World Records
The Largest Empires in History: The One Where the Sun Never Set
At its peak around 1920, the British Empire governed roughly a quarter of the planet's land and a fifth of its people — about 35 million square kilometres spread so widely that, somewhere within it, the sun was always shining. It is the largest empire by area in human history. But by a different measure, a 13th-century empire that grew from a few thousand horsemen was even more astonishing: the largest contiguous land empire ever, conquered in a single lifetime.