Notes on some big countries
History’s biggest empires, plus the busiest circle in the world.
As the years have gone on, I’ve felt increasingly uncomfortable with the idea, oft heard in parts of the liberal left, that Britain is the absolute worst country. Don’t worry, I’m not about to start slapping union flags on stuff at random or anything; but the idea that one’s own country is the worst seems to me to stem from the same impulse as the idea that it’s the best. Either way, we are in some sense topping the league tables; either way, we are special.
I was pondering all this, as you do, as I browsed Wikipedia’s list of the largest empires that there have ever been. (The editors of that august organ got it from multiple other, quite possibly non-comparable sources, but it’ll do as an indicative list.)
1. British Empire, 1920: 35.5m square kilometres (26.4% of the world)
2. Mongol Empire, c1300: 24.0m square kilometres (17.8% of the world)
3. Russian Empire, 1895: 22.8m square kilometres (16.9% of the world)
4. Qing China, 1790: 14.7m square kilometres (10.9% of the world)
5. Spanish Empire, 1810: 13.7m square kilometres (10.2% of the world)
6. Second French colonial empire, 1920: 11.5m square kilometres (8.5% of the world)
7. Abbasid/Umayyad Caliphate, c750: 11.1m square kilometres (8.2% of the world)
8. Yuan China, 1310, 11.0m square kilometres (8.2% of the world)
9. Xiongnu Empire, 176 BC: 9m square kilometres (6.7% of the world)
10. Empire of Brazil, 1889: 8.3m square kilometres (6.2% of the world)
That’s quite enough to be going on with – I mean, god, the amount of discourse there is bursting out of that top 10 already.
Firstly, yes, the British Empire was, by land mass, the biggest, so we can probably make a fairly compelling pitch for the title of “all time worst country” on at least this one narrow metric. But there are a couple of other European colonial empires in there, too, one of which – the Russian – has in a very real sense never fallen, merely declined in scale.1
Then there’s the fact that British, French and Spanish empires all peak in size a lot later than you might have imagined. In 1510, Spain was a superpower. By 1810? Not so much. In the cases of both Britain and France, that’s largely the result of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the division of the spoils after World War One – but given half remembered stuff about Rome running into trouble when it stopped expanding, too, I’m wondering if there is a point at which empires simply grow past the point of sustainability and pop, like a balloon.
And then there’s the fact that a lot of these aren’t European empires at all. A couple of them are Chinese (another thing we call a country that’s arguably a still extant empire); a couple, nomadic steppe dwellers (that’s who the Xiongnu were, in case you were wondering). The Mongol Empire, which stretched from Korea to Crimea, was the largest contiguous empire the world has ever seen. It also didn’t last very long – roughly the length of a single human lifespan; compared to the Romans, who last nearly seven centuries, even if you don’t count their Byzantine offspring, which you probably should, that’s nothing – and the thought occurs that there’s a case for a sort of four dimensional measure of imperial scale, that counts time as well as space. But I have no idea how we construct that, so am going to swiftly move on.
Lastly, you may be wondering: the Empire of Brazil? What? Well, in 1808, the Portuguese royal family fled to Rio de Janeiro to escape Napoleon, taking the seat of their empire with them; when Brazil declared its independence in 1822, it decided it quite fancied staying an empire, too. The reason it ranks higher on this list than the mother empire in any form is that it independently consolidated its control over an area of South America bigger than Portugal ever had.
It strikes me that there’s a parallel here with another ex-colony which declared independence from the empire that created it, and then went on to conquer a large chunk of the new world; but that one didn’t ever declare itself an empire, even though the land it swallowed already had plenty of inhabitants. If the United States were to be considered an empire, just for the record, it’d be in 9th place.
One could ask, of course: is land enough? The British Empire in 1920 looked massive – but relatively few people lived in the vast landmasses of Australia or Canada.
So here’s another chart, from the same page. This one’s a bit simpler so I’m just going to screenshot.
Two thoughts occur from all this. One is that people like me don’t just bang on about Rome because they had that sort of education: it actually was important. Even though it only ranks about 25th by area, by percentage of world population it’s much higher on the list, because it contained nearly a third of everyone alive at the time, far higher than any state today. Also, it lasted for centuries! That’s A Big Deal. (I explained why it is I spend so much time thinking about Rome here, if that’s your bag.)
The other thought that leaps out of this list is that if you really want a big empire by population you need either China or India.
So, yes, the British Empire was massive, on whatever measure you examine. But it was helped by including both one of the world’s major population centres, and a couple of massive bits of relatively uninhabited land. Take the bustle of India, the deserts of Australia or the frozen wastes of Canada out of the equation, and the rankings would look very different.
Though not the rankings of economic power.
Oh, god. I’m going to stop there, before I get myself cancelled.
Map of the week
Sticking with our theme, an oldie but a goodie.
In 2013, a Reddit user by the name of Ken Myers, who posted as “Valeriepieris”, noticed something striking about the world’s population distribution. He drew a circle with a radius of around 4,000 kilometres, centred somewhere off south east Asia, and containing most of China, India, Japan and several other countries. After doing some quick sums, Myers made a map and posted it to Reddit. It went viral and became a meme because, well, look:
Image: NASA/Reddit Map Porn/public domain.
The Valeriepieris Circle is still, to be fair, pretty mind blowing. A circle of 4,000km in radius sounds big – you wouldn’t want to walk it – but on the scale of the entire planet it really isn’t. It’s just 6.7% of the world’s surface area; yet it contains more people than the entire rest of the world.
Myers’ work has been tested, more than once, and found to be correct: so densely populated is Asia that this circle really does contain more people than the world beyond. In fact, Danny Quah – an economics professor at the National University of Singapore – has found that if you move the circle, you can actually make it slightly smaller (radius: 3,300km) and get the same results:
Image: cmglee/jimht at shaw dot ca/CC BY-SA 4.0.
As with that list of empires, you really can’t stress this enough: there are a lot of people in India and China.
The Gratuitous Dog Picture & Sales Pitch Bit
He has had a haircut, and thus is sad.
The article above is an extract from the archive of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, a weekly newsletter which goes out every Wednesday at 4pm. Become a paying subscriber, and each week you’ll get a bit on politics, some diverting links, an article on history/geography/language/something, and the map of the week. But that’s not all! You’ll also get a warm glow of satisfaction that you’re helping me to write nerdy and interesting things, and not boring corporate ones. And all for just £4 a month or £40£28 a year! While stocks last!
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Also, since one of the biggest drivers of European colonialism was “other European colonialism”, and since it’s hard to imagine that the bits of the world the British conquered would have gone unmolested by French, Spanish or whoever else in our absence, I’m tempted to suggest that Britain was not so much more evil than the others as “more successfully evil”. But at this point I am getting dangerously close to qualifying for a GB News slot, and I don’t want to be cancelled over a footnote, so I’m going to leave this there.