Today's political map is divided into approximately 200 sovereign states separated by clear, agreed upon borders. In the 18th and 19th century there were hundreds more states, most of which no longer appear on modern maps. What legacies have these historical states left on the modern world? How have the Sokoto Caliphate, Aceh or Annam shaped the trajectories of Nigeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam? Existing studies show that historical states have influenced modern-day peace, development and democracy, but make contradictory findings, which, we argue, reflect unsustainable assumptions about statehood and sovereignty that underpin current quantitative research on the topic. Moreover, researchers do not have a systematically collected, global map of historical states upon which to base empirical analyses. Researchers cannot answer basic questions like: how many states were there in 1823, and, where did these states rule? We simply don’t know where states in Africa, South Asia, and South-East Asia were, and, as such, cannot estimate their general impact on the modern world.
In the LEGACIES project, we will map historical statehood globally from 1750-1920 by building the most comprehensive dataset of sovereign states from 1750-1920 and a new method of mapping historical states that matches the realities of statehood in 18th and 19th century international systems. Our method is simple but powerful. We aggregate maps of historical states to create continuous measures of state presence that capture variations in the topography of statehood prior to the global expansion of the sovereign state system around 1920. Our method works because 19th century cartographers and 20th century historians and academics have rendered historical states with two-dimensional Cartesian methods using varying concepts of the state that produce different estimates of its extent. It’s only when we combine these efforts that a more complete picture of historical state presence emerges.
The historical system has never been mapped in this way and our simple, accurate and powerful method for doing so opens this possibility for the first time. Using the LEGACIES data, we will explore the largely unexamined topics of how historical statehood shaped anti-state resistance networks and democracy in the modern world, drawing on the new wave of data on protest, armed conflict, and democratization. These analyses are underpinned by a new theoretical framework for understanding how historical states have shaped modern institutions and dissent. We highlight the institutions, symbols, and elite networks that historical states can transmit to the modern world and the interplay between historical states, colonial states and modern states. The LEGACIES project will transform how scholars see and study the international systems of the 18th and 19th centuries and develop new knowledge on how old (and often dead) states have shaped the social and political contours of the modern world.
