Daily Archives: September 16, 2026

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Types of Empire (7) Gunpowder Empire

Posted on by

A mufti sprinkling a cannon with rosewater – engraving by Hieronymus Löschenkohl, 1788 (public domain image)

 

 

(7) GUNPOWDER EMPIRE

 

A term that isn’t as broad as you might think – not any empire with firearms, but instead a term used for three specific empires by two specific historians, notably William McNeill in his 1993 book The Age of Gunpowder Empires.

“Gunpowder empires, or Islamic gunpowder empires, is a term coined by the American historians Marshall G.S Hodgson and William H. McNeill to describe three early modern Muslim empires: the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire, and the Mughal Empire, which flourished between the mid-16th and early 18th centuries.”

As I said, you’d think it might be a term to connote any empire with firearms, of which the most famous are the European colonial empires from the early modern period. Indeed, the European colonial empires might well be called machine gun empires, at least from the nineteenth century onwards.

That is the point John Ellis makes in his book A Social History of the Machine Gun – caustically observing that while European states were reluctant to deploy machine guns against each other as predictably causing mass mechanized slaughter until the First World War, they were far less reluctant to deploy them in their colonial wars.

As Hillaire Belloc observed in a satirical verse:

“Whatever happens, we have got

The Maxim gun, and they have not”

In McNeill’s usage, “the gunpowder empires conquered vast amounts of territory with the use and deployment of newly invented firearms, especially cannon and small arms; together they stretched from Southeast Europe and North Africa in the west to Bengal and Arakan in the east”.

The contrast between his gunpowder empires and European use of gunpowder is that no single European state was able to centralize or dominate power through gunpowder – “As a result, the three empires were among the most stable of the early modern period, leading to commercial expansion, cultural patronage, and the consolidation of political and legal institutions.”.

However, “more recently, the Hodgson–McNeill gunpowder empire hypothesis has been called into disfavour as a neither adequate [n]or accurate explanation, although the term remains in use”,

One of my favorite uses of the term was by Harry Turtledove for the title of his book Gunpowder Empire, an alternative history if the Roman Empire had survived to the use of gunpowder. The classical Roman Empire, that is, as the Roman Empire did actually survive to the use of gunpowder as the Eastern Roman Empire – albeit as a very vestigial empire essentially reduced to its imperial capital Constantinople, which famously fell to one of the gunpowder empires, the Ottoman Empire, using cannons to break the city walls. Ironically, the designer of the largest cannon – and one of the largest cannons ever built – was a Hungarian who originally offered his services to the Romans. So the title of Turtledove’s book seems something of a misnomer.

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Empires (Revised: New Meteoric Rise Rankings) (4) Macedonian Empire

Posted on by

 

Alexander the Great’s route and empire at its largest extent in 323 BC – map by Generic Mapping Tools for Wikipedia “Macedonia (ancient kingdom” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 

(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 b!tchin’ 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.

 

The “Vergina Sun” (as named after archaeological excavations around the town of Vergina in northern Greece) – tentatively interpreted as historical Macedonian royal symbol

 

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 mostly 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.

 

METEORIC RISE

 

The archetypal meteoric rise – as well as the most meteoric rise among my top ten empires.

It eclipsed even the meteoric rise of the Persian Empire, as Alexander the Great conquered that empire – at its expanded or full extent beyond that founded by Cyrus the Great – and in almost half the time of Cyrus founding it, thirteen years from 336 BC to 323 BC.

Sadly, it’s also the archetypal example of an empire that, after its meteoric rise under its founder, falls apart in as meteoric fashion after the death of that founder – such that Alexander was arguably less foundational than Cyrus.

 

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…