taxes above 2% of their economy.

“There are serious questions as to whether any government could’ve handled the gargantuan tasks the Qing faced, and they managed to survive a civil war that by all accounts should have destroyed them and would probably have taken down most lesser Chinese empires.”

Even then the Qing emperor at least managed to bounce back, although his empire did not – twice, albeit more by that adage of history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Firstly in 1917, when he was briefly crowned for a fortnight by a royalist warlord in the so-called Manchu Restoration, and secondly in 1932 as “emperor” of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo

It’s tempting to think what might have happened if the Qing could have pulled off the same trick as the defeated Nationalists and retreated to Taiwan – but unfortunately for the Qing, they had lost Taiwan to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War

If nothing else, they totally had a better flag than any of their successors.

 

THE QING EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

On the other hand, the Qing Empire never fell. As the Soviet Union ironically replicated much of the nature and territorial claims of imperial Russia – with Stalin as the red Tsar – so too did Communist China with imperial China, particularly under Mao as red Emperor

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

Although the Qing Empire was confined in physical extent to east Asia, it deserves its status as a world empire – its designation for itself as the Middle Kingdom or heart of the world not too far from the reality as a world unto itself, the world’s most populous state and largest economy

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

While the modern view of Qing China tends to be closer to that of victim to Western powers, it can rank reasonably high as evil empire. Its original conquest of Ming China is estimated to have a death toll of at least 25 million. And it was seemingly indifferent to even higher death tolls to suppress the rebellions against it – although a casual indifference to loss of human life, even in the millions, was not unusual in either its predecessors or successors in China.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(8) OTTOMAN EMPIRE (1299 – 1922)

 

The empire that conquered Constantinople and besieged Vienna – twice.

As the latter, the last non-European empire to invade and conquer significant parts of Europe (unless you count the Americans or Soviets), although Vienna was their high water mark – and as the former, the power that finally conquered (and saw itself as inheriting) the last of the Roman Empire.

Ironically, the Ottomans often resembled the Roman Empire, firstly in its rise from one of numerous non-descript warring tribes on a peninsula, albeit the Anatolian rather than Italian peninsula (although as further irony, the Romans traced themselves from that peninsula as well, with their mythic origin from Troy). And secondly, in its tenacity in decline.

It is also intriguing how much of the origins of modern history might be traced to the looming presence of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and the Mediterranean – such as the discovery of the New World from seeking to find alternate trade routes to Asia and so on.

The rise of the Ottoman Empire rivals the conquests by the Arab caliphates it ultimately replaced in predominance in the Middle East – and indeed replayed much of the same history. The Ottoman Empire may have lacked the range and speed of the Arab conquests, although it made up for that in the extent to which it invaded and conquered within Europe.

With its conquest of the Byzantine Empire (as well as Constantinople as its newly conquered capital) and control of the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was a transcontinental empire at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa for six centuries.

Egypt was of course the jewel in the crown of their African empire – but it extended westwards from Libya to Morocco (and briefly into the Atlantic with the Canary Islands), becoming the basis of the fabled Barbary corsairs or pirates which even fought the United States, although these were only nominally under Ottoman control. The Ottomans also extended southwards to the Horn of Africa – and into naval wars in the Indian Ocean.

In Asia, they inherited the caliphate and its predominance in the Middle East, extending south through the Arabian peninsula, although held at bay by a resurgent Persia under their own Turkic Safavid dynasty.

And in Europe, they conquered the Balkans, extending to Crimea with the Crimean Khanate or Tatars, successors to the Mongol Golden Horde, as their vassal state, and also reached to the heart of Europe to besiege Vienna. Although apart from its defeats when besieging Vienna, it encountered significant holdouts or resistance elsewhere – Croatia, Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, Venice and the naval Battle of Lepanto.

It faced its waning tide of decline in the aftermath of its second defeat at Vienna, steadily losing its conquests in the Balkans even as it was propped up by Britain against Russia, resulting in it being styled as the “sick man of Europe” in the nineteenth century – somewhat overconfidently, as the Allies were to find out in WW1, although ultimately it collapsed in that war.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

Ironically, the Ottomans might be compared favorably to the Romans they supplanted in their tenacity in decline. They did not endure for so many centuries as did the Romans – but then modern history moves a lot faster.

Of course, they were helped by European powers propping it up against each other, particularly Britain propping it up against Russia.

And against the apparent odds, they and their predominance in the Middle East endured until the First World War – and they might well have endured beyond that if they had remained aloof from that war and not chosen the losing side. Even in that war, they proved a resilient adversary, and even in defeat, they cast a long shadow – historian J.M. Roberts refers to most wars in the Middle East thereafter as the wars of Ottoman succession, up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

 

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

On the other hand, their imperial core Turkey, to which they were shorn after the First World War, has also had a remarkable resurgence, rebounding almost immediately after its defeat from that war against further incursions, and newly emerging as a regional power in the Middle East, extending its influence and military presence through much of its former imperial territory

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

Well, the sun did literally set on the Ottoman Empire in pure geographic terms – for example, it did not extend as far eastwards into Asia as its Arab caliphate predecessors. However, it can properly be ranked as a world empire in its influence, extending across three continents and reaching even further beyond that.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

As I said, the Ottomans get a lot of historical hate from certain circles – but sadly, I do have to rank them highly in the evil empire stakes. To be honest, I don’t know quite how brutal they were in maintaining their conquests, but they were notorious for their patronage of piracy and slavery, particularly through the Barbary corsairs.

What earns them their high ranking in evil empire stakes is their actions against ethnic minorities in the empire’s dying days – notably the Armenians – that gave the definition to genocide in the twentieth century

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(7) ARAB – UMAYYAD CALIPHATE (661-750 / 756-1031)

 

The Arab conquests were a nigh-unstoppable historical explosion, once previously divided tribes in a historical backwater had been united under Mohammed – conquering one of history’s largest pre-modern empires (indeed the seventh or eighth largest in all history) in about a century or so, a blitzkrieg by horse, sail…and camel!

Mohammed had essentially conquered the Arabian peninsula, but his death left his successors – the three great Arab caliphates – only at the start of extending his empire to even wider conquests.

Now it might be said that I am somewhat inconsistent between empires in my entries, as I classify some, such as the Arab caliphates, as separate empires by different dynasties, while others I essentially classify as single empires despite their dynastic succession or fragmentation.

And the answer is, as usual, that I make my own rules and break them anyway – some empires have historical unity to them, if only in culture or theme, that appeals to me, while the different Arab caliphates appeal to me as distinct polities.

The Rashadun Caliphate, immediate successors to Mohammed, did most of the heavy lifting of empire as they broke out of the Arabian peninsula. Two formidable empires blocked their path, the Persian Empire and the eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, but the Arabs conquered the former and routed the latter back to Anatolia.

However, it was under their successors, the Umayyad Caliphate, that Arab empire reached its greatest extent, westwards from the north African shore to Europe itself – conquering Spain (well, not quite all, in a manner similar to the famous caveat to the Roman conquest of Gaul in Asterix comics) and famously invading France before being turned back at Tours by Charles Martel. Eastwards, they also extended beyond Persia through central Asia to the fringes of India and China – the latter of which presented even the Tang Empire some difficulty resisting their advance.

The Umayyads were mostly overthrown by the third Arab caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, who then presided over what is often regarded as the Golden Age of Islam from their capital in Baghdad – but for all that became increasingly vestigial in the empire they had inherited from the Umayyads as it fragmented into separate dynasties. The Abbasids did revive their political authority somewhat in Mesopotamia and Persia – only to be crushed along with Baghdad by the Mongols, although they continued to limp along in even more vestigial form in Egypt until the Ottomans replaced them as caliphate. Ha! That’s what you get for messing with my boys, the Umayyads!

Nor were the Umayyads done with history just yet – the Umayyads managed to pull a Taiwan, with an Umayyad prince in the role of Chiang Kai-Shek, fleeing into exile across the Mediterranean to Spain and continuing the Caliphate as the Emirate of Cordoba independent from the Abbasids, even with their own rival golden age of Islam in the fabled Al Andalus of Spain.

The Umayyads endured for almost three centuries before finally falling again in 1031 – but true to karmic form, once again cursed their successors with fragmentation, as Islamic Spain broke up into minor states and principalities, weakening it to Christian reconquest.

 

 

DECLINE AND FALL

 

You have to rank the Ummayads high for tenacity in their decline and fall – even in defeat by the Abbasid Revolution, they pulled a Taiwan to rule in Spain, partying it up in Ibiza like an English tourist .

 

THE UMMAYAD CALIPHATE NEVER FELL

 

Well it obviously did, although perhaps not in its enduring influence in Spain, and even more so in the dreams of caliphate by Islamic political extremists in the twenty-first century.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

One of the top 10 largest empires in history – although the sun literally set on them, they can be ranked among the world empires of history.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

To be honest, I don’t know much about the brutality of Arab conquests or repression, although there seem to be a number of revolts against them, not least the Abbasid revolution itself.

But they do have to rank highly in evil empire stakes for one thing – the Arab slave trade, which was of a scale at least equal to, if not exceeding, the more notorious Atlantic slave trade by European empires – not as intense perhaps, but of a longer duration. As in only abolished (when it was formally abolished) in the twentieth century.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(6) PERSIA – ACHAEMENID EMPIRE (550 – 330 BC)

 

“The empire that kicked off all the other empires” – the largest empire in history up until that point and first of the world empires, in impact rather than literal global extent. Best known in Western history as the liberators of the Jewish exiles in Babylon and recurring antagonists of the Greeks, not surprisingly reflecting the two predominant sources of Western culture.

The Persians originally started off as nomadic vassals of the preceding Median Empire, the extent and nature of which is disputed but apparently laid much of the groundwork for the latter Persian Empire in forming a powerful Iranian state. Cyrus the Great then founded the first Persian or Achaemenid Empire, by rebelling against and supplanting the Medes before then conquering the Neo-Babylonian Empire in Mesopotamia and kingdom of Lydia in Anatolia.

Ultimately the borders of the Persian Empire extended from central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east, to the Nile, Black Sea and Balkans in the west – although famously the Greek city states successfully resisted it in the Greek-Persian Wars. It was so big it had four capitals – Babylon, Ecbatana, Susa and Persepolis.

The Persian model of governance – “a successful model of centralized, bureaucratic administration via the use of satraps; its multicultural policy; building infrastructure, such as road systems and a postal system; the use of an official language across its territories; and the development of civil services, including its possession of a large, professional army” – essentially set the template for subsequent empires, particularly in the Middle East – influencing not only the Greeks and Romans, but also the Arabs and the Abbasid Caliphate. For the latter, it “left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together.

Its ultimate nemesis was Alexander the Great – apparently an admirer of Cyrus the Great, but who just took the empire from Cyrus’ more pathetic descendant Darius III. Oh well – he wasn’t using it anyway. And the legacy of Cyrus suited Alexander better, including that title of the Great.

However, the first Persian or Achaemenid Empire might have been swept from history, but Persia itself continued to be a seat of empires – it revived under the Parthian and Sassanid empires, both recurring antagonists of the Romans until the Sassanids were conquered by the Arabs. Even then, Persia managed to revive itself under Islamic or Turkic dynasties.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

For tenacity in decline…yes and no. The Achaemenid Empire itself collapsed with indecent haste, conquered by Alexander as he pursued Darius III from one corner of the empire to the next like a Macedonian Terminator. However, the Persians proved quite adept at the long game of reviving themselves while under the nominal satrapy of their conquerors, whom they ultimately overthrew to revive their empire in even more enduring and tenacious form.

 

THE ACHAEMENID EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

Well yes, the Achaemenid Empire fell rather dramatically to Alexander the Great, but Persia kept bouncing back, the zombie franchise of empires – as the Parthians, Sassanids, Safavids and the ironic ideological empire of the latter day Islamic Republic.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

Persia was the first of a long line of what can be termed world empires, as opposed to global ones – that is, in terms of their enduring influence and impact rather than a literal geographic global extent.

Although interestingly the Persians may well have been the origin of the claim for their empire as the empire on which the sun never sets. According to Herodotus’ Histories, Xerxes made the claim before invading Greece – “We shall extend the Persian territory as far as God’s heaven reaches. The sun will then shine on no land beyond our borders.”

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

Well, with their mutant armies and war rhinoceri…wait – that was the film 300. Outside of that film’s depictions of the Persian Empire as the Mordor of its time, which reflects Greek accounts of them as antagonists to some degree, the Persians do reasonably well in avoiding the evil empire tag – although obviously they didn’t build and maintain an empire of that size by being nice.

And they do pretty well in their Biblical portrayals, due to Cyrus’ liberation of the Jews from Babylonian exile – while Babylon is immortalized by the Bible as the symbol of evil, Cyrus is praised by it and even hailed as messiah, a term that used to be more generic for one anointed by God.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(5) SPANISH EMPIRE (1492 – 1976)

 

The first global empire and the original “empire on which the sun never sets”.

The Pope literally divided the world up between them and the Portuguese in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, although only after Portugal nudged the line further west to party it up in Brazil. Other European nations disagreed with the papal division of the world.

The Spanish Empire owed its global extent to its ‘discovery’ and conquest of the Americas from 1492 – a perfect storm of history as the Spanish royal sponsorship of Columbus coincided with the template for conquest from the Reconquista retaking the last Islamic stronghold in Spain.

Alexander the Great was reputed to have lamented that there were no new worlds to conquer (likely apocryphal) – the Spanish discovered one and conquered it. And whatever else one may think of the conquistadors, they exceeded Alexander and anyone else for a feat unparalleled in military history – remarkable in just how few Spanish forces conquered such large areas and populous empires numbering in the millions, crowned by their conquest of the Aztec and Inca Empires.

From there, they were the first to circumnavigate the world with Magellan’s expedition in 1522, although Magellan himself died en route from a nasty overdose of native spears and swords in the Philippines. So of course the Spanish claimed and conquered the Philippines as well, along with other Pacific Ocean islands.

However, they did claim more than they actually controlled in some places such as North America. Much of the modern United States was originally part of the Spanish Empire as attested by place names, but their claims extended well beyond that along the north-west Pacific coastline to Canada and Alaska, where they were ultimately contested by the British and Russians. Even so, the Spanish Empire still ranks as the fifth largest empire by area in history.

The Spanish Empire seemed to rise from one glittering height to another – with a lot of all that glitter indeed as gold and silver from the Americas, propelling it to the first world maritime superpower, and after the naval defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto, arguably the greatest power of the world.

Of course, it was all downhill from there. Part of that was a result of pursuing dynastic Habsburg claims in Europe – it’s odd to think of the Netherlands and parts of Italy as former Spanish territory. Pro tip – you can have a maritime empire, or you can try to dominate Europe, but you can’t do both.

Still, Spain retained its empire, despite being eclipsed by other European powers, until the nineteenth century when it began to decline in spectacular fashion as a casualty of one war after another.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

And how!

You could argue that Spain parallels the Romans in their tenacious decline and fall. Despite what might be called its crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and despite its waning power, at sea against England or Britain, and on land against France – it retained its empire until the nineteenth century.

However, the bell then tolled for the Spanish Empire, with the American Revolution (which it supported) and the French Revolution (particularly in the person of Napoleon). The Spanish Empire faced its own American revolution, losing the crown jewel of its empire with most of Spanish America winning independence.

Still, Spain was left a modest mid-tier empire as a nice beachside retirement nest egg, particularly in Cuba and the Philippines – arguably its parallel to the Byzantine continuation of the Roman Empire but skipping past a couple of centuries to that smaller rump Byzantine empire. It even briefly regained the Dominican Republic, as its parallel to the reconquests of Justinian or Basil.

And then it fell foul of the American Revolution again, this time in the form of the United States all grown up as the rising world power at the dawn of the twentieth century. The United States was looking around at empires and decided to take Spain’s for a test drive in the Spanish-American War.

Spain lost the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, as well as Cuba to quasi-independence (effectively as an American colony). Reading the writing on the wall with respect to retaining any Pacific territory, Spain sold its other Pacific island territories to that other rising power of the twentieth century, Germany.

That left Spain with just the bottom-tier empire of its African territories – small outposts in Africa like Fernando Poo in Equatorial Guinea, although it did also expand into the territory known as Spanish Sahara. Pro tip – if your empire consists of places like Fernando Poo and anywhere with the Sahara in it, it’s time to get out of the empire game.

And so Spain did, albeit like Portugal only in the 1970s

 

THE SPANISH EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

On the other hand, Spain technically retains some overseas possessions – the Canary Islands as well as some tiny islands and weird enclave cities in Morocco

But more so, the endurance of Spanish language and place names in the Americas demonstrates that, at least in some cultural sense, the Spanish Empire never fell

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

The Spanish Empire was the original empire to make this claim – and mean it literally, although the claim was more memorably (and definitively) made by the British Empire. In influence, it was also a true world empire, reshaping Latin America in its own image.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

And how!

The Spanish Empire would be one of the leading contenders people would advance for an entry if one were to compile a Top 10 Evil Empires, primarily due to its apocalyptic destruction of the Americas – although in fairness that was mostly down to one horseman of the apocalypse, pestilence. The death toll is usually tallied in the tens of millions – with many native tribes and their cultures wiped out.

Even setting aside death from disease, the Spanish conquest of the Americas involved atrocity, brutality and cruelty by any standard, including contemporary opinion at the time.

However, many point to what is often called the Spanish Black Legend – a tendency to demonize or vilify the Spanish Empire, as well as Spain (and Catholicism) more generally in history – with at least some fairness to it. After all, it was Spanish advocates such as Friar Bartolomé de las Casas who documented so many of the evils of its empire for history – and Spain was the first in recorded history to pass laws for the protection of indigenous peoples, although the Crown often found it difficult to enforce those laws on its distant and unruly colonists.

And one can’t help but observe the far more substantial mix of indigenous population and culture in the Americas south of the Rio Grande as opposed to north of it – although again in fairness North America had more sparse populations and had higher European immigration.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(4) MACEDONIAN EMPIRE (336 – 30 BC)

“There are no more worlds to conquer”.

The Macedonian empire may have been essentially the empire of one man, but that man was Alexander the Great and his empire changed the world.

“Alexander the Great was the king of Macedon during the 4th century B.C. who saw the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia and decided they would make a really bitchin’ backyard.”

Alexander’s empire was essentially the former Achaemenid Persian Empire, but also with the Macedonian hegemony of Greece – which he had led as a coalition of Greeks in his conquest of the Persian Empire (except the Spartans, because screw them – THIS ISN’T SPARTA!). Of course that was because it involved one of the finest fighting forces in history, honed (like his kingdom and its predominance in Greece) by his father Philip before him, the Macedonian phalanx, and led by Alexander as one of the finest military leaders of history, undefeated, usually against heavy numerical odds. That’s right – I’m an Alexander the Great and Battle of Gaugamela fan.

Alexander was nothing but audacious, as befitting a god among men – as he literally saw himself or came to do so. The feats of his life and conquests became legend. And genuinely funny, worthy of television deadpan snark at times – where is the Alexander sitcom series?! They could even call it Who’s The Greatest? That would be a hoot – as opposed to the unfunny snorefest that was Oliver Stone’s 2004 film.

Unable to untie the legendary insoluble Gordian knot of which it was prophesied that whomever untied it would conquer Asia? No problem – just cut it with your sword and go on to conquer Asia.

Faced with threat of the Persian navy which can strike at Greece behind your lines? No problem – just conquer the coastline of the Persian empire. Where’s your navy now, Persia?

The Persian emperor offers to surrender half his empire to you and your wimpy general Parmenion says you should accept? Sneer at him “I would too, if I were you”, then proceed to demonstrate you’re Alexander the Great by conquering the other half as well, while showing the Persian emperor he can run but he can’t hide.

Although my favorite story remains Alexander’s famous meeting with Diogenes – known to history as the Cynic philosopher but to contemporaries as that weird homeless naked guy sleeping in a barrel, although the only man to beat Alexander in an agora slanging match. (No one could beat Alexander in a ‘ýo mama’ slanging contest because his mother was the insanely hot Olympias, member of an orgiastic snake-worshipping cult of Dionysus – Alexander was something of a Dionysian himself). But I digress.

His empire may technically have only lasted as long as his reign, thirteen years from his succession to the throne of Macedonia in 336 BC to his death from fever in 323 BC at only 32 years of age. However, I’m reckoning it by the duration of the dynasties of his generals who succeeded him with their rival claims and Hellenistic kingdoms, until the last of them – Cleopatra, heir to the dynasty founded by Ptolemy in Egypt – fell to the Romans.

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

Yes and no.

Yes – Alexander’s empire fell apart upon his death. It was hardly the only empire to fragment among the successors of its original conqueror, and three of those fragments, roughly corresponding to a third of Alexander’s conquests or the former Persian empire each, were powerful states in themselves – Egypt under the Ptolemaic dynasty of Ptolemy, Anatolia and the Levant under the Antigonid dynasty of Antigonus, and Mesopotamia and Persia under the Seleucid dynasty of Seleucus.

The Ptolemaic dynasty was most content to keep to Egypt, but they all took shots at each other – with the Antigonus and the Seleucids taking their best shots at reclaiming all the empire, the latter at their height coming close to Alexander’s empire.

These states and other successors warred endlessly among themselves in the Macedonian Succession Wars or Wars of the Diadochi, depleting themselves until the Romans – also fans of Alexander – swallowed them up, with the legion displacing the phalanx as the finest fighting force of the classical world. Of course, that’s a massive over-simplification of what is often regarded as the “single most complex and tangled succession crisis in history”.

 

THE MACEDONIAN EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

Apart from the Hellenistic kingdoms and legacy he bequeathed the world, all the way to India, Alexander’s empire also persisted in the twenty cities or so he founded that bore his name, the most famous and enduring of which remains Alexandra in Egypt. Well, not quite the most enduring – that will always be the Alexandria he founded in our hearts. Next year in Alexandria, as we say.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

Alexander’s empire may not have been global, but it was an empire of the known world in Greek eyes. And it can rightly be regarded as one of history’s world empires, a turning point in European and Asian history that spread Greek culture – Hellenization – in its wake.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

Alexander could be a little, ah, bipolar but his empire tended to avoid the evil tag – except among the Persians – as he tended to be magnanimous in victory and seek to reconcile his conquests rather than simply subdue or destroy them, the key word being tended as he was also prone to bouts of (alcoholic) brutal violence

The kingdoms of his successors…not so much. The Seleucids in particular achieved enduring infamy with the successful Jewish revolt of the Maccabees against them. After all, you need a certain evil chic to go down in the Bible as the abomination of desolation – looking at you, Antiochus IV Epiphanes…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(3) BRITISH EMPIRE (1707 – 1997)

 

Pax Britannica.

Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!

To many – and certainly to modern history – THE Empire.

The largest empire of history – with a quarter of the earth’s land area, with a reach extending well beyond that to virtually every corner of the globe, including a command of the seas that effectively made them a British lake.

Essentially, the British made the world their pink bits – not a lewd innuendo (as it might be for the United States as part of its ‘soft’ influence – heh), but a reference to the tradition of mapmakers marking the British Empire in pink on maps.

Also the most populous empire of history, with a quarter of the world’s population (although not the most populous empire by relative proportion of the world’s population).

And above all the empire that more or less made the modern world – “to which we owe the development of transport and communication, the spread of science and technology, and the spread of the English language as a global lingua franca” – a global influence enduring in its American successor, not surprisingly as a former British colony and the subsequent “special relationship” between them.

“The British Empire is credited, even by its critics, for contributing to general economic development as it enforced a free-trade area over a quarter of the globe”, albeit lopsided in places – and the British as agents of industrialization and modernization. Even Karl Marx noted, with the sardonic wit that was his best stylistic feature, that the British were “conservatives at home and revolutionaries abroad”, tending to displace traditional and aristocratic elites for developing middle classes.

Politically, it was a forum for “the Enlightenment and its ideas of human rights”, the rule of law, social contract and political liberty – which of course would eventually be applied against the empire itself. That included such things as the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, or suttee in India.

The British Empire is often classified into the First and Second British Empires, although they are essentially continuous but for the loss of the American colonies in the American Revolution, which is the demarcation between them. However, it was the Second British Empire that took Britain truly to the glittering heights of world empire for which it is remembered, driven by its victory in the Napoleonic Wars, naval supremacy and the powerhouse – economic, financial and technological – of the Industrial Revolution.

By many metrics the British Empire would rank as top empire, so why only third here? Well, to be honest, I just find the top two entries more intriguing – with the top entry as more enduring and influential in its template for subsequent empires, including the British Empire. Also, as a modern empire, the wounds it inflicted are still too recent and raw.

Those wounds tend to be the focus of contemporary observers. However, such observations overlook the extent to which the British Empire was based on collaboration with their subjects, not least their uncanny ability to co-opt defeated warrior tribes – from the Scottish Highlands to the Gurkhas – for imperial service. It had to be – it is surprising just how limited British military forces were, apart of course from their prized naval supremacy, and how much of a shoestring they operated on, for a global empire.

Of course, the British were quite prepared to use brute force when they had to – “there would not have been a British Empire in the first place if its constituent peoples were free, or possessed agency in any meaningful capacity, to leave it whenever they were so inclined”. The British just preferred to use other more subtle means of influence and coercion when they could.

Of course, in their colonial wars, the British also relied on that classic art of war, picking curb stomp battles, through superiority of firepower. In the words of Hillaire Belloc – “Whatever happens, we have got – the Maxim gun, and they have not”. Or in the words of Edmund Blackadder – “back in the old days when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns — even spears made us think twice”.

Ultimately however, such brutality, initially limited to small minorities of their subjects involved in active rebellions, “became harder to conceal and make palatable as time went on, and the British lost their grip on the levers of mass media and propaganda which played an immense role in justifying and enabling their regime to its own citizens as well as international observers”.

And so the empire declined and fell, amidst other powers that rose to challenge it, or in the case of the United States, replace it. However, there are no definitive endpoints for it – even today, Britain retains overseas territories – although many are nominated. Singapore in 1942 and Suez in 1956 are two common nominations. The independence of India and cession of Hong Kong (back) to China are others, and I’ve gone with the last here.

In the end, I tend to agree with the assessment of TV Tropes, that the British were neither the first, the worst or the most damaging of the imperialists, but merely the most successful.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

Again – and how!

It may not have been as long as other classical declines I could name but then modern history tends to move faster. The British Empire reached its vaunted territorial height after the First World War, when it even managed to gain some more territory. In reality, the cracks were there from that war, but it took the Second World War for them to fall apart.

Still, the British can claim that they staked and gave up their empire on their finest hour – an apocalyptic struggle against the most destructive and predatory empires in history – with some fairness on one hand, but excluding such things as the Bengal Famine on the other. Ironically, it gained its true territorial height in the Second World War, with the occupation of former Italian or French colonies and other territory, but which soon evaporated.

 

THE BRITISH EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

On the other hand, the British Empire never fell – as Britain still retains overseas territories. That and we still live in the world they made, literally speaking their language.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

The British Empire was THE empire on which the sun never sets. Still is, in fact, technically through its overseas territories. Looking at you, Pitcairn Islands.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

And how!

The British often like to imagine themselves as ‘nice’ and their empire as the ‘nice’ one, as if they just went around the world playing cricket and sipping tea. In the words of TV Tropes, “home of men in red coats and pith helmets, being served lots and lots of tea by the locals…the great white Hunter, the adventure archaeologist”.

Or in the (ironic) words of D.H. Lawrence, “the English are so nice”.

Spoiler alert – although like all empires, the legacy of the British Empire is more complex than a mere matter of vindication or vilification, they were not and their Empire was not…nice. You don’t win and run global empires by being nice. And indeed there is a whole publishing industry, traditional and online, devoted to the British Empire as evil empire, including one hilariously over the top book “The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World”.

It has some fairness to it – one could easily compile a Top 10 (or Top 101) list for the British Empire as evil empire. Perhaps the most insidious evil of the British Empire was its indifference to famine, which some historians equate to holocausts, particularly in Ireland and India – those punching bags of the British Empire, from which one could well compile that Top 10 British Evil Empire list all of themselves.

And this time, it’s personal. Yes, I married the evil empire, when I was colonized by my British ex-wife – which lent itself to my theory of the British Empire as a relentless creeping doom, starting with just helping the British with their luggage when they arrived, but ending with your complete submission, as they expect everything else from you as well.

“And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice

about your being nice as well!

If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

(2) MONGOL EMPIRE (1206 – 1502)

 

“With Heaven’s aid I have conquered for you a huge empire. But my life was too short to achieve the conquest of the world”

Only just though – as the Mongols were a horse blitzkrieg across Eurasia, conquering the second largest empire in history (second only to the British Empire) and the largest contiguous land empire.

The founder of the Mongol Empire – Temujin, better known as Genghis Khan – was the best military and political leader of his era, or arguably any era. He succeeded in unifying the Mongol tribes as the nucleus of his empire, which at his death stretched from northern China through Central Asia to Iran and the outskirts of European Russia. In doing so, the Mongols conquered glittering states along the Silk Road in central Asia that barely anyone remembers because the Mongols wiped them out so thoroughly – the Khwaraziman Empire of Iran and the Qara Khitai.

His successors extended the Mongol Empire to almost every corner of Eurasia – “the 13th-century section in the history books of all countries in the region can be summed up as Mongols paid a visit and wiped us out”.

In the Middle East, they besieged and sacked Baghdad, the center of Islamic power for half a millennium, occupying as far as parts of Syria and Turkey, with raids advancing as far as Gaza in Palestine, where they were stopped in the battle of Ain Jalut by the Mamluks of Egypt.

In East Asia, Genghis had largely defeated the Jin Empire in northern China – his successors finished it off and conquered the southern Sung Empire as well. The latter was most famously by Kublai Khan – and in Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. They also invaded Korea, Burma and Vietnam – the last did not go so well, as neither did their naval invasions of Java and Japan.

And of course they also conquered Russia and invaded central Europe, defeating Poland and Hungary, and raiding the Balkans and Holy Roman Empire.

The Mongol Empire was too big to last as a unified polity, fragmenting much like the Macedonian Empire – although unlike the latter, it endured for about half a century in real terms (or a century in nominal terms) after the death of its founder before it was divided up into four khanates among his dynastic successors.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

The empire of Genghis and his successors somewhat resembles that of Alexander and his successors, albeit more enduring and formidable as a single empire, outlasting the death of Genghis until his grandsons fell out among themselves.

Initially, it was divided up into four khanates, three of which were formidable imperial states of themselves – the Golden Horde essentially ruling over Russia, the Ilkhanate essentially ruling over Persia, and the Yuan Dynasty essentially ruling over China and Mongolia itself. The Chagatai Khanate was still pretty formidable, ruling over central Asia, but just seems the runt of the litter in comparison.

From there, it’s an increasingly bewildering array of various successors to rival those of the Macedonian Empire, with all but the Yuan Dynasty quietly merging with local Islamic or Turkic dynasties.

The Ilkhanate endured least well, disintegrating with the reign and death of its last khan from 1316.

The Yuan Dynasty probably fared next best – its glittering height under Kublai Khan ended with his death in 1294, but it endured under his successors until it was defeated and ejected from China by the Ming in 1368, although they then ruled over their Mongolian homeland for almost three centuries as the Northern Yuan Dynasty.

The Chagatai Khanate proved to be quiet achievers, or at least those that claimed to be its successors did – Timur, founder of the Timurid Empire, saw himself as the restorer of Genghis’ empire and took a damn good swing at it, with one of his successors founding the Mughal Empire in India. The Chagatai Khanate itself continued as the Eastern Chagatai Khanate, before breaking up further and being conquered in turn, with the last khan deposed in 1705.

The Golden Horde was the most enduring, albeit in states ever more distant from Genghis’ empire or dynasty, remaining a powerful state until about 1396 – when invasion and defeat by the Timurid Empire saw it demoted from Golden to merely Great, before falling in 1502 and being succeeded by various Turkic khanates. The two most notable states, the Crimean Tatars and Kazakh Khanate, survived until 1783 and 1847 respectively, when they were conquered by Russia, although I’m going with the fall of the Golden or Great Horde as the end date of empire.

 

THE MONGOL EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

On the other hand, the Mongol Empire never fell! Mongol states – not least Mongolia – survive to the present day. Unleash the Horde!

Genghis himself survives in the disproportionate population of the world that can be traced to him. And then there are those that claimed to be his spiritual successors – with the last aspiring Khan as the eccentric Baron Ungern-Sternberg, who deserves a top 10 list of his own for his wildly insane ambitions.

A more serious argument might be made for Russia (and the Soviet Union) as their true spiritual successors, with many of its distinctive political features originating from the Mongol yoke.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

From Danube to the Pacific, the Mongol Empire deserves its title for global empire, as well as world empire for its enduring influence – we live in a Mongol-made world.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

And how!

Perhaps not surprisingly, our top three empires would also be among the leading contenders people would advance for an entry if one were to compile a Top 10 Evil Empires – probably even the top three there as well.

History has tended to overlook the positive or even progressive aspects of the Mongol Empire and its Pax Mongolica, but it would rank high as evil empire for the sheer scale of destruction they wrought, which can only aptly be described as apocalyptic, exceeding even the Second World War relative to world population.

As examples, the Iranian plateau didn’t fully recover its population until the 20th century, while some areas in central Asia remained disproportionately populated. The depopulation was such that wild animal species exploded in population and the regrowth of forests caused a noticeable change in climate.

And particularly since we mentioned it for the Spanish Empire, the horseman of the apocalypse that loomed largest was pestilence – the Black Death, spread both inadvertently by trade within the Mongol Empire and deliberately within its warfare, wiping out anywhere from 30% to 60% of the European population.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

(1) ROMAN EMPIRE (753 BC – 1453 AD)

 

THE Empire. Pax Romana.

“The grandeur that was Rome” – enduring both as empire, and in its influence or legacy.

The empire that set the template for, and defined the concept of, empire in Western civilization. Literally, with the word empire originating in the Latin imperium, as well as the word emperor originating from Latin imperator – with the title of Caesar (from the man himself) as the origin of the German Kaiser and Russian or Slavic Czar.

It may lack the size of other empires but as the saying goes, it’s not the size but what you do with it, and in this case the Roman Empire is distinguished by its sheer endurance, both in the empire itself and in its influence or legacy – “there was once a dream that was Rome”.

The Roman Empire predates the formal institutions of empire founded by Augustus (in the first century BC) – with the Roman Republic as an imperial republic, a recurring political model in Western civilization from the Greek city states, which essentially laid almost all the foundations for Mediterranean supremacy and the empire itself. Hence my starting date as that attributed to the founding of Rome (by legend).

The Republic also saw some of the most definitive events and figures of Roman history – not least Julius Caesar, who lent his name to the title of emperor and is perhaps the figure most identified with the Empire, although it was his heir Augustus who founded it in the wake of Caesar’s assassination. Like a good car salesman, Augustus just slapped the formal institutions of empire on the pretense of authority of the Republic or Senate, and said this baby can fit a millennium and a half in it.

And it did, despite the best efforts of his most notorious heirs, Caligula and Nero, as well as the Year with Four Emperors, to run it off the road in the first century AD. At its peak in the second century under Trajan – second of the so-called Five Good Emperors – it extended from the Atlantic to the Tigris, and from Scotland to the Nile.

However, the Empire’s endurance is showcased not only by its ability to remain intact over such an extent over so long a period, but to rebound from collapse or defeat in a manner unlike the steady decline of most other empires. One of the most remarkable feats was that of rebounding from collapse or at least fragmentation under the emperor Aurelian – in only five years to boot – in the so-called Crisis of the Third Century, when apart from barbarian and Persian invasions, the empire also faced the breakaway Gallic and Palmyrene Empires.

Aurelian probably extended the lifespan of the unified empire by two centuries – although the empire divided itself into western and eastern halves for administration in the fourth century, which arguably favored the eastern half with the better position as the western half slowly crumbled and fell to the barbarians at its gates.

But for sheer endurance, the title has to go to the eastern Roman empire, which history has labelled the Byzantine Empire, which lasted for a millennium past the fall of the western half, including feats of rebounding from defeats that bordered on resurrection. More like Lazarus Empire, amirite?

The first of these remains the greatest, albeit not the most, ah, resurrectionary – under legendary emperor Justinian and his even more legendary general Belisarius, taking a damn good swing at reclaiming the fallen western empire, although in hindsight the Gothic War in Italy was probably a swing too far.

In the end however, the empire suffered one defeat too many – wounded, fatally as it turned out, from the Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople in 1204. While it even managed the sort of spirited comeback it had previously, it simply lacked the scale of time or resources to see it through, particularly against a rising rival empire in its prime – the Ottoman Empire, that finally conquered Constantinople in 1453.

As for its enduring legacy, let me count the ways – “language, religion, art, architecture, literature, philosophy, law, and forms of government”. Latin and Greek. Christianity – Catholic and Orthodox, with the former inheriting the capitol, pontifex, many of the trappings, and much of the mystique of the western empire. “The Roman Empire’s afterlife in European cultural and political memory is no less significant and important than its actual physical and temporal power in its height.”

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

 

And how!

THE decline and fall – they wrote the book on it. Well, actually, that was Edward Gibbon, but you know what I mean.

That “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world”.

Even now, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire informs much modern discourse about state failure – from Edward Gibbon onwards, “we have been obsessed with the fall: it has been valued as an archetype for every perceived decline, and, hence, as a symbol for our own fears”.

As decline and fall, it involved the former as much as the latter – the Romans were consistently their own worst enemies, fighting their endless civil wars even with the barbarians at their gates.

There’s just something about the Romans desperately trying to hold one line after another in that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” that resonates with me. Indeed, any last stand or waning force often invokes the fall of the Roman Empire, both in history, and in fantasy or science fiction (which often replays it).

 

THE ROMAN EMPIRE NEVER FELL

 

On the other hand, the Empire never fell, at least according to P.K. Dick. Or we’re on to our Third or Fourth Rome (or more), going by all the countries that have claimed succession to the Roman Empire. Or at least we’re still living in a Roman world.

THE SUN NEVER SETS

 

“For these I set no limits, world or time,
But make the gift of empire without end.

Yeah – get some Aeneid into you! Yes – technically the sun did set on the Roman Empire. But the sun never sets on my Roman Empire. Or, more seriously, its legacy – from the global Roman Catholic Church to the republican forms of government adopted in the Americas.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

 

Again – and how! Ooo – I’d say crucifixions all round, Flavius!

Friends, Romans, countrymen – you know I love me some Romanitas, but you have to admit the Roman Empire would rank high in a top ten of evil empires. The Romans were absolutely brutal in conquering or enslaving their enemies (or anyone really) and suppressing rebellions or revolts.

Historians might argue over whether they were more brutal than other polities or by the standards of their time – I’ve certainly seen some argue that it was, including one entertaining argument that attributed it to lead poisoning from their water pipes. It certainly is entertaining to imagine the Romans as a bunch of lead-crazed psychos, running around like Patrick Bateman.

But you know you’re evil when people put a pox on your pax – “to plunder, to slaughter, to usurp, they give the lying name of empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” And that was from a Roman, Tacitus, although he put those words in the mouth of a Caledonian chieftain, whether that was apocryphal or otherwise.

Or when Christians – one of the groups repressed by the Romans, even if, almost unique in history, they did manage to pull off their great messianic ghost dance and win, conquering the empire itself – write you into their apocalypse as the Whore of Babylon (even if she is kinda hot), and your emperor (or a weird resurrected zombie version of Nero) as the Beast of the Apocalypse.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

 

 

TOP 10 EMPIRES (HISTORY): TIER LIST

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

(1) ROMAN EMPIRE
(2) MONGOL EMPIRE
(3) BRITISH EMPIRE

If the Roman Empire is my Old Testament of empires of history, the Mongol and British Empires are my New Testament.

Although the Roman Empire is arguably of itself my Old Testament and New Testament (or Iliad and Odyssey) of empires – perhaps with the Roman Empire as my Old Testament and the Byzantine Empire as my New Testament

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

(4) MACEDONIAN EMPIRE
(5) SPANISH EMPIRE
(6) PERSIA – ACHAEMENID EMPIRE
(7) ARAB – UMAYYAD CALIPHATE
(8) OTTOMAN EMPIRE
(9) CHINA – QING EMPIRE
(10) INDIA – MAURYA EMPIRE

 

(10) HUNNIC EMPIRE

 

A classic nomadic empire founded by horse blitzkrieg of mounted nomadic tribes from the Eurasian steppes that should be ranked as the fourth great empire of late antiquity and menacing the other three – Persian Empire as well as eastern and western Roman empires – in turn.

(Although I tend to agree with the observation of Youtuber Tominus Maximus that the Huns generally hated the eastern Roman empire but liked the western Roman empire. Well, you know, until they didn’t.)

However, despite its classic status and notoriety, the Hunnic Empire remains somewhat nebulous because like most nomadic empires, they preferred riding to writing – so we are mostly reliant on what other people wrote about them.

Apparently according to tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River. Their origins remain uncertain, other than broadly sweeping across central Asia – with some theories resembling an extent almost as wide as the Mongols, particularly those theories linking them to the Xongniu and other nomadic peoples that menaced China, often stylized as Huns, such as in the Disney version of Mulan.

They are also often linked to other nomadic tribes, sometimes also stylized as Huns, that menaced the Persian Empire and even India. It’s not helped by the tendency, as with the Scythians, to identify or name nomadic tribes across Eurasia as Huns – both before and after the classical Hunnic Empire.

Classical sources have them suddenly appear in Europe or west of the Volga from 370 AD – where they triggered the Migration Period or at least the westward movement of Goths into the Roman Empire and bringing about the latter’s fall.

By 430 AD, they had “established a vast but short-lived empire on the Danubian frontier of the Roman Empire” – with various Germanic or other tribes “either under Hunnic hegemony or fleeing from it”. The Hunnic empire largely crystallized around the charismatic leadership of the most notorious Hun, Attila – and rapidly disintegrated after his death.

Under Attila, the Huns won not just peak empire but also the historical infamy of being extremely barbaric and ruthless towards their adversaries. Although I have to admit Attila being identified as the Scourge of God earns him badass points.

From their empire, the Huns raided the more robust eastern Roman Empire, invading the Balkans and threatening the capital Constantinople, with little to stop them until the emperor opted for the pragmatic policy of paying tribute for peace.

The Huns then invaded the western Roman Empire in 451, with Attila claiming the sister of the western Roman emperor as his bride and half the empire as his dowry – with some fairness, as she had swiped right on him in preference to her betrothal to a Roman senator.

 However, there the Huns encountered the general Flavius Aetius, often hailed as “the last of the Romans”. Ironically, Aetius had effectively risen to power by relying on the Huns – with whom he had previously been a court hostage – as his allies. Now he had to face off against his former allies as Attila invaded Gaul, drawing on the waning resources of an increasingly vestigial empire to field one of its last major military operations in alliance with the Visigoths and its other Germanic allies – and won, defeating the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.

Or not, as historians dispute how conclusive a victory it was. Attila and the Huns withdrew from Gaul, only to invade Italy the following year – and there was little Aetius could do to stop them there, except for the Pope to ask Attila nicely if he would leave without sacking Rome.

Surprisingly, it worked. Attila left Italy – albeit probably more for lack of supplies or expectations of tribute as well as an eastern Roman campaign against the Huns in their homeland. He died the following year, aborting his plans for further campaigns against either empire – as with the Mongols, Europe was saved from invasion by a fortunately timed death (from Attila partying too hard celebrating his latest wedding to his hot new bride).

The Huns took one last shot at the eastern Roman Empire under one of Attila’s sons in 469, vanishing from history with their defeat.

 However, much about the Hunnic Empire remains mysterious, even the empire’s full territorial extent – some maps tentatively suggest their empire extended to the Baltic, but we just don’t know. Similarly, we can only speculate on why Attila agreed to leave Italy, setting aside papal mojo. We only have glimpses of fascinating aspects of the Huns such as their practice of cranial deformation, with their subsequent appearance no doubt adding to their fearsome reputation.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(8) GREEK – ATHENIAN EMPIRE & SPARTAN HEGEMONY

Athenian empire vs Spartan hegemony.

We usually (and correctly) think of the Roman Empire as the imperial template in Western culture, but this can mislead us into overlooking the Greek imperial template in Western culture. No – I’m not talking the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great, although that too was influential, but the classical Greek city states, particularly the opposing Athenian empire and Spartan hegemony of the Peloponnesian War.

Of course, similarly to the archetypal city-states of Sumerian civilization, their imperialism was on a small scale – city states ruling other city states or their colonies.

And it tended not to call itself a formal empire as such. Indeed, in this it was a remarkably far-reaching imperial template, not so much for imperialism but neo-imperialism. Where the Roman imperial template set the model for imperialism from the fall of the western empire through to the European maritime empires, the Greek imperial template set the model for neo-imperialism from the European maritime empires onwards.

The Athenian empire evolved from the Delian League, an alliance of Greek cities led by Athens against Persia after the Greek-Persian Wars, based on Athenian naval supremacy and named (in modern historiography) after the sacred island of Delos, “where congresses were held in the temple and where the treasury stood until, in a symbolic gesture, Pericles moved it to Athens in 454 BC”.

That last part of moving the Delian treasury to Athens marked the point where the heavy-handed control by Athens of the Delian League evolved into an Athenian empire, where Athens began to use the League’s funds for its own purposes and there were conflicts with or outright rebellions by less powerful League members.

Essentially members of the League were given a choice of either offering armed forces or paying taxes into the treasury. Most states chose the tax, which now doubled up as leaving them effectively disarmed while paying taxes or tribute to Athens. In the words of the classical historian Thucydides, ” it was correspondingly easy” for Athens “to reduce any that tried to leave the confederacy” – that is, crush members that tried to revolt or secede.

Thucydides dramatized just how heavy-handed Athens could be in the famous Melian Dialogue, often invoked by the so-called school of realism in international relations for its maxim that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer as they must”. Thucydides put that maxim in the mouths of his imagined Athenian emissaries when giving their ultimatum to the neutral island of Melos – surrender and join the League, paying tribute to Athens, or be destroyed.

One might well see the template from this Athenian “empire” or Delian League for the style or techniques of modern neo-imperialism or European maritime empire – even more so when one recalls that the Athenian state was democratic, in the style of so-called democratic empires, “a political state which conducts its internal affairs democratically but externally its policies have a striking resemblance to imperial rule”.

Interestingly, American democracy initially echoed classical Athenian democracy, in that both were also slave-owning societies and excluded women from politics.

Its opposing counterpart, Sparta, was authoritarian at heart but was also shy of formal empire with its Spartan hegemony. Particularly after its victory in the Peloponnesian War, it too could prove equally heavy-handed – establishing many of the pro-Spartan foreign governments throughout the Aegean and also establishing many Spartan garrisons.

Just as I tend to see the Peloponnesian War between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta underlying the grand ideological conflict in Western civilization, so too I am tempted to see the Athenian empire and Spartan hegemony resembling the rival United States and Soviet Union in the Cold War, except with victory reversed.

However, there was a deeper template, from which the Athenian empire and Spartan hegemony arose in part, and that was the long history of classical Greek colonization, a precursor of subsequent settler colonialism.

Essentially, Greek cities founded other cities on a prolific scale throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea coastlines, except in the western Mediterranean where they came up against the Phoenicians and their colonies (in what would become Carthage and its territories), from 750 to 550 BC.

The Greek cities or colonies often became strong city states in their own right, independent of their founding city or cities and often even rivalling them in influence – as in Sicily and southern Italy, to the extent that the Romans called the area Magna Graecia or Great Greece.

I am not familiar enough with the history of Greek colonization to comment on the extent that it was imperial in terms of displacing or dominating any inhabitants in the area of their colonies. However, it certainly had an impact that is occasionally characterized as cultural imperialism – Greek cities spread Greek culture.

However, I would go further – that Western civilization as a whole is effectively a Greek colony.

An analogy that is commonly drawn in modern history is to cast the British and their empire as the Greeks to the Romans of the United States, albeit American imperialism might be styled as closer to that of the Delian League (and its original democratic polity as closer to that of Athens).

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(8) PHOENICIAN & PUNIC EMPIRES

 

The Phoenicians rose to prominence among the Canaanites after the Bronze Age Collapse as the thalassocracy par excellence to dominate the Mediterranean and to influence classical Western civilization.

They earn special mention as with one notable exception they weren’t really an empire. Indeed, they weren’t even really a single ‘nationality’ or state, but an agglomeration of city-states like Sumer before them, located on the Levantine coast (mostly in modern Lebanon) – with the most prominent being Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos.

Of these, Tyre rose to become the richest and most powerful, famed for its purple dye that became synonymous with imperial chic – particularly through its use by the Roman emperor. Under its ruling priest Ithobaal from 887 to 856 BC, it even took a shot at expanding its territory to other Phoenician states, coming the closest the Phoenicians ever did to a unitary territorial state.

So if the Phoenicians didn’t really have an empire or even a single state, why the special mention at all?

Well, firstly there remains the history of Phoenician maritime and mercantile power, indeed the sole such power in the region for several centuries – arguably the precursor of what might be styled as economic neo-imperialism.

Interestingly, they combined maritime power with proto-industrialism. Like the Greek city-states which rose in parallel with them, they had few natural resources – apart from the lumber (or cedar) for which they were famed – so they specialized in craft, construction, and manufacture, for which they were also famed in contemporary literary works from the Bible to Homer.

With that maritime and mercantile power came cultural influence, best known of which is the oldest verified alphabet, but the full extent of their influence on classical Western civilization is still being discovered – for example, the “orientalization” of “Greek cultural and artistic conventions”.

However, “as a mercantile power concentrated along a narrow coastal strip of land, the Phoenicians lacked the size and population to support a large military”, and hence “increasingly fell under the sway of foreign rules” from “neighboring empires – except for their colonies, which brings me to my next point…

Secondly, there was the history Phoenician colonization, overlapping and in rivalry with classical Greek colonization – similarly founding colonies and trading posts, mostly of limited size but of impressive range throughout the Mediterranean coastline. The Greeks may have eclipsed them in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Phoenicians continued to predominate in the western Mediterranean, not least one colony founded by Tyre known to history as Carthage. Which brings me to my third point…

Thirdly, there was that one notable exception to the Phoenicians not really being an empire and that was the empire of the Phoenician colony that effectively took over the other colonies in the western Mediterranean and eclipsed the original Phoenician city-states, even Tyre as the city-state that founded it – Carthage and its Carthaginian or Punic empire.

Like the power that rivalled and ultimately destroyed it as the predominant power in the western Mediterranean – Rome – Carthage was an imperial republic. Before it lost out to the Rome that it mirrored as a republic – as it also mirrored the maritime and mercantile power of the original Phoenician city states – Carthage gradually expanding its economic and political hegemony across the western Mediterranean through a network of “colonies, vassal states and satellite states” that “controlled the largest territory in the region”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(7) EGYPTIAN EMPIRE

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Even more so than Mesopotamia, Egypt set the standard for imperial state chic, not least in its monumental architecture and statuary, as well as its priesthoods and divine ruler personality cult.

Indeed, it is not too difficult to see the stamp of Egyptian imperial chic even to the twentieth century and beyond, as in the Soviet Union but with a secular party priesthood devoted to the cycles of history as opposed to the Nile and cult of socialism rather than the sun god. Less pyramids perhaps, but equally monumental architecture and statuary, as well as a tendency towards equally grandiose and gigantic projects.

Ironically, despite this imperial chic, Egypt was not so much of an empire itself, except of course to its own subjects, as it largely kept within its own borders to the Nile. The exception is the imperial Egypt of the New Kingdom, when it extended southwards to Nubia and northwards through the Levant – under pharaohs such as Rameses, whose title in Greek gave us the figure in Shelley’s poem.

Also ironically, Egypt has consistently played an important role within empires, but more as imperial prize rather than ruling empire itself – starting with its conquest by Assyrian, Persian and Macedonian empires in turn.

The last also reveals something of an odd recurring tendency, for foreign invaders or subjects from an empire conquering or ruling Egypt to break away from that empire with their own dynasty within Egypt, which is then effectively regarded as Egyptian.

First and foremost among those was the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by Alexander’s general Ptolemy as a successor state of the Macedonian empire and regarded as the last dynasty of ancient Egypt. It was the dynasty that gave history Egypt’s most famous female monarch, Cleopatra – also Egypt’s last reigning monarch, before its fall to the Roman Empire. Indeed, its fall transformed the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.

Kudos to Cleopatra, however, for almost pulling all a second breakaway dynasty based in Egypt, this time from the Roman Empire in its eastern half, through her alliance with Mark Antony. Yes – it was a long shot but it’s tempting to imagine the counterfactual of their victory, perhaps anticipating the eastern Roman Empire by three centuries, except from Alexandria rather than Constantinople, with Greek as its lingua franca at an earlier date. Or alternatively something like the short-lived breakaway Palmyrene empire under Zenobia two centuries ahead of the Crisis of the Third Century.

Egypt then became an imperial prize for the Roman Empire – and its richest, the proverbial breadbasket of its empire. That always strikes me as strange from my perspective of contemporary Egypt and its comparative poverty – but then that is part of the more general strange feature that the Roman Empire’s eastern or southern African and Asian provinces were richer than its western and northern European provinces, the reverse of our contemporary perspective.

From there, it was briefly a battlefield between the eastern Roman (or Byzantine) empire and the resurgent Persian (or Sassanid) empire, before falling to the Arab conquest that defeated one and conquered the other.

Egypt remained in the hands of one caliphate after another, but rose to new prominence as the seat of power for the Fatimid Caliphate. The Fatimids did not quite fall within that recurring tendency for Egyptian breakaway dynasties, except perhaps in the last stages of their decline when their rule was effectively confined to Egypt – but the Mamluks did, the slave mercenary military case that rose to rule their own Sultanate in Egypt and beyond, even famously defeating the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalat in 1260.

The Mamluks declined in turn, but their role was replayed by Albanian mercenaries with Egypt as a province in the Ottoman Empire, led by their commander Muhammed Ali Pasha, who founded his own dynasty, nominally subject to but effectively independent from the Ottoman Empire.

Egypt became a protectorate of the British Empire, as Egypt again rose to prominence as an imperial prize, not for its agriculture but for the newly constructed Suez Canal as maritime trade route.

And once again ironically, Egypt and the Suez Canal subsequently rose to prominence as the imperial humiliation of the British Empire, with the Suez Crisis in 1956 – often cited as one of the end points of the British Empire.

We’re not quite done with Egypt and its imperial ironies yet – as finally modern Egypt echoed the imperial heights of its ancient New Kingdom with the short-lived United Arab Republic, when it formed a sovereign union with Syria from 1958 to 1961.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(6) MESOPOTAMIA – AKKADIAN, ASSYRIAN & BABYLONIAN EMPIRES

Ur-imperialism.

The original imperialism – in that Mesopotamia was the origin (or one of the origins) of human civilization, and even more so, states.

Of course those states were necessarily on a small scale, as in the archetypal city-states of Sumerian civilization, and their imperialism was similarly on a small scale, as in city states conquering other city states or their neighbors.

In his book Against the Grain, James C Scott strikingly argues that such imperialism was ingrained (heh) in those states from their very foundations in grain agriculture as an instrument and means of state control, depending on various degrees of forced labor or extraction.

Whether or not that is the case, Sumerian city states warred against each other in what might be regarded as micro-imperialism or proto-imperialism.

Or as I introduced it, ur-imperialism – both as the term ur- is used to connote an ancestral prototype or primeval origin, and for the Sumerian city state of Ur.

One of the aspects of that ur-imperialism is, like many other features of subsequent civilizations, Sumerian civilization created or set the standard features of imperial or at least palace states, including monumental architecture – such as ziggurats! – and imperial or royal cults of leadership.

Ultimately, Mesopotamia evolved to imperialism on a larger scale – with its three namesake empires best known in general history. The Akkadian empire – best known for Sargon of Akkad – managed to conquer or unite all Mesopotamian city states in an area similar to modern Iraq, in the floodplains of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers that defined Mesopotamia.

However, the Akkadian Empire pales in comparison to the biggest and most belligerent of Mesopotamian empires, the Assyrian Empire (or technically neo-Assyrian Empire, as I understand it was a resurgence of the Assyrian state) – indeed, the largest empire in world history to that date.

To be honest, I don’t know too much about the Assyrian Empire, other than it being portrayed as one of the evil empires that menaced the Israelites in the Bible – and also that Jonah was ordered to its capital Ninevah by God before disobeying and being swallowed by the whale.

Although smaller than its predecessor, the Babylonian Empire (or again technically neo-Babylonian Empire) loomed larger in the Bible as one of its ultimate symbols, if not the ultimate symbol, of evil empire, because of the so-called Babylonian captivity and exile of the Jews.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion”.

Egypt and Babylon are the two famous (or infamous) poles of captivity for the Jews, but the latter is more raw in the Bible – because it was more recent (and less mythic), but also because the Old Testament was mostly written or compiled at or about that time.

And the symbolism of Babylon as evil empire loomed even larger in Christianity, due to its use as a symbol for Rome in the Book of Apocalypse, with the enduring imagery of that hot harlot, Mystery Babylon.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(5) NAZI EMPIRE

The evil empire par excellence. Although that is an overstatement – it was barely an empire.

Despite styling itself as the Third Reich after the first German “empire” or Reich of a thousand years, the Holy Roman Empire, it didn’t even last as long as the second, Wilhelmine Germany.

In total, Nazi Germany lasted only twelve years from 1933 to 1945 – for which it could only be described as imperial, at least beyond its original borders, for a little over half of that, from 1938 onwards. Well, perhaps from its involvement in the Spanish Civil War before that, although that failed to yield a reliable client state – and it was arguably preparing for its imperialism from its very inception.

And even for war beyond its borders from 1939 to 1945, the second half of that period was defending or retreating from conquests made in the first half – before its complete collapse, defeat, unconditional surrender, occupation and partition. So the Nazi empire was about three years of conquests, albeit impressive, then defending or retreating from those conquests before falling altogether.

The evil part, however, is not an overstatement. It can probably best be summed up by the Encyclopedia of Fantasy’s comparison of the First World War with the Second – “despite the attempts of propagandists on both sides, no wholly evil figure emerges from World War I to occupy the world’s imagination, no one of a viciousness so unmitigated that it seems almost supernatural; Hitler, on the other hand, has all the lineaments of a Dark Lord, and the Reich he hoped to found was a parody of the true Land”.

The Nazi empire, short-lived as it was, consisted of its conquests and occupied territory in Europe and north Africa – as well as its allies that started off resembling client states at best and finished off resembling hostages at worst.

And it was notorious for all the worst features of empire – war, extortion, plunder, slavery and genocide – arguably as a form of hyper-imperialism, both in intent and scale, more so by being crammed into a few short years.

It couldn’t even aspire to the caustic observation of empire by the Roman historian Tacitus through the mouthpiece of a Caledonian chieftain – that they make a desert and call it peace. Rather they made a desert and called it war.

The most that could be said for it was that its occupation of western Europe, extortionate as it was from the outset, was relatively benign – relatively that is, compared to its occupation of eastern Europe, brutal or genocidal as it was from the outset

“It has been argued, and not altogether frivolously, that the crucial German mistake of the Second World War was to have behaved atrociously to Poland and correctly to France when the reverse would have served German interests to better effect”.

On a related side note, I have never understood why the Germans crushed the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, rather than simply withdraw to leave it as a thorn in the Soviet side.

Ironically, there were strains of anti-imperialism within the Nazi empire, similar to those other modern imperial powers that styled themselves as anti-imperialist while creating empires or enacting imperialism of their own. That was particularly so as it opposed the British Empire and hence sporadically invoked or supported anti-imperialism against that empire, as well as its propaganda posing as defending itself (or Europe) from Soviet and American forms of imperialism.

But it couldn’t even do that right – as it was not particularly concerned with expressing such sentiments during its high tide of conquest, and they only came to the fore as it became increasingly desperate defending against its defeat.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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(4) JAPANESE EMPIRE

One of the oldest empires but also one of the newest – which, among other things, makes it one of the oddest.

There were older empires than Japan, whose mythology traces its imperial line to legendary founder Jimmo in 660 BC, although more conventional history tends to trace its origins “in the late Kofun period of the 3rd-6th centuries AD”. However, it is the oldest empire still existing, at least in retaining an emperor, the last state to do so, albeit as ceremonial head of state.

Which brings us to the one of many oddities of Japan’s empire – that for the vast majority of its history, Japan had an emperor without an empire.

Firstly, in the sense that Japan was a homogenous polity that mostly kept to itself, apart from importing cultural influences, mostly from China – contrary to how empire is typically defined as one nation or people ruling over another. In that sense, the Japanese emperor was a somewhat inflated term for monarch, albeit a cult figure in the native Japanese religion of Shinto.

Secondly, in the sense that for a substantial part of its history, the emperor wasn’t even that, but a lame-duck monarch where de facto power was held by military aristocrats in what is generally known as the shogunate. Ironically, it is during one of these periods that Japan actually embarked on empire in the conventional definition of the term – its invasions of Korea in 1592-1598.

Japan was also one of the newest empires, a latecomer in the Age of Imperialism – and as the only Asian imperial power of that otherwise exclusive club of European empires, seen as somewhat of a gate crasher or interloper, although ironically its primary crash course was for collision with the other non-European imperial power, the United States.

Japan narrowly escaped being the subject of an imperial power or powers that was the fate of the rest of Asia. When European imperialism first tentatively reached east Asia about three centuries before in the Age of Discovery, Japan decided it was having none of that and famously sealed itself off in isolationism.

That couldn’t last forever, as European imperialism had bigger guns in the Age of Imperialism – and the United States forced Japan to open up with classic gunboat diplomacy (in the literal form of a fleet commanded by Commodore Perry), starting Japan’s love-hate relationship with the United States as an object of admiration and awe but also potential hostility and rivalry.

That saw Japan revive its emperor within a new centralized government in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and adapt all those features of European nations that led to their imperial power – in the smartest possible way by following world leaders in their fields, notably building their navy on expertise from Britain and their army on expertise from France, before swapping out the latter for Germany after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

And what more distinctive European feature was there than an empire? So Japan set about acquiring that too – modestly at first, from its immediate neighbors, starting with the Ryukuan island kingdom in 1879. By 1894, it was powerful enough to join in that other distinctive European feature in the nineteenth century – pawning Qing China, which it did in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, acquiring Taiwan, and continuing to use China as its punching bag thereafter.

However, its victory and claims against China saw it clash with European imperial powers keen to maintain the balance of power and their spheres of influence there – foremost among them Russia, looming largest against Japan in north-east Asia. That aligned Japan with Britain, which was similarly concerned with Russia, and they sealed their alignment with a formal alliance in 1902 – which allowed Japan to take on Russia directly and win in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

The spoils of victory in that war saw Japan revisit its ambitions in Korea, but this time successfully annexing it – where they were notoriously brutal ruling over it. Not Belgium-brutal, but still up there even on the scale of brutality in the Age of Imperialism.

Japan made more gains at the expense of Germany in and after the First World War – and at the expense of increasing hostility with the United States, prompting Britain to abandon the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

Which brings us perhaps to most of the oddities of the Japanese Empire, as it sowed the seeds of its rise to one of the largest territorial empires in history at the same time as the seeds of its decline as one of the shortest-lived empires in history. All the while on the path of evil empire, ultimately one that was dying and insane.

Yet on that path and even before, certainly from the Russo-Japanese War, Japan styled itself as anti-imperialist, in the tradition of those two other states that styled themselves as anti-imperialist while engaging in imperialism of their own, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Of course, for Japan this was against European imperialism – propagandizing their own imperialism with slogans such as “Asia for the Asians” and as the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, although they weren’t too big on the co- part of that title, more their own prosperity sphere. Those claims were not without some justice, but they were also with brutality and violence that eclipsed those of European imperialism as well as making their previous occupation of Korea seem like a picnic

Ultimately the Japanese Empire fell to defeat, primarily by the United States in the Pacific War – and Japan was not only shorn of its empire, but itself occupied by an American shogunate, albeit one that proved extraordinarily and unexpectedly enlightened in its role in the equally extraordinary and unexpected revival of Japan as an economic superpower, for a period second only to the United States itself. Which of course has seen Japan also accused of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, substituting economic power for military victory in controlling other nations.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

(3) AMERICAN EMPIRE

 

“Pick a spot…Any spot. I guarantee you we will have American troops there within thirty years. The Empire that you dreamed of while reading Tacitus” – The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Pax Americana – you’re living in it.

Perhaps the most paradoxical empire – or least the subject of the most vexed debate as to what extent it is an empire at all or whether it is imperialism without an empire, arising from the pervasive sense of its own exceptionalism.

A large part of that is that the United States has traditionally styled itself as anti-imperialist, or in the phrase of Thomas Jefferson, “an empire of liberty”, from its very founding in revolution against the British Empire through its traditional foreign policy encapsulated in the Monroe Doctrine of opposing European imperialism in the Americas – or American intervention beyond the Americas.

However, the United States would hardly be alone in pursuing imperialism while styling itself as anti-imperialist or even doing so in the name of anti-imperialism, as ironically two of its most formidable opponents did the same – Japan and the Soviet Union.

So the very idea of American imperialism or empire, let alone their nature, is one that meets substantial resistance.

However, there was at least the territorial expansion of the United States, as it manifested its destiny westwards across the continent from the very outset, ultimately to the Pacific – to the cost or destruction of all native American peoples in its path, and about half of Mexico.

Again ironically, that was parallel to the eastwards territorial expansion of the Russian empire across Siberia to the Pacific – as Alexis de Tocqueville observed as the basis for his prediction of them as opposing world powers.

Unlike the predominantly maritime empires of other European powers, the Russian empire was predominantly a territorial empire – and so , it is argued, was the United States, particularly as similarly to the Russian Empire and unlike European maritime empires, it absorbed and retained its territorial conquests or expansion into itself as a nation.

Whether one accepts the territorial expansion of the United States as imperialism or an empire, there can be no argument that the United States indeed was or had a formal empire for at least part of its history, as in the map in my feature image, albeit as a latecomer to the Age of Imperialism (or New Imperialism) in the late 19th century.

And it went about being a latecomer in the smartest possible way – it simply picked up someone else’s empire at a bargain bin sale of its own creation, the best pickings of the remaining Spanish empire in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

In that war, the United States acquired the Philippines (while also crushing the Philippines independence movement in the Philippine-American War from 1899 to 1902) as well as Puerto Rico and Guam – both of which it retains as territories today (while the Philippines became independent in 1946).

It also effectively acquired Cuba as a de facto colony even when it did not formally occupy Cuba. Even before that, it had extended its manifest destiny beyond the continent into the Pacific, as it annexed Hawaii (and afterwards to other Pacific islands, such as American Samoa).

However, when people refer to American imperialism, they tend not to be referring to its limited formal empire – or at least not just referring to it – but its informal empire, “the expansion of American political, economic, cultural, and media influence beyond the boundaries of the United States”.

That is, hegemony or sphere of influence in more positive terms, neo-imperialism or neo-colonialism in more negative terms, “which leverages economic power rather than military force in an informal empire” or means of control other than formal annexation or rule. Of course, that may still involve military force when it needs to, but generally neo-imperialism by definition proposes more subtle or indirect means of coercion or influence.

My own view tends towards that of imperialism without an empire – whether or not the United States has comprised a formal or informal empire, its foreign and military policy has unquestionably been imperialistic, at least at certain times and places.

Foremost among those times and places would be its southern neighbors at, well most times actually, because the United States has been at its shabbiest dealing with Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine may have been anti-imperialist towards European powers in the Americas, but not so much for the United States – indeed, it implies the Americas to be their exclusive sphere.

The influence of the United States extended well beyond the Americas with its rise to world power in the world wars, not least in its system of alliances, in what was (or is) dubbed the American Century – indeed, to a world-encircling extent exceeding even that of the British Empire, which it is frequently portrayed as inheriting or succeeding.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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(2) RUSSIAN & SOVIET EMPIRES

 

Bizarro European empire and third largest empire by size in history, such that even the residual state of Russia remains the largest nation in the world.

Why bizarro European empire? Well, for one thing, as J.M. Roberts pointed out in Triumph of the West, it’s always been unclear where the West ends going east – and in particular on which side of the line of Western civilization the Russian state falls.

For another, the Russian Empire was distinct from other European empires, but ironically its closest parallel is with the United States, albeit still weirdly so, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed when he presciently predicted them – in 1835! – as the future global powers on parallel but opposing paths:

“There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.

All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth. All the others have stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived. The American struggles against the obstacles which nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained with the ploughshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

The primary distinction with other European empires was that, with one notable exception, the Russian Empire was not a maritime empire. Indeed, it was famously landlocked, with an equally famous strategic policy of seeking unobstructed warm-water ports.

Instead, it was a good old-fashioned territorial empire, expanding eastwards from European Russia across Siberia and central Asia, hence its parallel with the United States and its westward ‘manifest destiny’ or territorial expansion (in both cases to the Pacific).

Unlike the United States, it had more arguable justification in terms of its security against historical invasions of nomadic tribe from the steppes, most famously the Mongols – but like the United States (and unlike European maritime empires), it absorbed and retained its territorial conquests or expansion into itself as a nation.

Ultimately, the Russian empire’s eastward expansion brought it to the Pacific Ocean but more fundamentally, to the borders of an Asian state armed with firearms and robust enough to resist it – Qing China, in its prime and powerful enough to defeat Russia in the Sino-Russian border conflicts of the seventeenth century.

Of course, Qing China famously waned in the nineteenth century, while Russia had grown stronger such that it was again able to make encroachments eastwards, but was confronted by Britain and the new rising power in north-east Asia – Japan.

However the Pacific saw that one notable exception for Russia’s maritime empire – as a latecomer in the first phase of European imperialism in the Americas, most famously claiming Alaska (equally famously bought from them by the United States in 1867) but also extending to California and even Hawaii before receding back.

The Russian Empire also expanded southwards through central Asia, but was again blocked by Britain in the so-called Great Game, as well as more regional empires such as the Ottoman Empire. That saw the southernmost extent of the Russian Empire, which did not scramble for Africa like other European empires and was constrained by its naval limitations from extending elsewhere in Asia.

It also expanded westwards into Europe itself, taking Finland from a waning Sweden and partitioning territory (with Prussia and Austria) from the waning Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Despite all this, the Russian imperial state came crashing down like the three other great imperial states of Europe brought down by the First World War – Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire – but more dramatically or spectacularly as it was succeeded by the world’s first communist state, the Soviet Union.

As a communist state, the Soviet Union styled itself as anti-imperialist, but ironically closely emulated or even exceeded the imperialism of its predecessor – arguably in the tradition of two other states that styled themselves as anti-imperialist as they created empires of their own, the United States and Japan.

Initially Soviet imperialism was limited within the former Russian empire itself, but with its rise to superpower escalated to reclaiming its predecessor’s lost territory and then to extending further than the Russian empire ever did, except across the Pacific to the Americas – starting westward to the heart of Europe with its subject satellite states after the Second World War, opposed by the United States in the Cold War, fulfilling de Tocqueville’s prediction.

It also renewed the Russian sphere of influence in north-east Asia, although that fell afoul of a resurgent China, ironically a rival communist state originally within (and a product of) that influence.

The most dramatic success of Soviet imperialism was when it graduated from the traditional territorial empire of its predecessor to the maritime empire of European empires, ironically as those empires were scrambling out of Africa and elsewhere – indeed expanding its influence under its continued anti-imperial guise of supporting decolonization or ‘liberation’ movements from those empires, with overlapping successes in Cuba, south-east Asia and Africa.

Despite all this – and accelerated by one imperial expedition too many into Afghanistan – the Soviet state came crashing down in the end of the Cold War, but not before President Reagan had famously characterized it as the “evil empire”, an epithet much relished by its east European subjects who in turn revolted against it in its death throes.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)