With any PoD after the mongols, who can create a larger contiguous land empire?

Who, if anyone, is capable of creating a continuous land-empire larger than the mongols?


  • Total voters
    103
Here's an unorthodox idea: The Mughals expand into the Steppe as well as India. They end up fighting with an alternate Russia and winning, triggering them seizing large chunks of Siberia. They probably won't be able to hold it together for long, but with a few lucky decades, they could probably get close to the Mongol Empire size.

It’s possible given a lot of luck, but before they get to Russia they’ll already be facing stiff competition from the Uzbeks. Up until Aurangzeb it was a standard part of Mughal foreign policy that eventually, they’ll get round to retaking their ancestral lands of mawara an nahr (Central Asia), Jahangir mentions it many times and the most famous serious attempt was Shah Jahans which ended up being a colossal money sink- he wasted more money there than Aurangzeb spent in his southern conquests and it didn’t result in a single territorial change. So don’t assume it’s for want if trying.

But yes if they did manage to conquer back their ancestral lands, the only thing stopping them from getting particularly far is the domestic situation- which to be fair would require an adroit politician to handle. Nevertheless, that too can be handled- perhaps the extra cash and presumably less money spent means that financing the southern conquests is easier/ the population isn’t taxed as much and there are fewer agrarian revolts. Or the image of a conqueror that the northern campaigns build up mean that the Deccan sultanates put up less of a fight, leaving more time to focus on dealing with the Marathas whether diplomatically or militarily.
 
My vote goes to Russia. They held a lot of sparsely populated lands all the way to the Pacific yet had also a big population to field big armies. If everything goes right, they can hold a territory between the Oder to the Southern tip of Korea with the Danubian Principalities, Eastern Anatolia (all the way with a border near Erzurum), Southern Azerbaijan, Persian Khorasan, East Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria. I think that would be big enough.
 
The others... are difficult...

The Ottomans can't get bigger than OTL except with getting Persia and a Large part of the Sahara.

The Chinese are the second after Russia to get what you want but not as big as Russia. At best, Central Asia with it and South East Asia.

The French got as big as it could during Napoleonic era. Large population won't make it easier for the French to control all of Europe. They knew it and that is why they kept vassals and allied states rather than directly annexing it.

The Indians can like the Chinese expand in two parts: Central Asia and South East Asia. But India has it more difficult than the Chinese.
 
Russia or the United States are your best bet. A more expansionist US who takes Canada or most of it during the revolution could eventually end up controlling all of North America and maybe parts of South America too. Do island chains especially ones near their mainland count as continuous?
 
Keep Portugal, and, thus, Brazil in the Iberian Union, and also have the Spanish colony of Florida expand to encompass more of the OTL US Deep South, and the Spanish Empire in the Americas could easily reach Biggest Chungus status.
 
Alaska and Greenland aren't nearly as big as you think. The Mercator projection is highly misleading.

Alaska: 1.718 million km² + Greenland: 2.166 million km² + Canada: 9.985 million km² = not even as big as modern Russian Federation, and about half the size of the Mongol Empire as estimated by Wikipedia.

Mercator is the only really navigationally useful projection out there (and therefore the best projection in every sensible sense) but yes, it's bad at capturing the general idea of the relative sizes of things.

Continental USA + Canada + Alaska + Greenland might just about do the trick of surpassing the Mongols, though.
 
Alaska: 1.718 million km² + Greenland: 2.166 million km² + Canada: 9.985 million km² = not even as big as modern Russian Federation, and about half the size of the Mongol Empire as estimated by Wikipedia.

To think about it, the greatest extent of the Mongolian Empire = 24.0M sq. km. OTL Russian Empire in 1895 = 22.8M sq.km. Add Alaska -> 24.5M and you are beating the Mongols by .5M sq. km. So just don't sell (at least not until 1895) it and the goal is achieved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires) :winkytongue:
 
To think about it, the greatest extent of the Mongolian Empire = 24.0M sq. km. OTL Russian Empire in 1895 = 22.8M sq.km. Add Alaska -> 24.5M and you are beating the Mongols by .5M sq. km. So just don't sell (at least not until 1895) it and the goal is achieved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires) :winkytongue:

Yeah. Same with any combination of two of Mongolia, Manchuria, East Turkestan/Xinjiang+Qinghai, Tibet or Afghanistan if Alaska doesn't count as "contiguous" for 1895 Russia.
 
China could probably get this big. The map is from a timeline in which the Cuban Missile War went hot, and the map was from it's after math.
cuban-missile-war-ahg-png.191089
It could even get bigger if you add in Sakhalin, Mongolia, Taiwan, and the rest of Siberia.
 
Top