European overseas colonies and their last colonizer
About this data
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
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Notes on our processing step for this indicator
The indicator is constructed by filling years with no colonizers with the last colonizer (grouped) in the time series for each country. Colonizers are identified as such, countries not colonized as "Not colonized" and countries colonized for multiple colonizers in the same year as "Multiple colonizers".
Years are defined from last date aggregations available in the Colonial Dates Dataset. This means that when sources differ, years of colonization are defined from the last date between them. This is different from mean date aggregations (also available), which averages the dates of colonization across the original sources.
Years have been expanded to show the full range of years in the dataset, from 1462 to 2022. The original dataset only includes the years where a country was colonized.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: European overseas colonies and their last colonizer”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada (2023) - “State Capacity”. Data adapted from Bastian Becker. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/european-overseas-colonies-and-their-last-colonizer [online resource]How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
Bastian Becker (2023) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
Bastian Becker (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “European overseas colonies and their last colonizer” [dataset]. Bastian Becker, “Colonial Dates Dataset (COLDAT) 3.0” [original data]. Retrieved November 21, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/european-overseas-colonies-and-their-last-colonizer