Building and maintaining a successful empire in previous centuries involved diplomacy that consisted of giving your neighbors a choice of accepting the conquerors or death-if those terms weren’t accepted, you raped their women and girls, slaughtered a lot people, stole all their stuff and forced the survivors into slavery-the Romans made a great success of that method, and a lot of empires after them...
That should read ...,and ALL empires BEFORE and after them. .