CLIO World Tables: A Global Historical Database

FALL 2015 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEE

John Gerring (Political Science)

Evidence about the past is scattered across archives, published works, and web sites, and often embedded in original-language sources. Consequently, those who wish to tackle historical subjects on a global scale are faced with the daunting prospect of assembling their own data, more or less from scratch – a laborious process, and one rarely undertaken.

Until recently, this state of affairs was accepted as natural and perhaps even congenial. Social scientists were largely absorbed with contemporary issues and historians were focused on narrow slices of time and space for which they could readily collect their own data. However, the rise of interest in global history in recent years, and the increasing importance of history within the social sciences, means that we must start thinking seriously about how to build efficient infrastructure for this type of research.

CLIO World Tables was designed to address this problem. This new database drew on a wide variety of sources: published and unpublished, hard copy and digital, archival and non-archival, English and foreign language. Several hundred sources were integrated.