Cliopatria – A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE

Abstract:

The scientific understanding of the complex dynamics of global history – from the rise and spread of states to their declines and falls, from their peaceful interactions with economic or diplomatic exchanges to violent confrontations – requires, at its core, a consistent and explicit encoding of historical political entities, their locations, extents and durations. Numerous attempts have been made to produce digital geographical compendia of polities with different time depths and resolutions. Most have been limited in scope and many of the more comprehensive geospatial datasets must either be licensed or are stored in proprietary formats, making access for scholarly analysis difficult. To address these issues we have developed Cliopatria, a comprehensive open-source geospatial dataset of worldwide states from 3400BCE to 2024CE. Presently it comprises over 1600 political entities sampled at varying timesteps and spatial scales. Here, we discuss its construction, its scope, and its current limitations.