Data
Years a country was an European overseas colony
About this data
Years a country was an European overseas colony
Number of years the country has been colonized from overseas by the European colonial power(s) in a specific year, between Belgium, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, or a combination of them.
Source
Bastian Becker (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
September 18, 2023
Next expected update
May 2025
Date range
1462–2022
Unit
years
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.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
This is a cumulative sum of the years the country has been colonized, across the entire time series. Colonizers or countries not colonized show a value of 0.
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.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
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: Years a country was an European overseas colony”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada (2023) - “State Capacity”. Data adapted from Bastian Becker. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-colonized [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. “Years a country was an European overseas colony” [dataset]. Bastian Becker, “Colonial Dates Dataset (COLDAT) 3.0” [original data]. Retrieved April 6, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-colonized