Galactic Empire

The Galactic Empire, declared as the First Galactic Empire, commonly referred to as simply the Empire, and remembered as the Old Empire, was the fascist galactic government that replaced the Galactic Republic in the aftermath of the Clone Wars and ushered galactic civilization into a new age.

The Empire was founded and ruled by Galactic Emperor Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord of the Sith who was publicly known as Sheev Palpatine or simply the Emperor. The new regime rose to power with a groundswell of populist support, promising peace and stability from the destructive Clone Wars and capitalizing on anti-Jedi and anti-droid sentiment and human-ethnocentrism. The subsequent Age of the Empire would last only two decades in contrast to the centuries of the Republic Era, but not before the Jedi Order was systematically purged and almost eradicated, and the galaxy largely conquered and oppressed.

History
The Imperial ideals of the Galactic Empire could be dated back to the Sith Empire of the Old Republic's time period. Following the defeat of the Sith during their final war with the Jedi Order, for at least a thousand years, the dominant governing body of the galaxy was the unicameral, parliamentary, and democratic Galactic Republic, which was governed by the Galactic Senate and led by an elected Supreme Chancellor.

In the last decades of its existence, the Republic Senate became embroiled in bureaucracy, rendering it woefully ineffectual as a governing body. Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord of the Sith known publicly as Senator Sheev Palpatine of Naboo, privately lamented the declining state of the Senate, noting that the Republic was "not what it once was"

Thirteen years before the Republic's end as a democracy, Darth Sidious orchestrated the Invasion of Naboo by the Trade Federation in order to create a leadership crisis in the Senate. Sidious used the crisis to manipulate the then Queen of Naboo, Padmé Amidala, into calling a Vote of No Confidence against sitting Supreme Chancellor Finis Valorum. The vote passed, and in the subsequent election, Sidious—in his public persona of Senator Palpatine of Naboo—secured the position of Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic for himself through a strong sympathy vote. Ultimately, he would be the last individual to hold this office.

In the decade that followed, Sidious secretly manipulated galactic events to the extent that war became inevitable. Besides persuading a dead Jedi Master, Sifo-Dyas, to create a secret clone army, he also tasked his Sith apprentice, Darth Tyranus, with exacerbating political tensions in the Republic and engineering a Separatist Crisis. These actions would culminate in the outbreak of the Clone Wars, the last conflict of the Republic, while Sidious himself "reluctantly" accepted emergency powers from the Senate.

With the rise of the Empire, all the institutions of the old Republic found themselves either dismantled or modified beyond recognition. There was a riot of renaming all things "Imperial" to glorify the new Emperor: overnight, the Coruscant sector was renamed the Imperial Sector, Coruscant itself was renamed Imperial Center, and Galactic City was renamed Imperial City. The Galactic Senate became the Imperial Senate, the Grand Army of the Republic became the Imperial Army with the clone troopers, which made up the majority of the GAR, reorganized into the Stormtrooper Corps, and the Republic Navy became the Imperial Navy. The four decrepit intelligence agencies of the Republic were merged into Imperial Intelligence, with former Senate Bureau of Intelligence (SBI) director Armand Isard at its head. The Palace of the Republic was rebuilt and expanded, becoming the Imperial Palace, eclipsing all other buildings on Imperial Center. The former Commission for the Protection of the Republic (COMPOR) was renamed the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order (COMPNOR). Within days, there were few names left to remind the people that there had ever been a Galactic Republic.