The data consist of 254 observations coded for seven legal categories.
These files are intended for educational and non-commercial use only. Please contact us with any questions or concerns.
We ask users of the database to cite it as follows:
Oona A. Hathaway & Scott J. Shapiro, Conquest and State Size Database, http://theinternationalistsbook.com/data.html. Users may also wish to reference Oona A. Hathaway & Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists (2017), particularly chapters 13 and 14.
This data set begins with 838 observations drawn from the Correlates of War Territorial Change database. From here, we narrow our analysis to the subset of the data that are associated with a military conflict or were otherwise coded as a conquest by Correlates of War. These 254 observations are then coded for seven new legal categories: (1) whether sovereignty is in dispute; (2) whether the transfer was a reversion of the same land previously exchanged between the same countries; (3) whether the intervention was carried out by, or with the approval of, a multinational organization; (4) whether the transfer was recognized by the international community; (5) whether coders were able to locate a manifesto or declaration of war; (6) whether the transfer represents a division of an existing state into two or more distinct states; (7) whether the intervening state claims sovereignty over the territory.
We generate data that maps the changing landscape of state control over territory from 1816 to 2014. In order to accomplish this, we use the Correlates of War Territorial Change data along with data from the World Bank, which reports the territorial size of states in 2014. We perform a match of the World Bank data to the Territorial Change data, and use the transfers to infer the size of all states in all years back to 1816.
The newly coded data can be found here.
The summary of data sources and technical documentation can be found here.
The replication files for Chapters 13 and 14 of The Internationalists can be found here. This includes both conquest and state size data.
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