The British Empire was the largest in history
At its peak it ruled roughly a quarter of the world's land and a fifth of its people — the empire on which the sun never set.
No empire has ever been bigger. At its height around 1920, the British Empire covered about 13.7 million square miles (35.5 million km2) — close to a quarter of Earth’s land — and a generation earlier, in 1913, it governed roughly 412 million people, about a fifth of everyone alive.
That reach was a system, not just a map. Colonies, dominions and protectorates spanned every inhabited continent, so the sun was always up over some part of it — hence the boast of “the empire on which the sun never set.”
What made the scale governable was technology. The steamship and the electric telegraph, both maturing in the second half of the 19th century, let London move troops, money and orders across oceans in days rather than months. Spread across so many time zones, the empire was held together less by territory than by the speed of moving things and information across it.
Sources & references
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