Not really, although I can think of a few instances where individuals/small organizations made a go at greatly increasing their power. It's a bit of a stretch in every case though.

What immediately comes to mind are the filibusters. During (mostly) the first half of the 19th century different US citizens at various times attempted to instigate wars between the US and Latin Americna countries for the sake of expanding US territory, or attempted to become rulers of these areas themselves. The most successful of these men were William Walker, who at various times was "President" of Baja California, Sonora, and Nicaragua. He kept at it until the Honduran government captured and executed him.

In terms of "evil twirling mustache" Lord Cochrane(A British Admiral who was a extremely colorful character) was rumored to have planned to release Napoleon from St. Helena and make him overlord of South America. There is essentially zero reliable evidence to support this rumor though, and it's worth noting that Cochrane was never censured or ejected from the RN/HMG because of it, which heavily implies it was a rumor/is a historical myth. Popularly repeated in fiction though.

Then there was the guy in 1990 who attempted to become King of Sark. He was stopped by a unarmed volunteer constable.

I can think of one promient individual who might, at a stretch, meet the "evil genius" criteria, but it's within the past 20 years that his actions are best known for.

The reason why there isn't much out there in the way of "evil geniuses with nefarious plots" is that, to be perfectly frank, states tend to have many more resources at their disposal than even the wealthiest of private citizens. Only the most basketcase, bankrupt countries are really vulnerable to these sorts of individuals, and even that weakness is mitigated by more powerful nations not wanting individuals acting off the reservation and working against their national interests in that region.

King Leopold of Belgium is who you are looking for. He was a relatively powerless king of a relatively powerless European country, but he desperately wanted to expand his nation's power. He believed the only way to do this was through the acquisition of colonies. He tried to acquire the Philippines for a while but failed. Then he turned to Africa.

He set himself up as a great savior of the downtrodden. He gave speeches at international conferences and formed a multinational relief organization funded by over a dozen European powers. He was the toast of the global humanitarian movement. Basically, the European powers gave his relief organization control of a region in the interior of Africa in order to set it up as a place for the good of all Africans. Then he went to work.

For a long time, as far as anyone knew he was setting up a relative paradise of prosperity and self-determination within Africa. He let groups come through his cities and see how well everyone was doing there. He released progress reports about all the great advancements in the lives of the people of the Congo Free State.

Then a couple people traveled off the beaten path. They smuggled out pictures and reported on the truth of Leopold's nation. He had enslaved and brutalized millions of people. He had forced them to mine and harvest natural resources, which he in turn sold for personal profit. Those who did not produce enough had their hands cut off.

Leopold was no absentee landlord. He knew exactly what was happening in his country and what tactics were being used. Under the guise of humanitarianism he had enslaved millions and become massively wealthy. He was found out and forced to leave the throne. The global human rights movement can be traced to that period of time and, in part, to the atrocities in the Congo Free State under Leopold.

He was written about by Mark Twain (in some writings that you assuredly would not have been assigned in an American public grade school) and Arthur Conan Doyle. The main work cited for these events is King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild. Not a source, but my film friends tell me that the incident is widely seen as one of the foundational inspirations for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, upon which Apocalypse Now is based.

Benito Mussolini was a pioneer of modern dictatorship and, far from Hitler's oafish sidekick that Allied propaganda portrayed him as, was most assuredly an evil genius.

He started from nothing--a blacksmith's son. An idealistic but wild child, he was expelled from several schools as a boy. Ironically, one of his first careers was as a schoolteacher, before World War I. With big dreams for the future of Italy, he joined the Socialist Party, wrote inflammatory newspaper articles, and eventually became the editor of several Socialist newsletters. This experience would serve him well as dictator.

He was eventually kicked out of the Socialist Party--they saw him as too radical, and he saw them as impotent, all talk and no fight. By the end of World War I, he considered Socialism a failure, and had abandoned most of his socialist ideals. Around this time he founded the Fascist Party, which started with no more than 200 members. They acted as strikebreakers, little more than gangs of thugs busting up unions and communist protests. But he gathered enough of a political following to demand the resignation of Italy's liberal Prime Minister, and the King complied, basically saying, "Take the job, if you think you can do better."

Do better he did (by a certain definition of the word "better"). The March on Rome was in 1922; by the end of the '20s he had all but completely consolidated his rule. He eliminated his adversaries by various means, nonviolent and violent (notably, the Matteoti Scandal ), standardized the school systems to encourage early indoctrination, and managed public opinion by manipulating the press with his vast propaganda machine (Mussolini's use of the media is probably where he most earns the title of "genius"). He constructed an elaborate cult of personality which convinced the Italians not only to obey him, or love him, but to worship him. It was an incredibly ambitious project, the likes of which had never been undertaken before, and which served as a model for every single dictator to come, from Hitler to Saddam to Kim Jong Il. Remember, Mussolini came to power 11 years before Hitler--I would make the bold claim that the Nazi regime would never have happened if Mussolini hadn't proved that it could work.

Mussolini was not a buffoon. His pompous grandstanding seems ridiculous now, but it was deadly serious at the time. And he was not an idiot. He read voraciously--Marx, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, and dozens of philosophers you've never heard of. Italian Fascism, though it was certainly an extension of Mussolini's enormous personality, was based on deep and well-studied intellectual principles. And he wrote: his complete works are 33 volumes and take up a shelf and a half of library space, and I've seen it.

If he was so smart, then why did Fascism fail? Plenty of reasons. History shows that tyrannies, in general, rarely last more than a generation or two before the desire for liberty explodes into revolution. This was accelerated by Mussolini's increasing madness in the '30s. Some people think that after the death of his brother, his only trusted confidant but his complete opposite personality-wise, he went off the deep end and started believing the myth of himself that he constructed. Allying himself with Hitler was, in hindsight, a mistake, but you can't blame him for betting on that horse. Ultimately, Italy simply didn't have the wealth, arms, or resources to be the world-conquering superpower Mussolini wanted it to be.

But he gets an A for effort, and though he was a monster, he was still more of an evil genius than Hitler ever was (at least regarding the second half of that term).

How about a real-life Varys the Spider?

During the short-lived Qin Dynasty of China (221-206 BCE), eunuch-adviser to the first - and only - two Emperors was a fellow by the name of Zhao Gao.

Zhao Gao and his brothers had all been castrated for "crimes" their parents had been convicted of when the Qin Kingdom had conquered the Zhao Kingdom, of which Zhao Gao had been a member of the royal family. It should also be noted that during the invasion, Zhao's wife had supposedly been raped by the Qin General Meng Tian.

Under the letter of the law, convicts whose punishment was castration were then to become slave-servants to join the imperial court, and typically highly trusted by the officials and royal family therein, given that they couldn't seize power and start a dynasty of their own.

So, following the unification of China under the Qin Emperor, Zhao Gao made himself invaluable to the imperial court by presenting himself as an expert in law and punishment - a particularly favorite topic of the Legalist Qin.

When the First Qin Emperor died in 210, Zhao Gao along with Chancellor Li Si and Prince Huhai conspired to keep his death a secret for the two months it would take to get his rotting corpse back to the capital and buried in his mausoleum. During the trip, the three decided that Prince Huhai should actually be the next Emperor instead of his elder brother Crown Prince Fusu, who was along the northern border defending against Xiongnu Barbarian raiders. It just so happened that Fusu and General Meng Tian were working together, and so Zhao Gao saw a way to kill two birds with one stone - off the guy who raped his wife and conquered his kingdom, and install the easily manipulatable Huhai as a puppet.

The trio altered the will of the First Emperor, proclaiming Huhai the heir to the throne, and ordering both Prince Fusu and and General Meng to commit suicide. Fusu, the ever-dutiful son (and likely well aware of the consequences of disobeying), fell on his sword without delay... while General Meng questioned the order. And for his trouble he was arrested, and his entire family executed along with him (this included Gen. Meng's brother, Meng Yi, who had been the official responsible for sentencing Zhao Gao to death previously, only to have that sentence commuted by the First Emperor).

Zhao Gao had the perfect puppet in Qin Er Huang (the Second Emperor of Qin), and he quickly manipulated the emperor into executing most of his own family, as well as many of the more loyal elements of his empire's bureaucracy. Within a year of him taking the throne, the Second Emperor had taken the peace and prosperity brought about by his father, and turned it into an empire-wide rebellion against him... and all on Zhao Gao's advice.

Incidentally, Zhao made it his goal to replace everyone in the court with agents loyal to him alone. When the time was right, he initiated a test to separate the wheat from the chaff:

He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao. Zhao Gao gained military power as a result of that.

from The Annals of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian, translated by Burton Watson (1993)

Between Zhao Gao's machinations - including insisting that, as the Son of Heaven, the Emperor should be neither seen nor heard by anyone, and thus become the Emperor's own voice - and Qin Er Shi's own childishness - namely killing messengers who dared bring him any bad news regarding the mounting insurrections around the country - things quickly turned sour for the Qin Dynasty.

Zhao Gao's final nail in the coffin he's been building for the Qin Dynasty came in 207, when the Qin Army had unexpectedly been defeated by a far small rebel force under the restored Kingdom of Chu. When the Qin general Zhang Han had retreated and sent an envoy to the capital to request reinforcements against the rebels, Zhao Gao convinced the emperor that Zhang was an enemy agent and no reinforcements should be sent.

In the meantime, Zhang's army was surrounded by the Chu rebels and forced to surrender, after while the entire 200,000 were buried alive by the rebel commander Xiang Yu. That had been the greater bulk of the Qin's armed forced, and they now stood virtually helpless as the disparate insurrections rallied around the victorious Xiang Yu and began marching toward the capital Xianyang.

At this point, the Second Emperor was finally made aware of the severity of the situation and tried to blame the whole situation on Zhao Gao's godawful advice. But the eunuch had been prepared for this outcome (and all the court officials were thoroughly in his pocket). It was the Emperor who found himself without options, surrounded by enemies, and eventually forced to slit his own throat.

Zhao Gao would be killed by the successor to the Second Emperor, Prince Ziying, but he went to his grave content in the knowledge that he had pretty much single-handedly brought down the entire Qin Dynasty through lies, manipulation, and assassination.

His revenge was total.

Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, you may PM /u/caffarelli to have your question considered for an upcoming Tuesday Trivia thread.

Aaron Burr, the former vice president. He was tried for treason in 1806. Allegedly, he raised an army to either spark a war with Spain or establish an independent nation in the western US. And he shot Alexander Hamilton. Pretty villainous if you ask me.

Perhaps Bismarck? (Noting that 'evil' is of course debatable here - he served his country and did it well; it seems unlikely that he would go out of his way to kick a puppy.) The Reinsurance Treaty, in particular, seems like a textbook case of an evil plot: Germany and Russia both agreed to remain neutral in the case of the other being at war with a single power, except if Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. Note that Germany would still be neutral if its ally AH attacked Russia! Moreover, Germany specifically promised to be neutral if Russia intervened in the Bosphorus or Dardanelles - in other words, if it finally finished partitioning the Ottomans. Such an act would be of extreme interest to Austria, the Balkans being its back yard, and might well lead to war between Russia and Austria; in which case Germany would be neutral, and likely surprise the heck out of its ally, if Austria attacked.

You can see why that one was kept secret. :D