History glossary
Empire
a large political system in which one power rules many peoples or territories.
- Category
- Political system
What it means
An empire usually expands beyond one homeland and governs different regions, cultures, or peoples. Empires can be held together by armies, taxes, roads, administrators, shared law, religion, or trade networks.
Related terms
Stories using this term
Nazi Germany
From Weimar collapse to WWII, Nazi Germany imposed totalitarian rule, expansion, and genocide.
Operation Barbarossa
From Hitler's ideological war in the east to Soviet survival before Moscow, Barbarossa turned expected blitzkrieg into prolonged attritional catastrophe.
The Roman Empire
From Augustus to the fall of the Western Empire, Rome built a vast imperial system whose law, cities, armies and ideas shaped the ancient and medieval worlds.
The Roman Republic
From the expulsion of Rome’s kings to the rise of Augustus, the Roman Republic built a powerful mixed constitution, expanded across the Mediterranean, and ultimately collapsed into civil war and one-man rule.
The Age of Exploration
An era of exploration and empire linking continents through trade, conquest, and cultural exchange.
The American Revolution and Early Republic
From colonial tensions to independence, this traces the birth and early struggles of the United States of America.
The Anglo Boer Conflict
A war between Britain and Boer republics that exposed imperial costs and reshaped South Africa.
The Anglo-Saxons
The Anglo-Saxons were the peoples and kingdoms that shaped Anglo-Saxon England after the end of Roman rule in Britain. From migration and settlement in Anglo-Saxon Britain to Christian conversion, Viking attacks, Alfred the Great, and the road to 1066, Anglo-Saxon history explains how early medieval England took form. Their language, laws, kingdoms, monasteries, and political traditions left a lasting mark on English identity before the Norman Conquest transformed the realm.
