Republics describe forms of government in which power is held by the people and their elected representatives. They constitute a form of indirect democracy.

As its Latin origin “res publica” implies, in republics, countries are considered a public matter, not a private concern or property of a ruler.

While many democratic principles are derived from Ancient Greece, Rome is the first ever state recognized to have used the term “republic”.

During the antiquity era, there were other states governed very similarly to Rome and Greek city-states, with sovereign power decentralized and distributed to legal assemblies and judges. These included Tyre, Arwad, and other states in West and East Africa, as far as India.

Over time, the classical republics became empires or were conquered by empires. Most of the Greek republics were annexed to the Macedonian Empire. The Roman Republic expanded dramatically conquering the other states of the Mediterranean that could be considered republics, such as Carthage.

Eventually, the Roman Republic started to face internal destabilization, becoming dysfunctional as it expanded too quickly. These factors converged to bring about the end of the Roman Republic, when the Roman Senate formally crowned Augustus as Emperor in 27 BC, marking the start of a new imperial constitutional order to Rome named “the Principate”.

There are inherent reasons why republican forms of governance then became rare for over a thousand years, before new republics reappeared in the Late Middle Ages in Europe. Small mercantile states were likelier to become republics then larger, agrarian feudal-based nations, which were predominantly kingdoms.

The rise of nation-states in the 17th century further accelerated the trend towards republican forms of government, with 159 countries out of the world’s 206 sovereign states today formally designated as “republics”.