Global empire

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A global empire involves the extension of a state's sovereignty over territories all around the world. The essential criterion demands that, when navigating around the world, the longest trip between the empire's possessions be half of the circumference of the planet. "Global" is therefore a function of longitude, not of latitude. For example, because of the Spanish Empire's territories around the globe, it was often said in the 16th century that " the sun never sets on the Spanish Empire." This phrase was later applied to the Russian Empire and British Empire.

1 History
- 1.1 Early empires
- 1.2 European contenders
2 Global empires
3 Related links

[edit] History

[edit] Early empires

Earlier empires were largely confined to the American or African and Eurasian continents. Nations such as ancient Egypt, the Aztec Empire, the Roman Empire, the Incan Empire, India, and China could in one sense be considered early superpowers, but not global empires.

Some of these early superpowers which spread across different continents include:

The Persian Empire under the Achaemenids is often considered the first early superpower, which once controlled all of Asia Minor, the Levant, Egypt, the Caucasus, and parts of India, Central Asia, and Greece.
The short-lived Macedonian Empire under Alexander the Great became one after replacing Persian power.
The Maurya Empire controlled most of Southern Asia and parts of Central Asia
The Chinese Empire at times controlled parts of Korea, Tibet, Mongolia and Central Asia
The Sassanid Persians who took power after overthrowing the Parthians, ruled all of Persia, reaching up to Egypt, India and Africa.
The Roman Empire covered most of Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, the Levant and Mesopotamia.
The Umayyad Caliphate was the largest empire in its time, stretching from Persia and the Indus River in the east upto Spain and Morocco in the west.
The Mongol Empire stretched across Asia to Central Europe. It was the largest contiguous and second largest empire in world history, five times greater than that of Alexander and much larger than the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire or any previous empire.

Only after the circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan's expedition (1519-1522) could states begin to achieve a global presence.

[edit] European contenders

The first global empires were a product of the European Age of Exploration that began with a race of exploration between the then most advanced maritime powers, Portugal and Spain, in the late 1400s. The initial impulse behind these dispersed maritime empires and those that followed was trade; driven by the new ideas and of the capitalism that grew out of the European Renaissance.

Portugal began establishing the first global trade network and empire under the leadership of prince Henry the Navigator.

During its Siglo de Oro, the Spanish Empire had possession of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal, most of Italy, parts of Germany, parts of France, and many colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. With the conquest of inland Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines in the 16th century, Spain established overseas dominions on a scale and world distribution that had never been approached by its predecessors (the Mongol had been larger but was restricted to Eurasia). Possessions in Europe, Africa, the Atlantic, the Americas, the Pacific, and the Far East qualified the Spanish Empire as attaining a global presence in this sense.

It is a little known fact that, for a few brief years in the 1650s, the tiny Duchy of Courland, located in what is now Latvia, simultaneously maintained overseas colonies within the territories of modern-day Gambia and Trinidad and Tobago. Thus, going by the above definition, this unlikely Latvia-Gambia-Tobago combination was, strictly speaking, a "Global Empire", although its total acreage was relatively small. (See Courland colonization.)

Subsequent global empires included the French, Dutch, and British empires. The latter, consolidated during the period of British maritime hegemony in the 19th century, became the largest empire in history by virtue of the improved transportation technologies of the time (nominal claims to huge tracts of uninhabited and uninhabitable land in the Arctic and in Australia, for instance, went uncontested). At its height, the British Empire covered a quarter of the Earth's land area and comprised a quarter of its population. By the 1860s, the Russian Empire- and it's heir the Soviet Union- became the largest contiguous state in the world, and the latter's main successor continues to be so to this day. The present-day Russian Federation, despite having "lost" its Soviet periphery, has 12 time zones, stretching slightly over half the world's longitude.