Quote Originally Posted by blitzkrieg80
Wow. You guys are deep. Imperator comes from General? How insightful... I guess that's why Augustus was called General citizen and provinces are called Empiralities... oh wait, no they aren't. seems you guys should study language a little closer. The relationship between powerful and influencial states and smaller states is pathetically simple and hardly related to the overgeneralization involved on this thread... Why not ask ourselves, "which empire would you be"? Let's mention volk while we're at it and act high and mighty because we know the most reoccuring frame in all history, which is quite unrelated.

Know what's funny to me? You guys have NO IDEA about the difference between Regules and Rex, otherwise you wouldn't call every single kingdom that's ever existed an "empire" - Mesopotamian empire, my bullock.
Chill pill dude. I find your tenuous grasp of English funny, if we're getting down to brass tacks, but thats OT.

I thnk its fair to muddle on about he meaning of the word, as most of the entities on the Wiki list did not use the word of themselves. Historians in the future will call the USA an empire if they want to, whether it has a President, High Priest or a Wanax in charge.

I note from an earlier post you feel the Shah-in-Shah might be the first Emperor. Fair call, but I see the Assyrians as blazing a significant bit of a trail that the Medians and Persians followed. The Persians certainly seemed to settle in groups in their conquered realms (eg Pontus), maybe that finds an echo in the Roman colonies. I have a feeling the Assyrians did the same, planting their guys everywhere while dragging subject folks from pillar to post to keep them in line. I'd say colonialisn is a big part of imperialism.

My country, Australia had a crack at colonialism in the 20th century. We pinched part of the island of New Guinea from the Germans after WW1. We sent an administrative elite, an exploitative crowd of merchants and plantation owners, some missionaries and some guys with guns to back it all up.

We acquired the territory through fighting and treated it like a province rather than a component of our Commonwealth so in a small ridiculous way (according to my vague suggest definition) we had an Australian Empire, even though we were explicitly a fragment of the (nominal) British Empire.

Not glorious, and we bugged out in 1975. They haven't had a civil war yet, so we didn't rip the place apart, but the power relationship we built was unbearabble to the Metropolis so it had to change.