OtherJul 12, 2024
Charting the Historical Prevalence of European Overseas Colonies
This chart shows the total number of overseas colonies per year colonized in each region by an European colonial power, between Belgium, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Italy.
See the interactive version of this chart here.
Dataset
| Entity | Year | Number of colonies by region |
|---|---|---|
| World | 1500 | 3 |
| World | 1550 | 21 |
| World | 1600 | 28 |
| World | 1650 | 40 |
| World | 1700 | 43 |
| World | 1750 | 44 |
| World | 1800 | 45 |
| World | 1850 | 32 |
| World | 1900 | 84 |
| World | 1950 | 82 |
| World | 2000 | 0 |
| World | 2020 | 0 |
Data sources
Colonies are defined in terms of contemporary nation states: along current independent countries and their borders. Bastian Becker (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data. European overseas colonies by region [dataset]. Bastian Becker, Colonial Dates Dataset (COLDAT) 3.0 [original data]. Retrieved December 2, 2023 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-european-overseas-colonies-by-region
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