Largest Empires in History by Land Area
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Largest Empires in History by Land AreaThe British Empire (35.5M km²) leads decisively, about 11.5M km² ahead of the Mongol Empire (24.0M) - itself the largest contiguous land empire in history. The Russian Empire (22.8M) sits just behind, meaning the top three each controlled more than 20 million km². A clear gap then drops to the Qing dynasty (14.7M) and Spanish Empire (13.7M), after which a tight cluster of the Second French colonial empire, the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates and the Yuan dynasty all fall between 11.0 and 11.5M. The list contrasts two models of empire: sprawling maritime colonial powers (British, Spanish, French) whose territory was scattered across continents, and vast contiguous land empires (Mongol, Russian, Qing) built by overland conquest.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Wikipedia - List of Largest Empires
- Coverage
- 8 entities · 8 observations
- Measure
- Peak Land Area (million km²)
- Last updated
- 12 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- 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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