The West’s territorial control halved from 1920 to 1993 while Islamic lands expanded sixfold.

Evidence

In 1490 Western societies controlled most of the European peninsula outside the Balkans or perhaps 1.5 million square miles out of a global land area (apart from Antarctica) of 52.5 million square miles. At the peak of its territorial expansion in 1920, the West directly ruled about 25.5 million square miles or close to half the earth’s earth. By 1993 this territorial control had been cut in half to about 12.7 million square miles. The West was back to its original European core plus its spacious settler-populated lands in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The territory of independent Islamic societies, in contrast, rose from 1.8 million square miles in 1920 to over 11 million square miles in 1993. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 229

Categorization

• XREF: Empire-size comparisons mirror the decolonization argument in The Defeat of the Spanish Armada and Western-centric colonial histories.