Territorial Change (v5)

Overview

The territorial change dataset is the result of the effort to identify and code all territorial changes involving at least one nation-state (as defined by the Correlates of War project) for the period 1816-2014. The data are restricted to territorial changes that involve at least one recognized (by COW) nation-state. Both the nation states and the non-nation states involved in territorial changes are regarded as political entities. This dataset contains information on the entities involved, the gaining side, the losing side, the territory exchanged, as well as the type and date of the exchange.

On March 21, 2015, we released the fifth version of this data set (that covers 1816-2014). This is an update of the earlier territorial change data set that ended in 2008. In version 5, three new cases were added

Citation

In any papers or publications that utilize this data set, users are asked to give the version number and cite the article of record for the data set, as follows:

Tir, Jaroslav, Philip Schafer, Paul Diehl, and Gary Goertz. 1998. "Territorial Changes, 1816-1996: Procedures and Data"Conflict Management and Peace Science 16:89-97.

Data Set

The revised territorial change data - now version 5 - is available in .xls format and in .csv format. The ZIP file below, contains the following files:

1. tc2014.csv: the data in comma-separated variable ASCII format

2. tc2014.xls: - The data in Microsoft Excel format.

3. tcmanual.pdf: The main territorial change coding manual. Appendixes A, B and C give details on changes introduced in v3.0, v4.0 and v4.01 respectively.

4. tcmanual.rtf: The main territorial change coding manual in rich-text format

5. Entities.pdf: The list of political entities (colonies, dependencies, and possessions)

Questions and Feedback

The territorial change data set is hosted by Paul Diehl, the University of Illinois and Jaroslav Tir, the University of Colorado-Boulder, under the COW Data Hosting Program. In case of questions or concerns concerning the data or coding rules, contact the hosts by email at pdiehl@uiuc.edu and at jtir@colorado.edu.