The biggest country in the world.

What is the largest country in the world is known: this is our Motherland. This was taught in Soviet schools, and even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this information has not lost its relevance. And now the Russian Federation has an area of ​​17,125,187 square kilometers, leaving behind the second-ranked Canada - 9,984,670 km2. And of all the states that have ever existed on the planet, the British Empire was the largest. Its area during its heyday was more than 42 million square kilometers.

As it was before

Large state formations existed in the ancient world. But even the most powerful of them, in an era when the speed of communication between different parts of the state was determined by the distance that a rider can ride in a day, could not be stable for a long time and fell apart. The only exceptions were, perhaps, the Persian and Roman empires: these were states with a powerful vertical of power and a tough law. But they were also much inferior in size to the colonial empires of the modern era.

In the Middle Ages, the Mongol Empire and the Arab Caliphate can be noted, which united more or less large territories under their rule. But these were ephemeral formations. Centrifugal tendencies destroyed these states very quickly. The Mongol empire was only nominally subordinate to the great khan, whose headquarters was in Karakorum. In fact, individual uluses of the empire were independent states - like, for example, the Golden Horde, which caused a lot of trouble for our ancestors.

With the era of the great geographical discoveries, which began in 1492 with the discovery of America by Columbus, the unrestrained growth of European monarchies began, absorbing the newly discovered or conquered lands in America, Africa, Asia and even the whole mainland - Australia. The insufficient speed of movement between the metropolis and the colonies was more than compensated for by the higher organization and military-technical superiority of the imperial ethnic groups over the conquered ones. A striking confirmation is the suppression of the Sepoy uprising in India by the British in 1857-1859. The British had an army of no more than 90 thousand people, of which there were no more than 12 thousand inhabitants of the metropolis, and they were opposed by a huge country with a population of about 250 million people and, accordingly, with a colossal mobilization resource.

Against the background of European colonial empires, the Russian Empire stood out in a fundamentally different way of control over territories and their exploitation. The imperial-forming ethnos - Russians (at that time Belarusians and Ukrainians under the name of Little Russians were considered local “varieties” of Russians) - always constituted the majority in the empire. St. Petersburg (at that time - the capital) did not strive for the unrestrained exploitation of the national outskirts, being content with keeping the local elites under control, and even bringing European culture into the life of the provinces and developing industrial production there. Therefore, in the Russian Empire, uprisings against the central government never reached such a degree of intensity and bloodshed as in India.

20th century and early 21st

The 20th century was the century of the collapse of the old empires. After the First World War, the Ottoman, German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires collapsed, however, the Soviet Union managed to collect almost all the imperial lands. After the end of World War II, the European metropolises were no longer able to hold colonies, the human resources of which exceeded their own dozens of times. The largest empire that ever existed on earth, the British, lost almost all of its acquisitions, even those where the Anglo-Saxons made up the majority of the population - Australia and Canada. And 1960 became the "Year of Africa" ​​- at once 15 countries of this continent gained independence, the British and French colonial empires ceased to exist.

StatePeak timeSquare at peak time
British Empire191842.75 million km
Mongol Empire1265-136138.0 million km
Russian Empire186622.8 million km
Soviet Union1945-199022.4 million km
Spanish Empire179020.0 million km

As a result of all these changes, the Soviet Union and its successor, Russia, became the largest states in the world. This situation still exists today. But which country will be the largest in the world in a few decades, hardly anyone can say. Most likely, there will be no formations like the British or Russian empires. It is not for nothing that the concept of neo-colonialism appeared in the last century, according to which there is no need to legally subordinate the colonies.

Economic dependence is quite enough. At the same time, the state budget does not bear the burden in the form of costs for the development of dependent territories and for raising the standard of living of people living there. And the natural and human resources of their own economic colonies are exploited at minimal cost. At least, the political practice of the "leading economic powers of the world" in the second half of the last century and at the beginning of this century confirms this.

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