35.5 million square kilometers under one flag. 24 million square kilometers of contiguous steppe ruled from a single tent. A civil code drafted in 1804 still governing courtrooms across four continents. An empire that turned a desert trade language into the mother tongue of 400 million people. A Tamil king’s grandson building the largest religious structure on Earth in a Cambodian jungle. 500 million native Spanish speakers tracing their vowels back to a handful of conquistadors. None of these empires lasted forever; but the borders they drew, the laws they wrote, and the languages they imposed never left.
Every border on a modern map is an argument that somebody won centuries ago. The language you are reading right now exists in its current form because one empire spread it by sword and another carried it by ship. The laws that govern your property, your marriage, and your right to a fair trial trace back not to parliaments and constitutions alone, but to the decrees of emperors who ruled long before the printing press was invented.
This is not another list of the biggest empires. Size matters here, but only as one variable among several. What we wanted to know is which empires left the deepest handprint on the present — on the languages spoken by billions, the legal codes enforced in more than a hundred countries, the road networks and trade routes still in use, and the cultural and religious landscapes that define daily life for most of the planet.
Some of these entries will be obvious. Rome and Britain need no introduction. Others may catch you off guard. The Khmer Empire, for instance, engineered a hydraulic system across roughly 1,500 square kilometres that sustained more than a million people — and built the largest religious monument on Earth while they were at it. The Mali Empire produced a ruler whose personal generosity during a single pilgrimage crashed the gold market in Egypt for a dozen years. And the Akkadian Empire, the oldest entry on this list, invented the very concept of empire itself.
Here are fifteen empires, ranked from the bottom up, judged not by how much land they grabbed but by how much of that land’s future they shaped.
How We Ranked These Empires
Rankings of historical empires typically default to territorial size or military conquests. We deliberately avoided that single-axis approach. Our ranking weighs five criteria in roughly equal proportion.
Linguistic legacy measures how many people today speak a language that the empire spread or standardised. The Spanish Empire scores exceptionally here: Spanish is an official language in 20 sovereign nations, with more than 500 million native speakers. The Roman Empire scores through its descendants — Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian collectively account for more than 900 million native speakers.
Legal and institutional influence tracks the adoption of legal codes, governance systems, and administrative models. The French Empire ranks high because the Napoleonic Code influenced civil-law systems in roughly 120 countries. The Byzantine Empire earns credit for Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis, the legal foundation on which most of continental Europe’s modern civil law rests.
Infrastructure and trade networks evaluates roads, ports, postal systems, and trade corridors that outlasted the empire that built them. The Achaemenid Empire’s Royal Road and the Mongol Empire’s Yam relay network both score highly.
Cultural and religious diffusion considers the spread of religions, artistic traditions, scientific knowledge, and cultural practices. The Umayyad Caliphate is the most obvious beneficiary here, having carried Islam, the Arabic language, and a golden age of scholarship across three continents.
Territorial scale and population governed serves as a baseline — not the whole picture, but a necessary dimension. An empire that ruled 44% of the world’s population (the Achaemenid Empire at its peak, around 480 BCE) or 24% of the planet’s land surface (the British Empire in 1920) plainly merits a place in the conversation.
No ranking of this kind is immune to debate, and ours is no exception. Empires are messy. Their borders shifted constantly, their records are incomplete, and their legacies are tangled with violence and exploitation alongside innovation and exchange. We have tried to be transparent about what we measured and why.
15. Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BCE)
Before the Akkadian Empire, there were city-states, kingdoms, and territories held by force. What there was not, in any meaningful sense, was an empire — a single political structure governing multiple peoples, languages, and regions under centralised authority. Sargon of Akkad changed that around 2334 BCE, and every empire on this list exists, in part, because of the precedent he set.
Sargon rose from obscure origins — later legends claimed he was placed in a basket on the Euphrates as an infant — and unified Sumerian city-states under Akkadian rule. He installed governors loyal to him across conquered territories, standardised weights and measures, and maintained a standing army. These were not original innovations in isolation, but bundling them together into a cohesive governing apparatus was. It became the template.
The empire lasted less than two centuries, but the administrative DNA it introduced — centralised taxation, appointed provincial governors, a professional military, a shared bureaucratic language — ran through every Mesopotamian state that followed: the Third Dynasty of Ur, Babylon, Assyria, and eventually Persia. Sargon did not just build the first empire. He built the blueprint.
14. Macedonian Empire (336–323 BCE)
Alexander III of Macedon conquered an area stretching from Greece to northwestern India in just over a decade. By the time he died in Babylon in 323 BCE, at the age of 32, he had assembled the largest empire a single conqueror had built up to that point — roughly 5.2 million square kilometres. The military achievement is staggering. The cultural aftermath is what earns him a place on this list.
Alexander’s conquests kicked off the Hellenistic period, roughly three centuries during which Greek language, art, philosophy, and science spread across the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Central Asia. He founded more than 20 cities named Alexandria, the most famous of which — in Egypt, founded on 7 April 331 BCE — housed the Great Library and served as the intellectual capital of the ancient Mediterranean for centuries.
Greek became the lingua franca of scholarship and diplomacy across a vast swathe of the known world. That linguistic reach meant the New Testament was written in Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew, which shaped the transmission of Christianity in ways that still ripple through Western civilisation. The fusion of Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian traditions during the Hellenistic period produced advances in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and engineering that formed the foundation of Western scientific thought.
The empire itself fell apart almost immediately after Alexander’s death, splintering among his generals into successor kingdoms. But the cultural engine he started ran for another three hundred years and, in certain respects, never fully stopped.
13. Achaemenid (Persian) Empire (c. 550–330 BCE)
At its territorial peak, around 480 BCE, the Achaemenid Empire ruled an estimated 49.4 million people out of a world population of roughly 112.4 million — approximately 44% of every human alive. No empire before or since has governed a larger share of humanity.
Cyrus the Great founded the empire around 550 BCE with a policy that was, for the ancient world, remarkably tolerant. He allowed conquered peoples to keep their languages, religions, and local customs. The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay document from 539 BCE discovered in the ruins of Babylon, records his policy of restoring temples and repatriating displaced peoples. It is often described as an early declaration of human rights, though scholars debate whether that modern framing accurately reflects its original purpose.
The empire’s physical infrastructure was equally ahead of its time. The Royal Road, stretching roughly 2,700 kilometres from Sardis (in modern Turkey) to Susa (in modern Iran), enabled mounted couriers to carry messages across the empire in about a week — a distance that would take a traveller on foot roughly 90 days. The Greek historian Herodotus described these couriers in his Histories (Book 8, Section 98): “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” That passage, written in the fifth century BCE, was later adapted as the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service — inscribed on the James Farley Post Office in New York City in 1914.
The Achaemenid system of provincial governance through satrapies — semi-autonomous regions run by royally appointed governors who collected taxes and maintained order while reporting to a central authority — influenced Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, and eventually Ottoman administrative models. The concept that a vast, multiethnic territory could be held together through bureaucracy rather than permanent occupation was one of the empire’s most durable exports.
12. Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE)
The Han Dynasty governed China for over four centuries, and its influence ran so deep that the majority ethnic group in China — the Han Chinese, who make up roughly 92% of the country’s population — still bears its name. That alone would make it historically significant. But the Han legacy extends far beyond ethnic identity.
Around 105 CE, a court official named Cai Lun refined the papermaking process using tree bark, hemp waste, old rags, and fishnets. Paper had existed in cruder forms before Cai Lun, but his method produced a material cheap, light, and durable enough for mass bureaucratic and scholarly use. The technology spread westward along the Silk Road, reaching the Islamic world by the eighth century and Europe by the twelfth. It is barely an exaggeration to say that every written record, printed book, and legal document produced in the last two millennia owes something to a Han-era innovation.
The Han also formalised the Silk Road as a trade corridor linking China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and eventually the Roman Empire. Silk, spices, lacquerware, and metallurgical techniques moved west; glassware, gold, and grapevines moved east. The exchange was not just commercial — religions, languages, technologies, and diseases followed the same routes. Buddhism entered China through Silk Road connections during the Han period and went on to shape East Asian civilisation for the next two thousand years.
The Han government pioneered a merit-based civil service — selecting officials through examinations rather than purely by birth or military prowess. This system, refined over the following centuries, became one of the most enduring features of Chinese governance and later inspired civil-service reforms in Europe, including the 19th-century British model.
11. Roman Empire (27 BCE–476 CE / 1453 CE)
Rome built roughly 80,000 kilometres of roads across three continents. Some of those roads are still in use. That is a useful starting metaphor, because the Roman Empire’s legacy works the same way: it is literally embedded in the ground beneath modern civilisation.
At its height in the second century CE, the empire governed between 55 and 70 million people — between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s population. Its territory stretched from Scotland to the Sahara, from Portugal to Mesopotamia. But the empire’s most durable exports were not territorial. They were linguistic, legal, and structural.
Latin, the language of Rome, did not survive intact as a spoken language. Instead, it evolved. The five major Romance languages — Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian — collectively have more than 900 million native speakers. Every one of those speakers is using a descendant of Roman military, administrative, and colloquial Latin, whether they know it or not. English, though Germanic in structure, draws roughly 60% of its vocabulary from Latin and its Romance offspring.
Roman law established principles that persist across modern legal systems: the presumption of innocence, the right to a defence, the distinction between public and private law, the concept of legal personhood. These did not arrive in the modern world directly — they were filtered through Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis in the Byzantine east and through canon law in the west — but their Roman origin is not seriously disputed.
Roman engineering — aqueducts, concrete (including hydraulic concrete that set underwater), the arch, the dome, central heating (hypocausts) — shaped European architectural and civil-engineering practice for centuries. The Pantheon in Rome, completed around 126 CE, remained the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome for more than 1,300 years.
If you speak a Romance language, live under a civil-law system, drive on a road that follows a Roman route, or assume you are innocent until proven guilty, Rome is still part of your operating system. For a deeper look at how ancient civilisations shaped everyday practices, see our feature on wildest ancient beauty trends.
10. Byzantine Empire (330–1453 CE)
The Byzantine Empire is, in a sense, the Roman Empire’s second act — and a strong argument for why sequels sometimes matter more than originals. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 CE, the eastern half continued for nearly another thousand years from its capital at Constantinople (modern Istanbul), preserving and transmitting the legal, literary, and scientific heritage of the classical world.
The single most consequential Byzantine contribution to the modern world is Justinian’sCorpus Juris Civilis, compiled between 529 and 534 CE. This codification of Roman law — organising, clarifying, and stripping contradictions from centuries of legal rulings — became the foundation of civil-law systems across continental Europe, Latin America, much of Africa, and parts of Asia. If you live in a country whose legal system is based on codified statutes rather than case-law precedent, you are living in Justinian’s intellectual shadow.
The Byzantines also played a critical role in the development of the Cyrillic alphabet. The Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolitic script to translate religious texts into Slavic languages in the ninth century. Their disciples — most notably Clement of Ohrid at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire — later developed the Cyrillic alphabet based on Greek letterforms. That script is used today by roughly 250 million people across Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Bulgaria, Mongolia, and several Central Asian nations.
Constantinople itself functioned for centuries as the critical bridge between Europe and Asia — a position that made it not only the richest city in the medieval world but also the primary conduit through which classical Greek and Roman texts, along with Arab scientific and mathematical advances, reached Western Europe and helped catalyse the Renaissance.
9. Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE)
The Umayyad Caliphate, based in Damascus, presided over one of the most rapid territorial expansions in history. Within a century of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, the caliphate stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indus River — roughly 11.1 million square kilometres, making it one of the largest empires the world had seen. Its population reached an estimated 62 million, or about 29% of the global total.
The Umayyads turned Arabic into the administrative and scholarly language of a territory spanning three continents. That linguistic standardisation laid the groundwork for the Islamic Golden Age (roughly the eighth through the fourteenth centuries), during which scholars writing in Arabic made foundational contributions to algebra, optics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy. The word “algorithm” itself derives from the Latinised name of the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who worked within this Arabic-language scholarly tradition. The word “algebra” comes from the title of his treatise, al-Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi Hisab al-Jabr wal-Muqabala.
The Umayyad Caliphate also established architectural and artistic traditions — the pointed arch, arabesque ornamentation, geometric tilework, calligraphic decoration — that spread across the Islamic world and influenced European Gothic architecture through contact in Spain, Sicily, and the Crusader states.
Perhaps most significantly, the Umayyad expansion carried Islam into regions where it remains the dominant religion more than a millennium later: North Africa, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Iberian Peninsula (where Islamic rule lasted until 1492). The religious, linguistic, and cultural map of these regions still reflects the boundaries drawn during Umayyad rule.
For a look at how historical trade routes shaped the food we eat today, check out our ranking of the most popular international cuisines in the world.
8. Khmer Empire (802–1431 CE)
This is the entry most readers will not have expected. The Khmer Empire, centred in what is now Cambodia, rarely appears in Western-focused rankings of history’s greatest empires. That absence says more about the biases of those rankings than about the Khmer achievement.
Angkor Wat — a temple complex covering 162.6 hectares (about 402 acres) — remains the largest religious monument on Earth, according to Guinness World Records. It was built during the reign of King Suryavarman II (1113–1150 CE) and originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu before gradually transitioning to a Buddhist site. The structure’s scale is difficult to grasp without comparison: it is substantially larger than Vatican City.
But Angkor Wat was only one element of a much larger urban and engineering project. The greater Angkor complex, at its peak in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was the largest pre-industrial city in the world, covering an area of roughly 1,000 square kilometres and supporting a population estimated at between 750,000 and one million people.
What made that population density possible was the Khmer hydraulic system — a network of massive rectangular reservoirs calledbarays, connected by canals and dikes, that captured monsoon floodwater and distributed it during the dry season. The system covered approximately 1,500 square kilometres and allowed multiple rice harvests per year in a region where rain falls only seasonally. The West Baray alone — the earliest and largest of the major reservoirs — measures roughly 8 kilometres by 2.3 kilometres.
The Khmer engineered a solution to the fundamental problem of tropical agriculture — too much water at one time, not enough at another — on a scale that no other pre-industrial civilisation matched. The system’s eventual breakdown, due in part to climatic shifts and infrastructure strain, contributed to the empire’s decline and the abandonment of Angkor in 1431 CE.
7. Mongol Empire (1206–1368 CE)
The Mongol Empire remains the largest contiguous land empire in history — roughly 24 million square kilometres at its peak, stretching from Korea to Hungary, from Siberia to the Persian Gulf. The dates 1206–1368 refer to the core empire through the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China; successor khanates persisted in various forms into the fifteenth century and beyond.
The standard narrative about the Mongols focuses on destruction: the sack of Baghdad in 1258, the decimation of Central Asian cities, population losses that may have temporarily reduced global carbon emissions (a grim distinction documented by researchers at the Carnegie Institution). That narrative is accurate as far as it goes. What it leaves out is the connective infrastructure the Mongols built across the wreckage.
The Yam postal relay system was a network of relay stations spaced approximately 25 to 40 miles (40–65 kilometres) apart, stretching across the entire empire. Mounted couriers could cover 200 to 300 kilometres per day under optimal conditions by switching to fresh horses at each station. The system moved not just messages but goods, diplomats, and intelligence across a landmass that had never before been connected by a single communication network.
The Mongols also enforced a policy of religious tolerance across their territories, protected trade caravans along the Silk Road (a period sometimes called the Pax Mongolica), and introduced the paiza — a metal passport guaranteeing safe passage — centuries before anything comparable existed in Europe. Marco Polo travelled under one. So did diplomats, missionaries, and merchants from dozens of cultures and faiths.
The Mongol Empire’s role as a transmission belt for ideas, technologies, and diseases — including, almost certainly, the Black Death — makes it one of the great connectors in world history, for better and for worse.
6. Mali Empire (c. 1235–c. 1600 CE)
The Mali Empire, at its peak in the fourteenth century, controlled the gold and salt trade across West Africa — two commodities that, in that era, functioned as the economic equivalent of oil and semiconductors today. The empire’s most famous ruler, Mansa Musa (reigned c. 1312–1337), is widely considered the richest person in history, with modern estimates valuing his wealth at roughly $400 billion in today’s dollars.
In 1324, Mansa Musa undertook his hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, travelling with a caravan of reportedly 60,000 people and camels carrying vast quantities of gold. His generosity during a stop in Cairo was so extravagant — distributing gold to the poor, to officials, and in the marketplaces — that he reportedly crashed the price of gold in Egypt. According to the fourteenth-century historian al-Maqrizi, the gold market in the region remained depressed for roughly 12 years. (Some modern scholars note that contemporary Mamluk records suggest the price disruption may have been less severe than later accounts imply, but the episode remains one of the most frequently cited examples of personal wealth affecting a national economy.)
Under Mansa Musa’s patronage, Timbuktu became a major centre of Islamic scholarship, home to the University of Sankore and a vast collection of manuscripts covering theology, law, astronomy, and medicine. The city attracted scholars from across the Islamic world and produced a literary and intellectual tradition that continued long after the empire’s decline.
The Mali Empire’s trans-Saharan trade networks connected sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean and, through it, to Europe and the Middle East. Gold from Mali mines funded Venetian and Genoese commerce, minted Florentine florins, and circulated through economies that had no direct knowledge of where it came from.
For another angle on how personal wealth intersects with fame, see our feature on celebrity billionaires who turned fame into business empires.
5. Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922 CE)
The Ottoman Empire lasted more than six centuries — longer than any other empire on this list — and at various points controlled southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. At its territorial peak in the seventeenth century, it governed an estimated 35 million people across roughly 5.2 million square kilometres.
The empire’s most distinctive administrative feature was the millet system, which organised non-Muslim communities — Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Jewish — as semi-autonomous groups with their own religious leaders, courts, and educational institutions. The system was not egalitarian by modern standards (non-Muslims paid additional taxes and faced legal restrictions), but it represented a functional model for managing religious diversity within a single polity. Its principles echo in modern approaches to minority rights and religious pluralism.
Istanbul itself — straddling Europe and Asia, controlling the Bosporus — was one of the most strategically positioned capitals in history. Ottoman control of the eastern Mediterranean and the overland routes to Asia was, in fact, a major incentive for European powers to seek sea routes to India and East Asia, which directly contributed to the so-called Age of Exploration and its consequences.
The empire’s collapse after World War I and the partition of its territories produced many of the national borders in the modern Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa — borders that remain sources of political tension more than a century later.
4. Qing Dynasty (1644–1912 CE)
The Qing Dynasty was the last imperial dynasty in Chinese history and, by territorial extent, the largest. At its peak around 1790, it controlled up to 14.7 million square kilometres — making it the fourth-largest empire in world history at that point — and the most populous state on the planet.
The Qing consolidated control over Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and Mongolia — regions that remain part of the People’s Republic of China today. The borders of modern China are, to a meaningful degree, Qing borders. Without the Qing expansion, the country’s territorial shape would look substantially different.
The dynasty also presided over a population explosion — from roughly 150 million to approximately 450 million over the course of its rule — driven by the adoption of New World crops (maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts) introduced via the Columbian Exchange. That demographic surge made China the world’s most populous country, a position it held for centuries.
Culturally, the Qing period produced some of the most celebrated works of Chinese literature, including Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone), often considered the greatest Chinese novel. The Kangxi Dictionary, compiled in 1716, standardised Chinese characters and remains a reference work. The Qianlong Emperor’s commissioning of the Siku Quanshu, a massive compendium of Chinese literary works, was the largest publishing project in Chinese history.
The Qing collapse in 1912 ushered in decades of political upheaval — the Republic of China, warlordism, Japanese invasion, civil war, and the eventual establishment of the People’s Republic — but the territorial and demographic framework the Qing built remains the foundation of the modern Chinese state.
3. Spanish Empire (1492–1976 CE)
The Spanish Empire was the first genuinely global empire — the first political entity to control significant territory on every inhabited continent. At its height, it spanned roughly 13.7 million square kilometres across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. Spain’s last colonial territory, Western Sahara, was relinquished on 26 February 1976, ending a colonial presence that had lasted 484 years.
The empire’s most measurable legacy is linguistic. Spanish is an official language in 20 sovereign nations (21 if the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is included), with more than 500 million native speakers — the second-most native speakers of any language on Earth, behind only Mandarin Chinese. From Mexico City to Buenos Aires, from Madrid to Manila’s historical Spanish quarter, the language persists as a direct product of colonial administration, missionary activity, and settlement.
The Columbian Exchange — the transfer of plants, animals, cultures, technologies, and diseases between the Old World and the New World following Columbus’s 1492 voyage — was largely initiated and sustained by the Spanish Empire, and it transformed global agriculture, demographics, and ecology more than any other single event in the last millennium. Potatoes, tomatoes, maize, and cacao moved east; wheat, horses, cattle, and (catastrophically) smallpox and measles moved west.
The demographic catastrophe in the Americas — indigenous populations declined by an estimated 90% in some regions within a century of contact, primarily due to epidemic diseases — remains one of the largest population collapses in human history.
Catholicism, carried by Spanish missionaries and enforced by colonial law, became the dominant religion across Latin America, the Philippines, and parts of Africa. Today, the majority of the world’s Catholics live in countries that were once Spanish or Portuguese colonies.
The legal systems of most Latin American countries blend Spanish colonial law, indigenous practice, and, later, Napoleonic-influenced civil codes — a layered heritage that still shapes property, family, and commercial law across the continent.
2. French Empire / Napoleonic Empire (1534–1980 CE)
France’s colonial empire, at its territorial peak, covered roughly 13.5 million square kilometres — nearly as large as Spain’s — and governed approximately 112 million people by 1938. But the French Empire’s most lasting export was not territory. It was a document.
The Napoleonic Code (Code civil des Français), enacted in 1804, was the first modern civil code — a comprehensive, systematically organised body of law that replaced the patchwork of feudal, regional, and religious legal traditions that had governed French life for centuries. It established principles that now seem self-evident: equality before the law, the right to private property, secular authority over civil matters, and the primacy of written statutes over judicial discretion.
The Code spread wherever French arms and influence reached — across Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, across Africa and Southeast Asia during the colonial period — and it endured long after French political control receded. According to various estimates, the Napoleonic Code has influenced civil-law systems in roughly 120 countries, from Belgium and the Netherlands to Louisiana (the only U.S. state with a civil-law system), from Japan to much of Latin America and francophone Africa.
France also gave the world the metric system (adopted as the international standard of measurement in all but three countries), the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and a tradition of secular republican governance that influenced revolutionary movements from Haiti to Vietnam.
The French language itself, while spoken natively by fewer people than Spanish or English, remains an official language in 29 countries and a working language of the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, the International Olympic Committee, and the International Red Cross.
The Francophone world — 88 member states and governments in the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie — is a direct and continuing product of French imperial expansion.
If you want to see how French culture shaped global dessert traditions, check out our deep dive into the greatest desserts on Earth.
1. British Empire (1583–1997 CE)
The British Empire, at its peak around 1920, covered approximately 35.5 million square kilometres — roughly 24% of the Earth’s total land area — and governed between 412 and 458 million people, or about 23% of the world’s population. It was the largest empire in history by both measures.
But the empire’s ranking at the top of this list is not primarily about size. It is about the depth and breadth of the systems it embedded across the globe, many of which continue to operate — in modified forms — long after the last colony gained independence.
English is spoken by approximately 1.5 billion people worldwide (including native, second-language, and foreign-language speakers), making it the most widely spoken language on Earth. It is the dominant language of international business, science, aviation, diplomacy, and the internet. That dominance is a direct product of British colonialism, subsequently reinforced by American cultural and economic power.
Common law — the legal system based on judicial precedent rather than codified statutes — operates in more than 80 jurisdictions worldwide, including the United States, Canada, Australia, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The system of parliamentary democracy, the Westminster model, and many constitutional frameworks in former colonies trace directly to British practice.
The British Empire built the infrastructure of global trade: ports, shipping routes, telegraph networks, railways, and financial institutions. The City of London remains one of the world’s two leading financial centres, a status rooted in the empire’s commercial networks. The pound sterling was the world’s reserve currency before the U.S. dollar replaced it after World War II — a transition that itself reflected the British-built financial architecture.
Sports represent another, often underappreciated, dimension of British imperial legacy. Football (soccer), cricket, rugby, tennis, golf, and field hockey were all codified and globalised primarily through British colonial networks. The FIFA World Cup and the Cricket World Cup are among the most-watched sporting events on Earth — both playing games with rules written in Britain and spread by its empire.
The empire’s legacy is also one of exploitation, extraction, famine, forced displacement, and systemic violence. The Bengal famine of 1943, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, the Mau Mau detention camps in Kenya, the transatlantic slave trade — any honest accounting of the British Empire must include these alongside the legal, linguistic, and institutional contributions. The legacies of colonialism — economic inequality, ethnic tensions along arbitrarily drawn borders, ongoing disputes over sovereignty — are as much a part of the empire’s modern footprint as the English language and the common-law system.
The final transfer of British colonial sovereignty — the handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 — marked the symbolic end of the largest and most globally consequential empire in human history.
For a look at how imperial-era decisions still shape the countries travellers overlook today, see our guide to the most criminally overlooked destinations on Earth.
Highlights: Key Takeaways
Oldest empire on the list: The Akkadian Empire (c. 2334 BCE) — it invented the concept of empire itself.
Largest territory: The British Empire (~35.5 million km², ~24% of Earth’s land).
Highest share of world population: The Achaemenid Empire (~44% of all humans alive, c. 480 BCE).
Most durable legal legacy: The French Empire — the Napoleonic Code influences roughly 120 countries.
Most widely spoken language legacy: The British Empire — English is spoken by ~1.5 billion people.
Largest pre-industrial city: The Khmer Empire’s Angkor (~1,000 km², population ~750,000–1,000,000).
Richest individual in history: Mansa Musa of the Mali Empire (~$400 billion estimated).
Largest contiguous land empire: The Mongol Empire (~24 million km²).
15 Empires That Shaped the Modern World; At a Glance
| Rank | Empire | Peak Period | Peak Territory | Peak Population | Key Legacy | Lasting Footprint |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | Akkadian Empire | c. 2334–2154 BCE | ~0.8 million km² | ~several million | First known multinational empire; standardized administration, postal system, and bilingual governance | Established the imperial template that every Mesopotamian successor state attempted to replicate for two millennia |
| 14 | Inca Empire | c. 1438–1533 CE | ~2 million km² | ~12 million | Largest pre-Columbian empire; advanced road network, terrace agriculture, quipu record-keeping | Andean agricultural and engineering innovations still in active use; Quechua spoken by millions today |
| 13 | Khmer Empire | c. 802–1431 CE | ~1 million km² | ~1–2 million (Angkor alone) | Built Angkor Wat; advanced hydraulic engineering and monumental temple architecture | Angkor Wat remains the world’s largest religious structure; shaped Southeast Asian art, religion, and statecraft |
| 12 | Achaemenid (Persian) Empire | c. 550–330 BCE | ~5.5 million km² | ~35–50 million | First true multicultural empire; satrapy system, Royal Road, Cyrus Cylinder (early human rights charter) | Defined imperial governance, religious tolerance, and infrastructure-based statecraft for every empire that followed |
| 11 | Maurya Empire | c. 322–185 BCE | ~5 million km² | ~50–60 million | First empire to unify most of the Indian subcontinent; Ashoka’s edicts spread Buddhism across Asia | Ashoka’s dharma governance model influenced Indian political philosophy; Buddhism became a global religion |
| 10 | Han Dynasty | 206 BCE–220 CE | ~6.5 million km² | ~57–60 million | Consolidated Chinese identity; Silk Road expansion, civil service examinations, papermaking | Ethnic Chinese still call themselves “Han people”; Confucian bureaucratic model endured for two millennia |
| 9 | Byzantine Empire | c. 330–1453 CE | ~3.5 million km² (6th c.) | ~26–30 million (6th c.) | Preserved Greco-Roman knowledge; Justinian’s Code, Orthodox Christianity, Hagia Sophia | Justinian’s legal code underpins modern civil law; Orthodox Christianity shapes Eastern Europe and Russia today |
| 8 | Umayyad Caliphate | 661–750 CE | ~11.1 million km² | ~62 million | Largest empire by area at its time; Arabic language standardization, Dome of the Rock, Islamic coinage | Spread Arabic as a lingua franca across the Middle East and North Africa; established the cultural geography of the Islamic world |
| 7 | Mughal Empire | c. 1526–1707 CE | ~4 million km² | ~150 million | Built the Taj Mahal; fused Persian, Central Asian, and Indian cultures; one of the wealthiest empires in history | Defined South Asian art, architecture, cuisine, and religious pluralism; Mughal administrative structures shaped British India |
| 6 | Spanish Empire | c. 1492–1800s CE | ~13.7 million km² | ~60–70 million | First global empire; Columbian Exchange, spread of Christianity and the Spanish language across the Americas | Nearly 500 million native Spanish speakers today; reshaped demographics, religion, and economies of the entire Western Hemisphere |
| 5 | Mongol Empire | 1206–1368 CE | ~24 million km² | ~110 million | Largest contiguous land empire in history; connected East and West via Pax Mongolica | Reopened the Silk Road at unprecedented scale; accelerated the transfer of gunpowder, paper, and printing to Europe |
| 4 | Ottoman Empire | c. 1299–1922 CE | ~5.2 million km² | ~35 million (17th c.) | Over 600 years of rule; bridged three continents; millet system of religious governance | Its dissolution drew the modern borders of the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa; its legacy shapes regional geopolitics today |
| 3 | Roman Empire | 27 BCE–476 CE (West) | ~5 million km² | ~56–70 million | Roman law, Latin alphabet, republican governance, engineered infrastructure (roads, aqueducts, concrete) | Romance languages spoken by over 1 billion people; Roman legal principles underpin Western jurisprudence; Pax Romana template still studied |
| 2 | Abbasid Caliphate | 750–1258 CE | ~11.1 million km² | ~50–60 million | Islamic Golden Age; House of Wisdom, algebra, optics, modern medicine, preservation of Greek philosophy | Transmitted the scientific and philosophical foundations of the European Renaissance; algebra, algorithms, and Arabic numerals power the modern world |
| 1 | British Empire | c. 1600s–1997 CE | ~35.5 million km² | ~458 million (1938) | Largest empire in history; spread English, common law, parliamentary democracy, and industrial capitalism globally | English is the global lingua franca; common law governs ~2.5 billion people; the Commonwealth of Nations spans 56 countries |
Frequently Asked Questions
Which empire was the largest in history? By total land area, the British Empire was the largest, covering approximately 35.5 million km² (~13.7 million sq mi) at its peak around 1920 — about 24% of the Earth’s land surface. By contiguous territory, the Mongol Empire holds the record at roughly 24 million km².
Which empire had the highest percentage of the world’s population? The Achaemenid (Persian) Empire governed approximately 44% of the global population around 480 BCE — roughly 49.4 million people out of an estimated 112.4 million worldwide.
Why isn’t the United States on this list? The United States is a global superpower, not a classical empire in the territorial sense used here. While it has exerted enormous cultural, military, and economic influence, its model of power projection differs fundamentally from the territorial empires ranked in this article. It does not govern a vast network of foreign territories under direct imperial administration.
How many people speak English today? English is spoken by approximately 1.5 billion people worldwide, including roughly 400 million native speakers and over a billion second-language or foreign-language speakers. Its global dominance is largely a product of British colonialism and subsequent American cultural and economic power.
Were any empires excluded from this list, and if so, why? Several notable empires — including the Maurya Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Portuguese Empire, and the Russian Empire — were considered but ultimately excluded. The Russian Empire, for instance, covered approximately 22.8 million km² at its peak (c. 1866) and was the third-largest empire in history by territory. Its exclusion reflects our weighting toward lasting global institutional and linguistic impact rather than territorial size alone. Each of these empires left significant legacies, and a longer list could justifiably include any of them. Our methodology prioritised the five criteria outlined in the ranking methodology section, which inevitably means some empires with strong claims were left out.
What was the Columbian Exchange? The Columbian Exchange refers to the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the Americas, West Africa, and the Old World following Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492. It fundamentally reshaped global agriculture, demographics, and ecology.
Conclusion
Every empire on this list left something behind that the world still uses — a language, a legal principle, a road, a border, a religion, a crop, a trade route, an alphabet. Some of those legacies are celebrated. Others are still being reckoned with. Most are both.
What this ranking makes clear is that modern civilisation is not the product of a single tradition or a single continent. It was built by Sumerian administrators and Mongol postal riders, by Roman engineers and Khmer hydraulic architects, by West African gold traders and French legal reformers. The fifteen empires on this list did not merely conquer territory — they reshaped how people governed themselves, communicated with each other, worshipped, ate, traded, built, and thought.
The borders on your map, the language of your contracts, the rules of the sports you watch, the crops on your plate, and the legal system that protects your property — all of these are downstream of decisions made by empires that most people could not place on a timeline.
Now you can.
