No, I’m not talking about Star Wars or any fictional story with a empire in it, I’m talking about real life. More specifically, I’m talking about how most countries with a large amount of land in the 19th and early 20th century were called empires when they really were not empires at all, in fact they were mostly democracies.

A few examples were the British “Empire”, the Japanese “Empire”, and the German “Empire”. The main reason as to why all these countries were called an empires was for the sake of power projection. Power projection is when a country, as the term says, projects power whether by military, diplomatic, or even calling themselves names in order to seem tougher just as shown by the prior examples. All of these countries had leaders that were called “Emperor” or “King” when in reality they held no political power other than being a symbol just like the UK today or Spain who both have kings and queens, but in reality, are controlled by a democratic system so people can feel represented and won’t destroy the country just because they don’t like their leader.

You might wonder why countries would use power projection terms to describe themselves when they could just do that with their armies instead? Well, at the time, many countries were fighting other countries that were their technological equals. And since most of the land that could be eaten up was inhabited by pushovers, powerful countries that took all the land had no one else to fight but each other. Thus, they started using terms to make their pretty much equal armies seem larger.