Died of Overreach

The largest empire the world had yet seen. Babylonians and Medes erased its capital, Nineveh, so thoroughly that for centuries people doubted it had existed.

The world's first superpower — its ceremonial capital Persepolis torched by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE, a single night that ended two centuries of Persian rule.

Alexander conquered the largest empire the world had yet seen — Greece to the Punjab — in under a decade, then died in Babylon in 323 BCE at thirty-two, with no heir who could hold it. It came apart over his unburied body.

It conquered the Warring States and built the first unified Chinese empire, standardising its script, money, and roads. It fell apart within four years of the death of the emperor who made it.

The most valuable crop of the ancient world — spice, medicine, and the economic engine of Cyrene — could not be cultivated, only wild-harvested. So it was harvested to extinction — Pliny the Elder records that the last stalk was sent to the Emperor Nero as a curiosity.

The first great steppe empire, which trapped a Han emperor for seven days and forced China to buy peace with silk and princess-brides. Han offensives and an internal split broke it; the southern half was absorbed and the rest driven west into the dark.

For nearly three centuries it was Rome's equal in the east — at Carrhae in 53 BCE it destroyed Crassus's legions and kept the eagles, the only eastern power to wipe out a Roman army and hold its standards. In 224 CE Ardashir I killed its last king Artabanus IV at Hormozdgan and took everything.

The steppe horsemen who made both Romes pay tribute in gold. Within twenty years of Attila's death the empire that terrified Europe had vanished.

It did not fall in a day. The last western emperor, a teenager named Romulus Augustulus, was deposed without a battle by the Germanic commander Odoacer in 476.

The first caliphate, which conquered Sasanian Persia and half of Byzantium in thirty years. It ended in the assassinations of the First Fitna, with Ali's death in 661 passing power to the Umayyads.

For six centuries the lowland Maya raised stone cities and read the heavens more precisely than anyone then alive. Across a hundred years of drought and war — the Classic Maya collapse — they walked out of their great cities and let the jungle take them, though the Maya themselves never left.

A great Andean capital that ruled the southern Lake Titicaca basin for centuries before the Inca, raising the Gateway of the Sun and the cut-stone blocks of Pumapunku at 3,850 m. A prolonged drought broke its raised-field farming, and the city was emptied around 1000 CE.

The Saharan Berber empire that founded Marrakesh and ruled from the Senegal River to the Ebro in Spain. The Almohads swept it away in 1147.

The Isma'ili Shia caliphate that founded Cairo and al-Azhar and challenged the Abbasids for the leadership of Islam. Saladin abolished it in 1171 and restored Sunni rule.

The 'Great Table' of Siena was the largest bank in 13th-century Europe and treasurer to the Pope. When Philip IV of France seized its assets and Boniface VIII moved the papacy's business to Florence, it went bankrupt in 1298 — and took Siena's place in finance with it.

Bankers to Edward I of England for twenty-two years, financing his wars on the back of England's wool trade. When war with France came in 1294 and the king demanded funds they could not produce, he seized everything they had — and the firm that financed a kingdom was gone.

A Florentine bank that ran England's mint, customs and wool revenues for Edward I and II — until Parliament's Lords Ordainers expelled all foreign financiers in 1311 and left £150,000 in loans unpaid.

The third of Florence's great 'super-companies', founded 1282, banker to the kings of Naples. It failed in 1343 — not from England's royal defaults, like the Bardi and Peruzzi, but from financing Florence's war against Lucca.

Florence's super-companies lent Edward III of England some 900,000 and 600,000 gold florins for the Hundred Years' War; his default in the 1340s dragged them under.

For a few centuries it was the largest city in North America — up to 20,000 people, bigger than London. By 1350 CE no one lived there.

The largest contiguous empire that has ever existed, built by Genghis Khan from 1206. It grew faster than it could be governed, and that is what killed it.

The Shona stone capital that ran southern Africa's gold trade to the Indian Ocean. By the mid-1400s its 18,000 people had walked away and the walls were left standing over nothing.

The most powerful bank in 15th-century Europe. Founded in Florence in 1397, it financed the Renaissance and banked for the popes — then collapsed under its own bad loans when the Medici were expelled in 1494.

The Mongol khanate that held the Russian principalities in tribute for two centuries. It shattered into rival khanates and was finished off in 1502.

A Hindu-Buddhist sea power founded in 1293 that claimed 98 tributaries from Sumatra to New Guinea at its mid-14th-century peak under Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada. Civil war and Islamic coastal sultanates hollowed it out, and its capital fell to Demak around 1527.

An empire larger than Western Europe, broken at the Battle of Tondibi in 1591 by a few thousand Moroccans carrying a weapon it had never seen: the gun.

The Augsburg house that once owned Venezuela — the colony contemporaries called Klein-Venedig. It financed the Holy Roman Emperor so heavily that when Spain went bankrupt in July 1614, the Welsers followed within a week.

It founded Jamestown and sent some 6,000 colonists to Virginia. Roughly 4,800 of them died — 347 in Opechancanough's attack of 1622 alone — it never turned a profit, and in 1624 the king revoked its charter and took the colony for the Crown.

Jakob 'the Rich' Fugger bought Charles V the imperial crown in 1519 and held assets equal to perhaps 2% of Europe's economy. The house was destroyed by the one thing it trusted most — loans to sovereigns like the Spanish crown, which never paid them back.

Scotland bet roughly a quarter of its liquid wealth on William Paterson's Darien colony in Panama. The colony lasted less than a year, the money was gone, and the ruin helped force the 1707 Union with England — which dissolved the company.

John Law's monopoly on French Louisiana inflated the Mississippi Bubble — a paper-money mania that collapsed in 1720 and bankrupted the French crown.

An East India company so profitable that Britain and the Dutch demanded its abolition as the price of recognising the Habsburg succession. Emperor Charles VI traded a thriving company for the Pragmatic Sanction — the price of putting his daughter Maria Theresa on the Habsburg throne.

The dynasty that made Iran Shia and rebuilt Isfahan into a showpiece capital, broken when Afghan invaders besieged that capital in 1722.

The English slave-trading monopoly that shipped more enslaved Africans than any other single institution — roughly 186,748 people across 652 voyages. Chartered under the Duke of York in 1672, it lost its monopoly in 1698 and was dissolved by Parliament in 1752.

It founded New Amsterdam — the Manhattan settlement that became New York — and in 1628 Piet Hein captured Spain's entire silver fleet for it. It went bankrupt once in 1674, was rebuilt, and was finally dissolved by the Dutch state in 1792.

Colbert's 1664 answer to the Dutch and English in Asia, it reached its height in India under Dupleix. After 130 years of bankruptcies and revivals, its final act was a Revolutionary scandal — and the deputies who rigged its liquidation went to the guillotine.

The most valuable company that has ever existed — worth roughly $7.9 trillion in today's money. It died not in battle but of debt and corruption: the ruinous Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and some 219 million guilders of debt finished it.

For 82 years from 1731, Gothenburg sent ships like the Götheborg to Canton and grew rich on Chinese tea. When Sweden's neutral advantage faded, the company simply voted itself out of existence in 1813 — eight years before its charter even expired.

A trading monopoly that traded almost nothing but its own soaring shares, until the 1720 South Sea Bubble burst and ruined Britain.

'The bankers' banker' — the firm that rescued others in the panic of 1825. Forty years later it begged the Bank of England for the same help, was refused as 'rotten', and its collapse on Black Friday, 10 May 1866 — owing about £11 million — set off the wider crisis.

The 'Financier of the Civil War' invented the mass bond market, then bet the firm on the Northern Pacific, a railroad through empty country. When it suspended payments on 18 September 1873, it triggered the Panic of 1873 and dragged the United States into a six-year depression.

Chartered in 1600, this private corporation ruled some 200 million people and fielded an army of 260,000 — twice the size of Britain's. Then in 1874 the government it served took it over.

A construction company the Union Pacific's own bosses owned, so they could pay themselves to build their own railroad at double the cost. The 1872 bribery scandal it spawned — Congressman Oakes Ames buying votes with discounted shares, even Vice President Schuyler Colfax implicated — became the byword for Gilded Age corruption.

A Scottish bank that hid losses above £6 million for years behind falsified accounts. When it failed in 1878, unlimited liability fell on its 1,200 shareholders — ruining all but 254 of them.

Ferdinand de Lesseps, the conqueror of Suez, raised a billion and a half francs from 800,000 small French investors to dig Panama at sea level. Twenty-two thousand workers died of fever, the money vanished, and the bankruptcy became the Panama Scandal that reached deep into the Republic.

A private company meant to govern an empire on the cheap. It administered the ~246,800 square miles that became Kenya and Uganda for seven years, ran out of money, and handed the territory to the British government in 1895 — which paid its shareholders £250,000 in compensation.

New York's third-largest trust backed a failed scheme to corner United Copper, and the run on its doors one October morning set off the Panic of 1907 that brought down the American banking system.

John D. Rockefeller's trust grew so total it controlled 90% of American refining — until the Supreme Court, under the Sherman Antitrust Act, split it into 34 pieces.

China's last imperial dynasty, founded by Manchu conquerors in 1636 and toppled by the 1911 Xinhai Revolution — the child emperor Puyi abdicated in 1912.

The largest contiguous land empire of its age, stretched across eleven time zones — two centuries of Romanov rule undone by war, hunger, and the 1917 revolution.

It built the car presidents rode in and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that flew over Britain, then merged with a failing partner and spent its last years as a rebadged Studebaker.

AT&T spent $500 million over 15 years to prove that people do not want to be seen while they talk — debuted at the 1964 World's Fair, the commercial service launched in Pittsburgh in 1970, peaked at 453 subscribers, and was quietly shut down by 1974.

Formed in 1968 by the biggest railroad merger in US history — the Pennsylvania Railroad joined to the New York Central — it filed the biggest US corporate bankruptcy in history 871 days after the first trains ran under its name.

Its 'End of the Plain Plane' campaign painted the fleet in fourteen colours, had Halston dress the crew, and flew Concorde on US domestic routes; then airline deregulation stripped its routes and doubling fuel prices grounded it for good.

John DeLorean was arrested in an FBI drug sting the same week his factory closed; the gull-winged DMC-12 he built to defy Detroit became immortal only in Back to the Future, three years after the company died.

Atari invented home gaming — Pong, then the Atari 2600 — and reached $2 billion in sales by 1982, before the 1983 video-game crash it helped cause broke the company apart in 1984.

The junk-bond house that ruled 1980s Wall Street under Michael Milken, felled by insider-trading charges and its own leverage.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International — the 'Bank of Crooks and Criminals' — founded by Agha Hasan Abedi in 1972 and shut down across 78 countries in 1991 as one of history's largest financial frauds.

A founding giant of American aviation, ground down by 1978 deregulation, labor war, and corporate raider Frank Lorenzo.

It was the airline of the future — its logo flew on the spaceplane in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Then deregulation and the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of Flight 103 grounded it, and the real 2001 came with Pan Am already a decade dead.

The world's first communist superpower, born by treaty in 1922 and dissolved by Mikhail Gorbachev's stroke of the pen in December 1991 — 69 years undone by a failed coup.

The largest property developer on earth — builders of Canary Wharf, the World Financial Center, and much of the Toronto skyline. It borrowed against towers no one had yet rented, and when the early-nineties slump came it fell into the biggest bankruptcy in Canadian history — US$18.5 billion in debts.

An Wang's word-processing machines owned the 1970s office, but the $3 billion empire collapsed when the IBM PC arrived and a son inherited what his father built.

Britain's oldest merchant bank, founded 1762, destroyed in 1995 by rogue trader Nick Leeson's hidden losses in Singapore.

A Calgary penny-stock company claimed 200 million ounces of gold at Busang in the jungle of Borneo; the samples had been salted with shaved jewellery, and chief geologist Michael de Guzman fell from a helicopter before the truth came out.

Kim Woo-choong's Korean conglomerate borrowed its way to global reach, then collapsed on 1 November 1999 under ~$50 billion in debt — the largest bankruptcy in history at the time.

A hedge fund run by Nobel laureates Scholes and Merton, whose models cratered in the 1998 Russian debt default and forced a $3.6 billion Federal Reserve bailout.

It spent $11.8 million on advertising in its first year against $619,000 of revenue, floated a sock puppet over the Macy's parade, and dissolved in 2000, nine months after going public.

Fortune named it America's Most Innovative Company six years running. The innovation, it turned out, was the accounting — and when the Houston energy trader collapsed in 2001 it took its auditor, Arthur Andersen, down with it.

The man who invented the mail-order money-back guarantee built a retail empire that outlived him by 88 years, then let CEO Sewell Avery sit on its cash while Sears took the suburbs.

Once it carried more than half of all transatlantic passengers; Carl Icahn's 1985 buyout loaded it with debt, it went bankrupt three times, and its final flight landed just before midnight on 1 December 2001 — by midnight it was an American Airlines flight.

Louis Borders raised $1.2 billion to reinvent grocery delivery — a near $4.8 billion IPO in 1999 — and burned through it in three years, building automated warehouses for demand that did not yet exist.

For most of the twentieth century, half of Australia flew the airline Reginald Ansett built. Its New Zealand owner bled it — an NZ$1.425 billion loss, the largest in that country's corporate history — a low-cost rival undercut it, and the week of September 2001 finished it: grounded overnight, 16,500 jobs gone, creditors paid nothing on three billion dollars.

One of the world's five great accounting firms, convicted of obstruction of justice in 2002 for shredding documents for a single client named Enron.

Its Magic Cap devices — the Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy — were the smartphone in 1994, shipped to almost nobody, before the company dissolved in 2002 and its alumni went on to build the iPhone and Android.

Once nicknamed the Flying Bank for its stability, Switzerland's flag carrier collapsed on 2 October 2001 when its debt-fueled Hunter Strategy ran out of cash.

A telecom giant built by Bernard Ebbers' acquisitions that booked $11 billion in fake profits and filed the largest U.S. bankruptcy of its day.

It survived the Civil War, two world wars and the Great Depression. A bet on mortgages ended it in a weekend in September 2008 — the largest bankruptcy in US history, $639 billion in assets gone.

Founded to help rebuild Seattle after the great fire of 1889, it was seized by federal regulators 119 years to the day later and sold overnight to JPMorgan Chase — the largest bank failure in American history.

Once worth more than C$1,100 a share and a third of the Toronto Stock Exchange's value, the telecom titan filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and was liquidated in an accounting scandal, its 6,000 patents sold for $4.5 billion.

From Trollhattan, Sweden it put turbochargers in family cars and made safety a selling point, then spent two decades dying quietly inside General Motors before the bankruptcy of 2011.

For 50 years Monarch flew British families to the Mediterranean sun; on 2 October 2017 it stranded 110,000 of them abroad in the largest UK airline collapse on record.

Elizabeth Holmes promised hundreds of blood tests from a single finger-prick; the Edison machines never worked, and the $9 billion startup collapsed in fraud.

Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman raised $1.75 billion to sell ten-minute videos to commuters, launched the week the world went indoors, and were gone in eight months.

A German fintech darling whose €1.9 billion in cash turned out not to exist; it collapsed in 2020, and COO Jan Marsalek vanished.

Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange, which lent customer deposits to his trading firm Alameda Research, then ran out of money in November 2022.