Colonized by Belgium

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Binary
Value labels	1 = Yes, 0 = No
Technical name	cult_colonizedBEL
Category	Culture
Label	Colonized by Belgium
Related indicators	Colonized by Australia Colonized by Austria Colonized by China Colonized by Germany Colonized by Egypt Colonized by Spain Colonized by France Colonized by the United Kingdom Colonized by Greece Colonized by Haiti Colonized by Hungary Colonized by Italy Colonized by Japan Colonized by the Netherlands Colonized by Portugal Colonized by Russia Colonized by Sweden Colonized by Turkey (Ottoman Empire) Colonized by United States of America Colonized by South Africa

Country has been colonized by Belgium. Sharing a common colonial history is considered to be a major driver of similarities in trade, migration, development aid etc. Furthermore, we suspect that major groups in states orientate politically, socially and/or culturally on the former colonial power, that could very well manifest itself as an outright rejection. Sharing a common past, i.e. being colonized by the same state, displays the possibility of common cultural features either by being formed in the colonization period or by a shared (understanding of the) past.

Coding rules

We take the CEPII GeoDist dataset and create binary variables for several colonial powers depicting whether a country was colonized by this state. “Colonization is here a fairly general term that we use to describe a relationship between two countries, independently of their level of development, in which one has governed the other over a long period of time and contributed to the current state of its institutions” (Mayer T. and Zignago 2011, 12). For this version we compute that as a time-invariant variable. Furthermore, we take the information from CEPII that distinguishes between being colonized and being shortly colonized. To make an example we can look at Zambia, which was colonized by the UK and compare that to Afghanistan which was only shortly colonized by the UK. In this example Zambia and Afghanistan have no common cultural history because the exposure to the colonizer was of a very different length. We have a total of 21 different colonizers and 16 short colonizers. Since there was no data available for some smaller states, that emerged very late, we filled the missing data for the following entities with the values of the entities in the parentheses: Macedonia (Greece), South-Sudan (Sudan), and Kosovo (Albania).

For further information see the Technical Paper: Besche-Truthe, Fabian; Seitzer, Helen; Windzio, Michael. 2020 “Cultural Spheres – Creating a dyadic dataset of cultural proximity”. SFB 1342 Technical Paper Series, 5. Bremen, SFB 1342.

Bibliographic info

Citation:

Related publications: NA (no information available)

Misc

Project manager(s): Fabian Besche-Truthe, Michael Windzio, Helen Seitzer

Data release:

• Version 0.001: Initial release

Revisions: No revisions yet

Sources

• Mayer, Thierry, and Soledad Zignago. 2011. “Notes on CEPII’s distances measures: The GeoDist database.” CEPII Working Paper 2011-25.