Name: What if the Roman Empire Reunited Today?
Uploaded: 2019-12-26T04:01:51.000Z
Duration: 5 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,930 This is an image of the Roman Empire

at the height of her power in the year 117 AD.

Transition words & phrases

History was cruel to the Empire, however, and over the centuries

she gradually lost power and eventually disappeared

But what would a country with the same borders

as the old Empire look like today in the 21st century?

What if all of the territory of the Roman Empire

Let me start by saying that this is outrageously impossible.

convince Spain, England, Turkey, and Syria

Crimea would get a little more awkward than it already is,

But let us suspend our disbelief for a moment

and just imagine what it would actually look like

and these are what the borders of the Roman Empire

would look like were it to come back into existence.

This sounds very impressive, but the Empire would actually only

be the seventh largest country in the world by size.

but it would be smaller than Australia and Brazil.

And Russia, meanwhile, would be nearly three times the size

If we examine the population of this hypothetical empire,

it would be roughly 711 million people, or about 10700:01:22,700 --> 00:01:24,850 of the total global population.

had 10 times fewer citizens at about 70 million people.

But back then, that was 21% of the entire global population.

be enough to place it in third place in terms of population

The Empire would, however, have more than double the population

If we were to speculate on a hypothetical capital

come across Istanbul, which was a historic capital

of the Empire back when it was known as Constantinople.

making it by far the largest city in this Empire.

At the height of the city during the actual empire in 580,

But even earlier in 180 AD, however, the city of Rome

to reach a population of one million people.

Even though today Rome has a population of well over two

million, there would still be much bigger

cities within the borders of the Empire today,

like Cairo, London, Baghdad, and Alexandria.

At first thought, it might seem like such a huge country would

And while that would be true, it wouldn't

All of this territory combined would give the modern Roman

Empire a GDP of $15.99 trillion US, which

would mean that the empire would only be the world's

Despite having a population that would be less than half

of the modern Empire's, the United States

territory in wealthier areas, like England, France,

and Germany, but also in more impoverished areas

of citizens within the empire would be at around $24,623.

The Empire would be placed 52nd in the world in terms

of how much money the average citizen was earning, just

With a large GDP and population, however, the Empire

Averaging all of the active military personnel

in the territories within the empire, that

would mean the Empire's standing military

would make the Roman military the largest standing

are, one, what would be the dominant languages and, two,

To begin, the most widely spoken language within the country

would certainly be Arabic, which 32% of the population

Subtitles ListPlay Video

What if the Roman Empire Reunited Today?

awkward

vast

average

fascinating