Largest Empires in History by Land Area
About This Dataset
Largest Empires in History by Land Area
Each empire is measured at its own territorial peak, which for most of them lasted only briefly. This chart ranks the largest empires in history by maximum land area, in millions of square kilometres, with the peak year noted in the source.
Analysis
The British Empire is the largest empire in history at 35.5 million square kilometres in 1920, 1.48 times the 24 million of the Mongol Empire. At its peak it covered 26.35% of the world's land. These are peak figures reached in different centuries, so the chart compares maximums rather than empires that existed side by side. 6 of the 12 peaked after 1800, and the smallest here, the Empire of Brazil, still covered 8.337 million square kilometres.
Key Findings
🏆
British Empire leads in Maximum land area (million square kilometres) with 35.50.
📊
Average Maximum land area (million square kilometres): 15 · median: 11.
↔️
Gap: British Empire is 4.3× larger than Empire of Brazil.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Wikipedia - List of largest empires
- Coverage
- 12 entities · 12 observations
- Measure
- Maximum land area (million square kilometres)
- Last updated
- 10 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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