What was the largest empire in history?
A few empires for you to think about every day
Short answer: The modern-day People’s Republic of China is the largest empire in history.
By “large” I mean controlling the most people-years. Taking this approach, here are the top 5 largest empires in history, in order of the total amount of human experience that has been lived under each one1.
It’s possible you could find different population numbers that would switch the order of the Qing vs India. But there isn’t really another country or empire in history that is close to breaking this top 5.
Our top 5 empires are massive in the course of human history, accounting for about 17% of all of human lived experience2.
Obviously, these are all recent empires that - with the exception of Ming - benefited from massive population growth over the past 200 years. 3 of the 5 empires are China, and the other 2 are (essentially) India.
My advice to all you people looking to build enormous empires throughout history: Do it in the modern age, and in Asia.
But what about Rome? The Ottoman Empire? The Mongol Empire? How do these empires stack up?
Some of these were long-lived, some ruled over large swathes of the earth, but none of them are even close to the top 5 in terms of the magnitude of human lived experience.
But even our top 5 empires are tiny in comparison to the number of years that have been lived by nomadic people.
If you decided to make a “composite empire”, made up of all the stateless nomadic people who have ever lived3, then your empire would account for 20% of all human lived experience.
What’s the point of all this?
There are lots of reasons to study the empires of history. To understand where our current cultural and political institutions come from. To challenge our norms of what a functioning society should look like. To appreciate the richness of human experience.
But one reason to study history is to build empathy for the lived experience of our fellow people - past and present. And empathy should be accompanied by a sense of proportion.
If you want to understand how the largest chunks of humanity have lived their lives, you need to learn about modern China and India. And most of all, you need to learn about nomadic people.
Another way you could do this calculation would be to do it by total number of subjects who lived in each empire, regardless of how long they lived. This methodology would lead to larger estimates for older empires since people died younger then, with the likely conclusion that the Qing was the largest empire in history
5% of human experience has been lived under the PRC alone.
Which you shouldn’t, but hey! We’ve made it this far.