They were about 'closing the map', creating a great continental empire which the Russians were to seek to emulate in the 1880s and 1890s.

The political structures of a continental empire Russia acquired over four centuries was instantly shattered when the Soviet Union broke up in December 1991.

Indeed, the First World War which broke out six weeks later was to spell the doom of Europe's continental empires, that of the Habsburgs included.

The core elements of this framework are a type of the state (continental bureaucratic empire) that manifests three main properties in its organization.

Russian America: an overseas colony of a continental empire, 1804-1867 (2011)

And while Japan dreamed of continental empire and strove to realize the dream, she suppressed her own proletarian revolution.

In 446 BC a revolt broke out in Boeotia which was to spell the end of Athens's "continental empire" on the Greek mainland.

Vanderbilt erected a continental empire on his love and mastery of the age of steam.

By the middle of the 19th century, with the admission to the Union of Florida, Texas and California, the United States became a continental empire.

Getting to the meat of the lesson, the teacher said Japan decided to pursue its own longtime desire for a continental empire, and attacked China.