Empire

An empire is a political institution in which a single sovereign authority, typically a monarch or imperial state, exercises rule over an extensive territory encompassing multiple peoples, cultures or previously independent polities, usually through some combination of military conquest, administrative incorporation and, in many cases, formally unequal status between a metropolitan core and subordinate territories. Empires have recurred across world history and world regions, from the ancient Persian, Roman, Han Chinese and Mauryan empires to the early modern Spanish, Ottoman, Mughal and Qing empires and the modern European colonial empires of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. As a political institution, empire is distinguished from smaller-scale polities such as the city-state or nation-state chiefly by its scale, internal diversity and characteristic reliance on indirect or hierarchical administration to govern distant or culturally distinct territories.