Map of the Timurid Empire in 1400, Demis Map Server (from reference The Jalayirids: Dynastic State Formation in the Mongol Middle East Map 3, Wikipedia “Timurid Empire” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

(13) TURKIC – TIMURID EMPIRE

Yeah, you know those horse blitzkriegs or nomadic empires by mounted nomadic pastoralist tribes from the Eurasian steppes – “those psychos on horseback” – that keep popping up in my top ten history lists?

A large number of them were Turkic, as one of the more prevalent ethnicities of Eurasian mounted nomadic pastoralist tribes – particularly after the so-called Turkic expansion throughout Eurasia from the 5th century AD onwards.

They are distinct from the Mongolic peoples but the Turkic expansion overlapped with the Mongol Empire as the latter enlisted Turkic peoples and confusingly gave rise to various Turko-Mongol “traditions” or ethnocultural syntheses. And to confuse things further, the Turkic expansion extended to the Middle East – giving rise to Turko-Persian tradition – and more famously, Anatolia, as the origin of the Turks who formed the Ottoman Empire and present nation of Turkey.

There’s enough Turkic empires for their own top ten, originating with the first definitive Turkic empire in the 6th century – the Göktürk Khaganate, variously titled the First Turkic Khaganate, the First Turkic Empire, or Turkic Khaganate, which also “became the first Central Asian transcontinental empire from Manchuria to the Black Sea”.

Indeed, Turkish nationalists have compiled their own top ten of Turkic empires, or rather, a top sixteen – the 16 Great Turkic Empires, albeit counting some disputed as Turkic, going back to the Xongniu or Huns.

However, one empire that is not disputed as Turkic – or rather, Turko-Mongol – is the Timurid Empire, founded by Timur or Tamerlane, “the last of the major nomadic conquerors of the Eurasian Steppe” and in doing so, mauled other states of such formidable reputation as the Golden Horde, Mamluk Sultanate, the Ottomans, and Delhi Sultanate. Or as I like to call him, the Timurnator. He was even eyeing off Ming China before his death

“The Timurid conquests and invasions started in the late 14th century with Timur’s control over the Chagatai Khanate” – one of the successor states of the Mongol Empire which I otherwise would have seen as the runt of the litter – and ended at the start of the 15th century with the death of Timur. Due to the sheer scale of Timur’s wars, and due to the fact that he was generally undefeated in battle, he has been regarded as one of the most successful military commanders of all time. These wars resulted in Timur’s supremacy over Central Asia, Persia, the Caucasus, the Levant, and parts of South Asia and eastern Europe, and they also resulted in the formation of the short-lived Timurid Empire”.

While his empire persisted for a century after his death, it slowly fragmented but one of his successors, his great-great-grandson Babur, conquered India to forge a whole new empire that was arguably the most powerful imperial state in the subcontinent prior to the British – the Mughal Empire, which survived even in decline to the nineteenth century.

Map of the Carolingian Empire in 814 AD – Wikipedia “Holy Roman Empire” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

(12) HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

The thousand year Reich, subsequently styled as the First Reich – which means I’ve featured all three Reichs in my special mentions.

It was, as Voltaire famously quipped, neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.

The Holy Roman Empire had some substance to it, but also embodied an idea – or worse, a snub by Pope Leo III to the eastern Roman Empire and its empress Irene by crowning Charlemagne as Roman emperor, in Rome no less, in what must surely rank as a medieval meme.

Of course, underlying that idea was the enduring influence or template of the western Roman Empire, a legacy which many in the European kingdoms or nations subsequent to it sought to revive, even at the expense of the eastern Roman Empire.

That idea had some force to it under Charlemagne, who had achieved the largest unified polity in western Europe since the Roman Empire – although his empire should more accurately be styled as the Frankish Empire- but it soon fell apart after it was divided between his sons.

From that division, Germany emerged as a separate realm from the Frankish Empire, largely from the eastern Frankish empire, and it was from Germany that the Holy Roman Empire truly arose. Historians tend to distinguish the Frankish Empire from the Holy Roman Empire proper, with Otto I as the first Holy Roman Emperor in 962, even if that cuts down that thousand year Reich (from Charlemagne’s coronation in 800) to a mere 844 years.

Again, the idea had some force to it under Otto and his successors, even if it oscillated between that idea as reflected in its title as Roman Empire and the reality as reflected in its title as Empire or Kingdom of the Germans. It was still a snub to the eastern Roman empire, who were deeply insulted by the Pope crowning Roman Emperors – although in fairness, “the Pope was the only one of these people who actually lived in Rome itself” so “it could be argued he was the most entitled to decide who was Emperor of the Romans”.

The actual term Holy Roman Empire began to be used only during the reign of Friedrich or Frederick Barbarossa two centuries and two dynasties later, and under him, the idea had some teeth to it (as well as transforming him into a legendary figure) and continued to do so until his grandson Friedrich II, who attempted to run an Italian-German empire from Sicily.

That reflected the internal struggles within the Empire – with German nobles, with Italian cities or communes, and above all, with the Papacy. “The Empire and the Papacy, both competing for secular and religious power over all Christendom without the means to enforce it, essentially destroyed each other’s credibility. This was not helped by a fairly consistent policy of Emperors to neglect the basis of their power in Germany to grasp at its shadow in Italy – because in order for a German king to become Emperor, he had to go to Italy and be crowned by the pope”.

From there, the empire that had originated as a meme essentially devolved back into one – falling into irrelevancy or worse, the joke of an empire “that mostly clung to life because the ruler of Austria wanted to call himself an emperor and the rest of Europe was willing to humor him”. As Marx quipped, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

And above all, it was incredibly convoluted, both in history and structure – an emperor elected by powerful regional lords and clergy, in an empire that went from 300 to 1800 “sovereign kingdoms, duchies, free cities, and other entities”.

Hence Voltaire’s famous quip about it – and Napoleon doing away with the whole dog’s breakfast of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.

The Republic of Venice with its Domini de Terraferma and Stato da Mar – its main territories in Italy and overseas by Ariel196 for Wikipedia “Venice” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

(11) VENETIAN EMPIRE 

Technically it’s the Venetian Republic – La Serenissima or the Most Serene Republic of Venice – as it was another imperial republic in the style of Rome, indeed with quite a few parallels between them.

Of course, the world had moved on from the days that an Italian city-state could dominate the peninsula and then the Mediterranean (and beyond) in the style of Rome, but Venice took a damn good swing at it, punching remarkably above its weight.

The parallels with Rome extend to a similarly legendary founding – the Republic dated its founding back to 697 AD, albeit predated by Venice itself reputed to have been settled by refugees from the Huns and Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire seeking the safety of its islands.

The Republic was founded as the Duchy of Venetia within the eastern Roman Empire’s Exarchate of Ravenna – its leader’s title of Doge originating from the Latin for dux (or duke) as an imperial provincial title. It became increasingly independent as the exarchate crumbled, until effectively achieving de facto independence because of an agreement between the Holy Roman Empire and the eastern Roman Empire.

Its independence corresponded with its rise as an imperial republic in its own right. Venice relied on the tried-and-true methods of a smaller state – particularly city and island states – to punch above its weight, namely naval power fuelled by wealth from maritime trade, as well as cunning and sharp practice in diplomacy. That wealth was also fuelled by its art, craft and manufacture – historian Geoffrey Blainey’s observation that Venice was like the Silicon Valley of its time, in things like glassmaking, has always stuck in my mind.

Indeed, while it resembled Rome’s classical (and imperial) republic, it also followed the classical Greek model of a maritime colonial empire with a focus on its naval power and trade, while in many ways pre-empting the European colonial – and neocolonial – empires of which it was a predecessor.

And like all empires, even maritime or mercantile ones, it was in the business of territorial expansion – “During its history it annexed a large part of north-east Italy, Istria, Dalmatia, the coasts of present-day Montenegro and Albania as well as numerous islands in the Adriatic and eastern Ionian seas. At the height of its expansion, between the 13th and 16th centuries, it also governed the Peloponnese, Crete and Cyprus, most of the Greek islands, as well as several cities and ports in the Mediterranean”.

Of course, its rise as imperial republic caused it to come into conflict with rival Italian city-states, notably Genoa, but also the eastern Roman empire. Venice had a weird love-hate symbiotic-parasitic relationship with the eastern Roman Empire – evolving from an imperial province and vassal in the empire’s reconquest of Italy, to ally and close associate of the empire effectively as its navy and trading house, and ultimately to rival and perfidious adversary in the Fourth Crusade.

In some ways, that symbiosis involved Venice as almost the inversion of Constantinople – the heart of a mercantile empire which waxed and rose, sucking from the blood of the latter as it waned and fell. Although ironically, Venice found its fortune to be little more symbiotic with Constantinople than it would have liked after all – as the rival declining eastern Roman empire was replaced by the new rival rising Ottoman Empire.

Even then, its remarkable to think that Venice as a city-state held its own going toe-to-toe with the Ottoman superpower for four centuries or so of Ottoman-Venetian Wars (that commenced even before the fall of Constantinople), albeit inevitably losing territory to the Ottomans.

The rise of the Ottoman Empire also indirectly prompted one of the primary factors behind the decline (and fall) of the Venetian Republic and the Mediterranean in general – the decline of Mediterranean trade relative to the Atlantic as the latter opened in the European Age of Discovery and conquest of the Americas. Even so, the Venetian Republic endured until 1797 when it finally fell to the French under Napoleon.

Extent of Attila’s empire based on a map from Empires and Barbarians: The Birth of Europe by Peter Heather 2010 – map by Slovenski Volk for Wikipedia “Huns” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(10) HUNNIC EMPIRE

A classic nomadic empire founded by horse blitzkrieg of mounted nomadic tribes from the Eurasian steppes that should be ranked as the fourth great empire of late antiquity and menacing the other three – Persian Empire as well as eastern and western Roman empires – in turn.

(Although I tend to agree with the observation of Youtuber Tominus Maximus that the Huns generally hated the eastern Roman empire but liked the western Roman empire. Well, you know, until they didn’t.)

However, despite its classic status and notoriety, the Hunnic Empire remains somewhat nebulous because like most nomadic empires, they preferred riding to writing – so we are mostly reliant on what other people wrote about them.

Apparently according to tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River. Their origins remain uncertain, other than broadly sweeping across central Asia – with some theories resembling an extent almost as wide as the Mongols, particularly those theories linking them to the Xongniu and other nomadic peoples that menaced China, often stylized as Huns, such as in the Disney version of Mulan.

They are also often linked to other nomadic tribes, sometimes also stylized as Huns, that menaced the Persian Empire and even India. It’s not helped by the tendency, as with the Scythians, to identify or name nomadic tribes across Eurasia as Huns – both before and after the classical Hunnic Empire.

Classical sources have them suddenly appear in Europe or west of the Volga from 370 AD – where they triggered the Migration Period or at least the westward movement of Goths into the Roman Empire and bringing about the latter’s fall.

By 430 AD, they had “established a vast but short-lived empire on the Danubian frontier of the Roman Empire” – with various Germanic or other tribes “either under Hunnic hegemony or fleeing from it”. The Hunnic empire largely crystallized around the charismatic leadership of the most notorious Hun, Attila – and rapidly disintegrated after his death.

Under Attila, the Huns won not just peak empire but also the historical infamy of being extremely barbaric and ruthless towards their adversaries. Although I have to admit Attila being identified as the Scourge of God earns him badass points.

From their empire, the Huns raided the more robust eastern Roman Empire, invading the Balkans and threatening the capital Constantinople, with little to stop them until the emperor opted for the pragmatic policy of paying tribute for peace.

The Huns then invaded the western Roman Empire in 451, with Attila claiming the sister of the western Roman emperor as his bride and half the empire as his dowry – with some fairness, as she had swiped right on him in preference to her betrothal to a Roman senator.

 However, there the Huns encountered the general Flavius Aetius, often hailed as “the last of the Romans”. Ironically, Aetius had effectively risen to power by relying on the Huns – with whom he had previously been a court hostage – as his allies. Now he had to face off against his former allies as Attila invaded Gaul, drawing on the waning resources of an increasingly vestigial empire to field one of its last major military operations in alliance with the Visigoths and its other Germanic allies – and won, defeating the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.

Or not, as historians dispute how conclusive a victory it was. Attila and the Huns withdrew from Gaul, only to invade Italy the following year – and there was little Aetius could do to stop them there, except for the Pope to ask Attila nicely if he would leave without sacking Rome.

Surprisingly, it worked. Attila left Italy – albeit probably more for lack of supplies or expectations of tribute as well as an eastern Roman campaign against the Huns in their homeland. He died the following year, aborting his plans for further campaigns against either empire – as with the Mongols, Europe was saved from invasion by a fortunately timed death (from Attila partying too hard celebrating his latest wedding to his hot new bride).

The Huns took one last shot at the eastern Roman Empire under one of Attila’s sons in 469, vanishing from history with their defeat.

 However, much about the Hunnic Empire remains mysterious, even the empire’s full territorial extent – some maps tentatively suggest their empire extended to the Baltic, but we just don’t know. Similarly, we can only speculate on why Attila agreed to leave Italy, setting aside papal mojo. We only have glimpses of fascinating aspects of the Huns such as their practice of cranial deformation, with their subsequent appearance no doubt adding to their fearsome reputation.

Athens and its Delian League vs Sparta and its Peloponnesian League at the outset of the Peloponnesian War – map by Marysas (from E Levy) for Wikipedia “Delian League” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

(9) GREEK – ATHENIAN EMPIRE & SPARTAN HEGEMONY

Athenian empire vs Spartan hegemony.

We usually (and correctly) think of the Roman Empire as the imperial template in Western culture, but this can mislead us into overlooking the Greek imperial template in Western culture. No – I’m not talking the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great, although that too was influential, but the classical Greek city states, particularly the opposing Athenian empire and Spartan hegemony of the Peloponnesian War.

Of course, similarly to the archetypal city-states of Sumerian civilization, their imperialism was on a small scale – city states ruling other city states or their colonies.

And it tended not to call itself a formal empire as such. Indeed, in this it was a remarkably far-reaching imperial template, not so much for imperialism but neo-imperialism. Where the Roman imperial template set the model for imperialism from the fall of the western empire through to the European maritime empires, the Greek imperial template set the model for neo-imperialism from the European maritime empires onwards.

The Athenian empire evolved from the Delian League, an alliance of Greek cities led by Athens against Persia after the Greek-Persian Wars, based on Athenian naval supremacy and named (in modern historiography) after the sacred island of Delos, “where congresses were held in the temple and where the treasury stood until, in a symbolic gesture, Pericles moved it to Athens in 454 BC”.

That last part of moving the Delian treasury to Athens marked the point where the heavy-handed control by Athens of the Delian League evolved into an Athenian empire, where Athens began to use the League’s funds for its own purposes and there were conflicts with or outright rebellions by less powerful League members.

Essentially members of the League were given a choice of either offering armed forces or paying taxes into the treasury. Most states chose the tax, which now doubled up as leaving them effectively disarmed while paying taxes or tribute to Athens. In the words of the classical historian Thucydides, ” it was correspondingly easy” for Athens “to reduce any that tried to leave the confederacy” – that is, crush members that tried to revolt or secede.

Thucydides dramatized just how heavy-handed Athens could be in the famous Melian Dialogue, often invoked by the so-called school of realism in international relations for its maxim that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer as they must”. Thucydides put that maxim in the mouths of his imagined Athenian emissaries when giving their ultimatum to the neutral island of Melos – surrender and join the League, paying tribute to Athens, or be destroyed.

One might well see the template from this Athenian “empire” or Delian League for the style or techniques of modern neo-imperialism or European maritime empire – even more so when one recalls that the Athenian state was democratic, in the style of so-called democratic empires, “a political state which conducts its internal affairs democratically but externally its policies have a striking resemblance to imperial rule”.

Interestingly, American democracy initially echoed classical Athenian democracy, in that both were also slave-owning societies and excluded women from politics.

Its opposing counterpart, Sparta, was authoritarian at heart but was also shy of formal empire with its Spartan hegemony. Particularly after its victory in the Peloponnesian War, it too could prove equally heavy-handed – establishing many of the pro-Spartan foreign governments throughout the Aegean and also establishing many Spartan garrisons.

Just as I tend to see the Peloponnesian War between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta underlying the grand ideological conflict in Western civilization, so too I am tempted to see the Athenian empire and Spartan hegemony resembling the rival United States and Soviet Union in the Cold War, except with victory reversed.

However, there was a deeper template, from which the Athenian empire and Spartan hegemony arose in part, and that was the long history of classical Greek colonization, a precursor of subsequent settler colonialism.

Essentially, Greek cities founded other cities on a prolific scale throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea coastlines, except in the western Mediterranean where they came up against the Phoenicians and their colonies (in what would become Carthage and its territories), from 750 to 550 BC.

The Greek cities or colonies often became strong city states in their own right, independent of their founding city or cities and often even rivalling them in influence – as in Sicily and southern Italy, to the extent that the Romans called the area Magna Graecia or Great Greece.

I am not familiar enough with the history of Greek colonization to comment on the extent that it was imperial in terms of displacing or dominating any inhabitants in the area of their colonies. However, it certainly had an impact that is occasionally characterized as cultural imperialism – Greek cities spread Greek culture.

However, I would go further – that Western civilization as a whole is effectively a Greek colony.

An analogy that is commonly drawn in modern history is to cast the British and their empire as the Greeks to the Romans of the United States, albeit American imperialism might be styled as closer to that of the Delian League (and its original democratic polity as closer to that of Athens).

Carthaginian dependencies and protectorates through the Punic Wars (public domain image – Wikipedia “Ancient Carthage”)

(8) PHOENICIAN & PUNIC EMPIRES

The Phoenicians rose to prominence among the Canaanites after the Bronze Age Collapse as the thalassocracy par excellence to dominate the Mediterranean and to influence classical Western civilization.

They earn special mention as with one notable exception they weren’t really an empire. Indeed, they weren’t even really a single ‘nationality’ or state, but an agglomeration of city-states like Sumer before them, located on the Levantine coast (mostly in modern Lebanon) – with the most prominent being Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos.

Of these, Tyre rose to become the richest and most powerful, famed for its purple dye that became synonymous with imperial chic – particularly through its use by the Roman emperor. Under its ruling priest Ithobaal from 887 to 856 BC, it even took a shot at expanding its territory to other Phoenician states, coming the closest the Phoenicians ever did to a unitary territorial state.

So if the Phoenicians didn’t really have an empire or even a single state, why the special mention at all?

Well, firstly there remains the history of Phoenician maritime and mercantile power, indeed the sole such power in the region for several centuries – arguably the precursor of what might be styled as economic neo-imperialism.

Interestingly, they combined maritime power with proto-industrialism. Like the Greek city-states which rose in parallel with them, they had few natural resources – apart from the lumber (or cedar) for which they were famed – so they specialized in craft, construction, and manufacture, for which they were also famed in contemporary literary works from the Bible to Homer.

With that maritime and mercantile power came cultural influence, best known of which is the oldest verified alphabet, but the full extent of their influence on classical Western civilization is still being discovered – for example, the “orientalization” of “Greek cultural and artistic conventions”.

However, “as a mercantile power concentrated along a narrow coastal strip of land, the Phoenicians lacked the size and population to support a large military”, and hence “increasingly fell under the sway of foreign rules” from “neighboring empires – except for their colonies, which brings me to my next point…

Secondly, there was the history of Phoenician colonization, overlapping and in rivalry with classical Greek colonization – similarly founding colonies and trading posts, mostly of limited size but of impressive range throughout the Mediterranean coastline. The Greeks may have eclipsed them in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Phoenicians continued to predominate in the western Mediterranean, not least one colony founded by Tyre known to history as Carthage. Which brings me to my third point…

Thirdly, there was that one notable exception to the Phoenicians not really being an empire and that was the empire of the Phoenician colony that effectively took over the other colonies in the western Mediterranean and eclipsed the original Phoenician city-states, even Tyre as the city-state that founded it – which was of course Carthage and its Carthaginian or Punic empire.

Like the power that rivalled and ultimately destroyed it as the predominant power in the western Mediterranean – Rome – Carthage was an imperial republic. Before it lost out to Rome that it mirrored as a republic – as it also mirrored the maritime and mercantile power of the original Phoenician city states – Carthage gradually expanding its economic and political hegemony across the western Mediterranean through a network of “colonies, vassal states and satellite states” that “controlled the largest territory in the region”.

The maximum borders of the Egyptian empire 1450 BC by J.G. Bartholomew in 1913 (public domain image – Wikipedia “New Kingdom of Egypt”

(7) EGYPTIAN EMPIRE

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Even more so than Mesopotamia, Egypt set the standard for imperial state chic, not least in its monumental architecture and statuary, as well as its priesthoods and divine ruler personality cult.

Indeed, it is not too difficult to see the stamp of Egyptian imperial chic even to the twentieth century and beyond, as in the Soviet Union but with a secular party priesthood devoted to the cycles of history as opposed to the Nile and cult of socialism rather than the sun god. Less pyramids perhaps, but equally monumental architecture and statuary, as well as a tendency towards equally grandiose and gigantic projects.

Ironically, despite this imperial chic, Egypt was not so much of an empire itself, except of course to its own subjects, as it largely kept within its own borders to the Nile. The exception is the imperial Egypt of the New Kingdom, when it extended southwards to Nubia and northwards through the Levant – under pharaohs such as Rameses, whose title in Greek gave us the figure in Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.

Also ironically, Egypt has consistently played an important role within empires, but more as imperial prize rather than ruling empire itself – starting with its conquest by Assyrian, Persian and Macedonian empires in turn.

The last also reveals something of an odd recurring tendency, for foreign invaders or subjects from an empire conquering or ruling Egypt to break away from that empire with their own dynasty within Egypt, which is then effectively regarded as Egyptian.

First and foremost among those was the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by Alexander’s general Ptolemy as a successor state of the Macedonian empire and regarded as the last dynasty of ancient Egypt. It was the dynasty that gave history Egypt’s most famous female monarch, Cleopatra – also Egypt’s last reigning monarch, before its fall to the Roman Empire. Indeed, its fall transformed the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.

Kudos to Cleopatra, however, for almost pulling all a second breakaway dynasty based in Egypt, this time from the Roman Empire in its eastern half, through her alliance with Mark Antony. Yes – it was a long shot but it’s tempting to imagine the counterfactual of their victory, perhaps anticipating the eastern Roman Empire by three centuries, except from Alexandria rather than Constantinople, with Greek as its lingua franca at an earlier date. Or alternatively something like the short-lived breakaway Palmyrene empire under Zenobia two centuries ahead of the Crisis of the Third Century.

Egypt then became an imperial prize for the Roman Empire – and its richest, the proverbial breadbasket of its empire. That always strikes me as strange from my perspective of contemporary Egypt and its comparative poverty – but then that is part of the more general strange feature that the Roman Empire’s eastern or southern African and Asian provinces were richer than its western and northern European provinces, the reverse of our contemporary perspective.

From there, it was briefly a battlefield between the eastern Roman (or Byzantine) empire and the resurgent Persian (or Sassanid) empire, before falling to the Arab conquest that defeated one and conquered the other.

Egypt remained in the hands of one caliphate after another, but rose to new prominence as the seat of power for the Fatimid Caliphate. The Fatimids did not quite fall within that recurring tendency for Egyptian breakaway dynasties, except perhaps in the last stages of their decline when their rule was effectively confined to Egypt – but the Mamluks did, the slave mercenary military case that rose to rule their own Sultanate in Egypt and beyond, even famously defeating the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalat in 1260.

The Mamluks declined in turn, but their role was replayed by Albanian mercenaries with Egypt as a province in the Ottoman Empire, led by their commander Muhammed Ali Pasha, who founded his own dynasty, nominally subject to but effectively independent from the Ottoman Empire.

Egypt became a protectorate of the British Empire, as Egypt again rose to prominence as an imperial prize, not for its agriculture but for the newly constructed Suez Canal as maritime trade route.

And once again ironically, Egypt and the Suez Canal subsequently rose to prominence as the imperial humiliation of the British Empire, with the Suez Crisis in 1956 – often cited as one of the end points of the British Empire.

We’re not quite done with Egypt and its imperial ironies yet – as finally modern Egypt echoed the imperial heights of its ancient New Kingdom with the short-lived United Arab Republic, when it formed a sovereign union with Syria from 1958 to 1961.

Assyrian Empire 824-671 BC

(6) MESOPOTAMIA – AKKADIAN, ASSYRIAN & BABYLONIAN EMPIRES

Ur-imperialism.

The original imperialism – in that Mesopotamia was the origin (or one of the origins) of human civilization, and even more so, states.

Of course those states were necessarily on a small scale, as in the archetypal city-states of Sumerian civilization, and their imperialism was similarly on a small scale, as in city states conquering other city states or their neighbors.

In his book Against the Grain, James C Scott strikingly argues that such imperialism was ingrained (heh) in those states from their very foundations in grain agriculture as an instrument and means of state control, depending on various degrees of forced labor or extraction.

Whether or not that is the case, Sumerian city states warred against each other in what might be regarded as micro-imperialism or proto-imperialism.

Or as I introduced it, ur-imperialism – both as the term ur- is used to connote an ancestral prototype or primeval origin, and for the Sumerian city state of Ur.

One of the aspects of that ur-imperialism is, like many other features of subsequent civilizations, Sumerian civilization created or set the standard features of imperial or at least palace states, including monumental architecture – such as ziggurats! – and imperial or royal cults of leadership.

Ultimately, Mesopotamia evolved to imperialism on a larger scale – with its three namesake empires best known in general history. The Akkadian empire – best known for Sargon of Akkad – managed to conquer or unite all Mesopotamian city states in an area similar to modern Iraq, in the floodplains of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers that defined Mesopotamia.

However, the Akkadian Empire pales in comparison to the biggest and most belligerent of Mesopotamian empires, the Assyrian Empire (or technically neo-Assyrian Empire, as I understand it was a resurgence of the Assyrian state) – indeed, the largest empire in world history to that date.

To be honest, I don’t know too much about the Assyrian Empire, other than it being portrayed as one of the evil empires that menaced the Israelites in the Bible – and also that Jonah was ordered to its capital Ninevah by God before disobeying and being swallowed by the whale.

Although smaller than its predecessor, the Babylonian Empire (or again technically neo-Babylonian Empire) loomed larger in the Bible as one of its ultimate symbols, if not the ultimate symbol, of evil empire, because of the so-called Babylonian captivity and exile of the Jews.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion”.

Egypt and Babylon are the two famous (or infamous) poles of captivity for the Jews, but the latter is more raw in the Bible – because it was more recent (and less mythic), but also because the Old Testament was mostly written or compiled at or about that time.

And the symbolism of Babylon as evil empire loomed even larger in Christianity, due to its use as a symbol for Rome in the Book of Apocalypse, with the enduring imagery of that hot harlot, Mystery Babylon.

Europe at the height of Axis success by Gorak ten-en for Wikipedia “Naz! Germany” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

(5) NAZ! EMPIRE

The evil empire par excellence. Although that is an overstatement – it was barely an empire.

Despite styling itself as the Third Reich after the first German “empire” or Reich of a thousand years, the Holy Roman Empire, it didn’t even last as long as the second, Wilhelmine Germany.

In total, Naz! Germany lasted only twelve years from 1933 to 1945 – for which it could only be described as imperial, at least beyond its original borders, for a little over half of that, from 1938 onwards. Well, perhaps from its involvement in the Spanish Civil War before that, although that failed to yield a reliable client state – and it was arguably preparing for its imperialism from its very inception.

And even for war beyond its borders from 1939 to 1945, the second half of that period was defending or retreating from conquests made in the first half – before its complete collapse, defeat, unconditional surrender, occupation and partition. So its empire was about three years of conquests, albeit impressive, then defending or retreating from those conquests before falling altogether.

The evil part, however, is not an overstatement. It can probably best be summed up by the Encyclopedia of Fantasy’s comparison of the First World War with the Second – “despite the attempts of propagandists on both sides, no wholly evil figure emerges from World War I to occupy the world’s imagination, no one of a viciousness so unmitigated that it seems almost supernatural; H!tler, on the other hand, has all the lineaments of a Dark Lord, and the Reich he hoped to found was a parody of the true Land”.

The Naz! empire, short-lived as it was, consisted of its conquests and occupied territory in Europe and north Africa – as well as its allies that started off resembling client states at best and finished off resembling hostages at worst.

And it was notorious for all the worst features of empire – war, extortion, plunder, slavery and genocide – arguably as a form of hyper-imperialism, both in intent and scale, more so by being crammed into a few short years.

It couldn’t even aspire to the caustic observation of empire by the Roman historian Tacitus through the mouthpiece of a Caledonian chieftain – that they make a desert and call it peace. Rather they made a desert and called it war.

The most that could be said for it was that its occupation of western Europe, extortionate as it was from the outset, was relatively benign until later in the war – relatively that is, compared to its occupation of eastern Europe, brutal or genocidal as it was from the outset

“It has been argued, and not altogether frivolously, that the crucial German mistake of the Second World War was to have behaved atrociously to Poland and correctly to France when the reverse would have served German interests to better effect”.

On a related side note, I have never understood why the Germans crushed the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, rather than simply withdraw to leave it as a thorn in the Soviet side.

Ironically, there were strains of anti-imperialism within the Naz! empire, similar to those other modern imperial powers that styled themselves as anti-imperialist while creating empires or enacting imperialism of their own. That was particularly so as it opposed the British Empire and hence sporadically invoked or supported anti-imperialism against that empire, as well as its propaganda posing as defending itself (or Europe) from Soviet and American forms of imperialism.

But it couldn’t even do that right – as it was not particularly concerned with expressing such sentiments during its high tide of conquest, and they only came to the fore as it became increasingly desperate defending against its defeat.

RATING:
S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT DEVIL-TIER?)

Map of the Japanese Empire at its peak in 1942 (although it did extend its territory in China in 1944-1945) by San Jose for Wikipedia “Japan during World War II” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

(4) JAPANESE EMPIRE

One of the oldest empires but also one of the newest – which, among other things, makes it one of the oddest.

There were older empires than Japan, whose mythology traces its imperial line to legendary founder Jimmo in 660 BC, although more conventional history tends to trace its origins “in the late Kofun period of the 3rd-6th centuries AD”. However, it is the oldest empire still existing, at least in retaining an emperor, the last state to do so, albeit as ceremonial head of state.

Which brings us to the one of many oddities of Japan’s empire – that for the vast majority of its history, Japan had an emperor without an empire.

Firstly, in the sense that Japan was a homogenous polity that mostly kept to itself, apart from importing cultural influences, mostly from China – contrary to how empire is typically defined as one nation or people ruling over another. In that sense, the Japanese emperor was a somewhat inflated term for monarch, albeit a cult figure in the native Japanese religion of Shinto.

Secondly, in the sense that for a substantial part of its history, the emperor wasn’t even that, but a lame-duck monarch where de facto power was held by military aristocrats in what is generally known as the shogunate. Ironically, it is during one of these periods that Japan actually embarked on empire in the conventional definition of the term – its invasions of Korea in 1592-1598.

Japan was also one of the newest empires, a latecomer in the Age of Imperialism – and as the only Asian imperial power of that otherwise exclusive club of European empires, seen as somewhat of a gate crasher or interloper, although ironically its primary crash course was for collision with the other non-European imperial power, the United States.

Japan narrowly escaped being the subject of an imperial power or powers that was the fate of the rest of Asia. When European imperialism first tentatively reached east Asia about three centuries before in the Age of Discovery, Japan decided it was having none of that and famously sealed itself off in isolationism.

That couldn’t last forever, as European imperialism had bigger guns in the Age of Imperialism – and the United States forced Japan to open up with classic gunboat diplomacy (in the literal form of a fleet commanded by Commodore Perry), starting Japan’s love-hate relationship with the United States as an object of admiration and awe but also potential hostility and rivalry.

That saw Japan revive its emperor within a new centralized government in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and adapt all those features of European nations that led to their imperial power – in the smartest possible way by following world leaders in their fields, notably building their navy on expertise from Britain and their army on expertise from France, before swapping out the latter for Germany after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

And what more distinctive European feature was there than an empire? So Japan set about acquiring that too – modestly at first, from its immediate neighbors, starting with the Ryukuan island kingdom in 1879. By 1894, it was powerful enough to join in that other distinctive European feature in the nineteenth century – pawning Qing China, which it did in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, acquiring Taiwan, and continuing to use China as its punching bag thereafter.

However, its victory and claims against China saw it clash with European imperial powers keen to maintain the balance of power and their spheres of influence there – foremost among them Russia, looming largest against Japan in north-east Asia. That aligned Japan with Britain, which was similarly concerned with Russia, and they sealed their alignment with a formal alliance in 1902 – which allowed Japan to take on Russia directly and win in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

The spoils of victory in that war saw Japan revisit its ambitions in Korea, but this time successfully annexing it – where they were notoriously brutal ruling over it. Not Belgium-brutal, but still up there even on the scale of brutality in the Age of Imperialism.

Japan made more gains at the expense of Germany in and after the First World War – and at the expense of increasing hostility with the United States, prompting Britain to abandon the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

Which brings us perhaps to most of the oddities of the Japanese Empire, as it sowed the seeds of its rise to one of the largest territorial empires in history at the same time as the seeds of its decline as one of the shortest-lived empires in history. All the while on the path of evil empire, ultimately one that was dying and insane.

Yet on that path and even before, certainly from the Russo-Japanese War, Japan styled itself as anti-imperialist, in the tradition of those two other states that styled themselves as anti-imperialist while engaging in imperialism of their own, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Of course, for Japan this was against European imperialism – propagandizing their own imperialism with slogans such as “Asia for the Asians” and as the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, although they weren’t too big on the co- part of that title, more their own prosperity sphere. Those claims were not without some justice, but they were also with brutality and violence that eclipsed those of European imperialism as well as making their previous occupation of Korea seem like a picnic

Ultimately the Japanese Empire fell to defeat, primarily by the United States in the Pacific War – and Japan was not only shorn of its empire, but itself occupied by an American shogunate, albeit one that proved extraordinarily and unexpectedly enlightened in its role in the equally extraordinary and unexpected revival of Japan as an economic superpower, for a period second only to the United States itself. Which of course has seen Japan also accused of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, substituting economic power for military victory in controlling other nations.