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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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The map they used in the linked article as the largest empire to ever exist was actually of the later British Empire, which doesn't include what is the present-day US (though it was larger than the British Empire at the time that it included some of the present-day US).
It'd be interesting to create composite maps of empires that included all the territory that they ever controlled, rather than the peak that they controlled at any one time. I think you'd need to do some work in R, and that the Brits would probably still come out on top.
As I have pointed out before, Russia also historically controlled part of what is now the US:
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-vyacheslav-volodin-warns-us-russia-reclaim-alaska-1722342
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_colonization_of_North_America
Fort Ross in California has been preserved as both an American and Californian historic landmark, and you can go visit it; Russian Orthodox services are held there a couple times a year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Ross,_California
Someone needs to show Mr. Matveychev this Wikipedia page, because apparently he doesn't know it was purchased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase
My understanding from past reading is that there's some sort of conspiracy theory in Russia that the Alaska Purchase wasn't properly formalized in some way, ergo it doesn't count.
googles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_payment_conspiracy
The Fort Ross article has a similar-sounding conspiracy theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Ross%2C_California
Would be an interesting Cold War scenario to have a little exclave of Russia just north of San Francisco, kinda a Pacific Kaliningrad.
That is some crazy stuff.
Edit: not sure what's going on with these markdown links. I'll try to work it out
Wikimedia Commons users to the rescue! For the top five largest empires in history:
British empire. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_empire.png which benefits substantially due to some very short-lived occupations like Ethiopia and the southern two thirds of Somalia after pushing Italy out during WW2
Mongol empire never held anything that it didn't have at its territorial peak, so that one is easy
Russian empire. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Russian_Empire-en.svg I honestly had no idea about Djibouti, and by the sounds of it it was more one mad Russia guy and his mates who were soon kicked out by the French navy
Qing dynasty. I'm pretty sure this one is also the same as its territorial peak, but it's much harder to check due to the far longer history than the Mongol empire. Light green on this map is claims which were never actually controlled.
Spanish empire. This one is horrendously complicated since it includes the Iberian Union with Portugal and Portugal's colonies at the time, and also the Holy Roman Empire, southern Italy, and the Netherlands due to Charles V and the other Habsburgs. It also includes Louisiana (as in the area of the Louisiana Purchase, not the modern US state), as well as large claimed areas that were not meaningfully controlled like the interior of Brazil or the Pacific Northwest of North America. This is certainly the biggest proportional increase, with Louisiana alone putting it above the Qing dynasty, but I don't think it catches up to Russia.
"Ross" sounds like a really English name, but "According to William Bright, "Ross" is a poetic name for a Russian in the Russian language".
In the context it's usually seen as a male given name for English-speakers, it does descend from Scottish Gaelic that later spread across the UK, so your instincts weren't wrong, just misplaced for this specific context
Yeah, "Ross" is an English name, but this particular "Ross" comes from a different root.