MontanaHatchet said:
What's not impressive about it? It had the largest empire in history, and it did that without the empire even being contiguous. It also colonized what are now some of the wealthiest nations in the world (even if they became nations after freedom), such as the United States, India, Canada, and Australia. Not to mention that they had territory on every continent in the world. |
You could argue they did it the easiest way possible and that it not being contiguous was a power not a weakness. They just rolled in anywhere they could that was really weak and took over with little struggle with vastly superior weapons. They had a few tough conflicts, but those largely occured AFTER they conquered those areas.
Unlike say the Mongols who were only about 700 million short of the world by taking on all comers taking much harder land to conquerer often with technologies superior to them.
The Mongols took 10% less land but did it in a FAR more impressive way.
Additionallly the British tend to get "extra" credit for stuff... for example completly uninhabitable parts of Canada or inhabited only by self ruling natives, Parts of India that were really indepented (about 50%) and the interior of Australia where nobody lived... except natives.
Additionally there was a time between civil wars in which you could consider the Mongol empire, well an empire again... in which case they were far larger then the UK's empire was both in population and land size.
The same could be said for the Romans... who went through half as much land, but took much more trouble to expand.
I still think it was impressive... but I think it'd be a misnomer to consider it the most impressive empire, and I could see how some might not be impressed by it.
