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.

History

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, 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 once controlled all of Asia Minor, the Levant, Egypt and parts of India and Greece.
• The short-lived Macedonian Empire under Alexander the Great became one after replacing Persian power.
• The Sassanid Persians who took power after overthrowing the Persian 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 ruled from Persia to Spain.
• The Mongol Empire stretched across Asia to Central Europe. It was the largest contiguous and second largest empire in world history and five times greater than that of Alexander and much larger than that of Roman Empire, the Persian Empire and any empires earlier in time.

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

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.

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.

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 continues to be so to this day. The present-day Russian Federation, despite having "lost" its Soviet peripheries, has 12 time zones, stretching slightly more than half the world's surface.

Legacy

The legacies of the colonial global empires cannot be escaped today. It can be seen in the spread of western languages, culture, religion, institutions and peoples (western and non western) around the world. They also had a great effect upon western culture as the flood of knowledge about the world overturned medieval notions. This not only transformed how Europeans thought about the world but also how they thought about themselves as they learned of the foreign cultures they encountered abroad. One simple example of the legacy of these empires was in the spread of crops and animals which brought great changes in agriculture, not only in Europe and the Americas but also throughout east and south Asia.

The later period of the global empires is often described as the first era of globalization. The early global empires (Portuguese and Spanish) pioneered the oceanic trade routes that linked the world's continents. With them also began the earliest expressions of international law. The later empires, especially the Dutch and the British, extended this network, and just as importantly, pioneered the first instances of modern global business. For example they created the first global joint stock corporations (British East India Company, Dutch East India Company) as well as the commodities markets and the financial and legal institutions to finance and regulate global trade. By the closing stages of the 19th century, a century in which the British and French empires expanded enormously, virtually all the elements of what is today called globalization were in place, including international law and conventions recognised by the great powers, and virtually free markets of goods, capital and labour. The ethics of these colonial empires has been much criticised for destroying the lives and the identities of their subject populations, but in one of the great ironies of history it was one of their inadvertent cultural exports, the ideal of nationalism, that was ultimately to be their undoing.

Global Empires

• The Mongol Empire
• The Portuguese Empire
• The Spanish Empire
• The Dutch Empire
• The French Empire
• The British Empire
• The Russian Empire