The Top 100 Leaders in History

Dear DSMeyer1 and company, greetings from one of your British cousins!  I did my A-levels in history not too terribly long ago specialising in the Tudor period in particular, so I can be of some help to you on the British side of things at least.  I’ve been lurking on your splendid discussion board for a good spell and felt I should chime in with some background and analysis from a voice out of merry Albion, about my own country at least.  Since your fellow posters have done such a thorough job of this and posted at length, I suppose I owe you the courtesy of doing the same.

Britons in general can be a prickly lot when it comes to non-Brits elaborating on our history, especially by Yanks.  Not to worry in my particular case—I criss-cross the pond often enough on business that I’m quite fond of the States, even to the point of talking up your baseball World Series and our Cricket Test Matches on the same Pub night!  I’ve helped put together and judge lists like this before for students, as they represent an interesting and organised way to take stock of historical events and analyse and compare their importance, and by aggregating these lists among many people one can crystallise our understanding of them.  I would say that your list as currently compiled is overall well-done even from a skeptical Briton’s perspective, with just a handful of issues that really do require attention.  I’ll break my own response into two posts, the first giving some general clarifications on British history overall, the second squarely on my own expertise and background in the Tudor period.

Some general British history clarifications to kick things off:

-  We Brits do not consider William the Conqueror to be an Englishman, even though he is without doubt a central figure in English and British history by any reckoning.  Nor did he regard himself as an Englishman even by the most generous definition.  He was born and grew up in Normandy, was culturally Norman, first gained power as a Norman duke, and had merely the slightest connection to English culture after 1066.  He was the descendant of Vikings who adopted Latin French culture in what became Normandy, and spoke a dialect of what we today call Old French, one of many dialects that had grown out of the Latin first spoken by the Roman soldiers who followed Julius and Augustus Caesar into Gaul.  The bloke barely knew a phrase of English.  Even after the Conquest, William was predominantly in Normandy, putting down rebellions by Norman rivals or fighting enemies in France proper. 

-  Among Napoleonic War figures, we place both the Duke of Wellington and Horatio Lord Nelson right highly, with Nelson a bit higher.  It was Nelson’s defeat of the French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805 that established the British Navy as the ruling power of the seas for the entire 19^th century, this on top of his other exploits, and Nelson was thereby a critical historical shaper.  Britain’s navy had become right powerful in the 7 Years War that came to a close in 1763, but during your American Revolution just over a decade later, you Yanks and the French under de Grasse proved a major headache to our ships, and even in the Indian Ocean the French more than matched us in the 1780s.  So whilst the 7 Years War made us the major seafaring power and essentially made the British Empire as a global imperium, it was Nelson who confirmed our navy as indisputably the most powerful vis-à-vis the French and Spaniards.  Wellington was a pivotal figure in his own right as well, as the Iron Duke together with the great Prussian Gebhard von Blücher finally defeated Napoleon for good, and Wellington proved fundamental in restructuring our armed forces overall. 

- I realise Churchill is a difficult figure to peg, for his recency if nothing else—it is still a bit difficult to know how his work will play out in the next century.  The more recent historical treatises have indeed not been too flattering to him, which in fact is hardly unusual.  In the early 20^th century after all, British PM’s like Palmerston and Disraeli were placed very highly on such influence-ranking lists by British schoolboys, whilst today, they naturally do not hold the same prestige.  Still, speaking as objectively as a patriotic Briton can be on this topic—I still believe that Churchill will continue to command respect in the century to come, even if some of his shine continues to wear off, and I would suggest that both your #37 global ranking and the #50-70 or so that others have suggested basically flank where we would rank him, perhaps around global #50-55 or so would be most proper, and around #6-7 on the Britain-only list.  I agree with your contributors’ points that durable, constructive institutions and innovations are the benchmark measure of a historical figure, and this is the standard we used for the aggregate rankings.  Churchill will fare well on this point. 

If anything, I suspect that Churchill’s influence is overestimated for WWI and WWII, but underestimated as a figure in combating Communism and introducing postwar institutions, which is where most of his innovations derive from.  Churchill’s WWI contribution was indeed largely a failure at Gallipoli, and WWII was perhaps mixed particularly when Singapore is accounted for, as Churchill himself was stout-hearted enough to admit—and it is true, it was mainly under Churchill and Attlee’s watch that our empire was destroyed.  However, the British Empire had begun to crumble in the decade after WWI, a foolish war we never should have been lured into, which visited a ghastly wound on our finances, power, and soldiery—and even before that, as Dominion Status was initiated well before 1914, so the Empire’s dismantling cannot and should not be laid entirely at Churchill and Attlee’s feet. 

-  Your other contributors have addressed this and I will add my assent: Even I as a Briton—and my fellow Britons no doubt, who take this topic seriously—will concur with your placing George Washington in the Top 5 globally, even if so much of his great influence occurred at our expense.  As a contrast and as has been cogently discussed here, not a single European monarch of the post-Roman Imperial period, when Europe had fractured into rival states, would outrank the major ancient figures—the main Roman Emperors, the founding figures in China, India, and the Arab world—in terms of influence.  This is so, if merely because the ancients set in place the shared international foundations and institutions that the post-Roman countries and their overseas empires all had in common, even as their administrations and their cultures differed markedly with each other. 

This also applies to even most leaders in the post-monarchical period of the West, with just one exception—your own George Washington, who does stand with the great ancients as a world foundational figure.  It is interesting to note that Washington had to not only distinguish himself as a leader, but to earn his leadership position in the first place.  It does seem that this meritocratic vetting has, throughout history, in general produced stronger and far more influential leaders than the monarchical system, in which family connections and associated incompetence seem to have hobbled even the better monarchs overall.  The monarchs inherit their power rather than earning it, so they do not necessarily have to demonstrate true skill and merit.  Which I suppose is one reason why even in Britain our rulers have been ceremonial for centuries, with the real power elsewhere...  But it is intriguing that so many of the top leaders in history were self-made, and had to earn authority in a new system that they themselves had to fashion, before they could exercise it: Mohammed, Saul, Washington, Constantine, Genghis, Augustus, all of them had to shape their own power centers or at the very least prove their worth in the midst of a power vacuum, which may be one reason for their subsequent innovativeness and importance.

That East-West conduit already existed, Alexander just took it over. Not only did the Persian empire already incorporate the same territories as Alexander's, minus Greece, but the Greeks themselves were already making significant inroads into that empire as traders and soldiers before Alexander's conquest. Greek influence in the Levant and Egypt appears to have been significant well before Alexander. It's probably fair to say that international exchanges sped up after Alexander, in the same way that they sped up after Genghis Khan, but these were quantitative changes, not qualitative ones.

The Mongol successor states lasted just as long as the Macedonian ones, and the history of China, India, Iran, Russia, and everywhere in between is unthinkable without them. If we're evaluating the subsequent effects on history of a leader's coquests, it's probably worth mentioning that there were two Chinas when Genghis Khan conquered them. It is, of course, possible that they would have been brought back together without him, but it's equally possible thay they would have grown further and further apart over time - in which case Qin Shi Huang Di's legacy today would be that much smaller. It would also be difficult to imagine what Iran, the Middle East and surrounding regions would look like had the Abbasid Caliph not been overthrown - a Muslim regime would have been far less likely to overthrow the institution completely, thereby leaving the way open for competing claims to the caliphate. Indeed, without the string of events leading to the founding of the Safavid Dynasty, would there be an Iran at all? It's also practically impossible to imagine what Russian history would be without the Golden Horde, or what Indian history would look like without the Mughals.

As for founding cities and spreading knowledge, Genghis encouraged both. If anything, the traffic of ideas that came about as a result of the Mongol conquests was far beyond what happened after Alexander.

I could go on, but I just wanted to make the point that the further you go in evaluating the knock-on effects of a leader's actions on later generations, the closer you get to being able to make just about any argument you want.