Colonized by United States of America

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Binary
Value labels	1 = Yes, 0 = No
Technical name	cult_colonizedUSA
Category	Culture
Label	Colonized by United States of America
Related indicators	cult_spheres; cult_colonizedAUS; cult_colonizedAUT; cult_colonizedBEL; cult_colonizedCHN; cult_colonizedDEU; cult_colonizedEGY; cult_colonizedESP; cult_colonizedFRA; cult_colonizedGBR; cult_colonizedGRC; cult_colonizedHTI; cult_colonizedHUN; cult_colonizedITA; cult_colonizedJPN; cult_colonizedNLD; cult_colonizedPRT; cult_colonizedRUS; cult_colonizedSWE; cult_colonizedTUR; cult_colonizedZAF; cult_short_colonizedBRA; cult_short_colonizedCOL; cult_short_colonizedDEU; cult_short_colonizedDNK; cult_short_colonizedESP; cult_short_colonizedFRA; cult_short_colonizedGBR; cult_short_colonizedHUN; cult_short_colonizedIND; cult_short_colonizedITA; cult_short_colonizedNLD; cult_short_colonizedPOL; cult_short_colonizedRUS; cult_short_colonizedSWE; cult_short_colonizedTUR; cult_short_colonizedUSA

Country has been colonized by the United States of America

Coding rules

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. 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:

Bibliographic info

Citation:

Related publications: NA (no information available)

Misc

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

Data release: 2020.11.23

Revisions: NA (no information available)

Sources

Mayer, T. & Zignago, S. (2011) Notes on CEPII’s distances measures : the GeoDist Database CEPII Working Paper 2011-25.