the fact that "turkey" was used synonymously with the Ottoman Empire really shows how strange the term "empire" is when you reflect on it. the original empiers were all the super powerful kingdoms in the fertile crescent that needed that title to differentiate themselves form all those shmoozes who controlled less, so really, emperor just means king but more important, hence why Qin is known as China's first empire, but then it gets weird the moer you look into the term. There are empires that controlled tiny amounts, like the Haitian emperor who was inspired by Napoleon (which is a really weird thing if you think about the correlation for 2 seconds) or the byzantine empire when it was standing on its last legs. Moreover kingdoms that are way above the threshold of greatness that comes with being an empire like the ptolemaic kingdom. and then the term empire is used to denote the brits and the dutch and the portuguese and thats when you REALLY get confused because those places arent dynastic at all. Who's the emperor? Queen Elizabeth II or Churchill? I don't know which answer is stranger honestly. and then it becomes fuzzy to say when these empires end, like did the Brits end when the USA told them facts dont care about their feelings at the suez in 53, or when they gave over a tiny city to china in 99? That particularly pokes holes in the weirdness of the term empire. Is America an empire? It holds considerable power and land and the ruler has an ego so big it compensates for the one incher the kids at the island had to deal with. That sounds like an empire to me. Back to the ottoman part we called it an empire even when it was all f**ked up and ready to die in 1920, and many people also called it simply Turkey the same way we call the UK Britain. Really goes to show the weirdness of that historiographic term.
