Atlas of 19th c. African States

The Atlas of 19th century African States estimates the spatial extent of political centralization in sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th century. The dataset is introduced in the paper A Precolonial Paradox: Rethinking Political Centralization and Its Legacies

The data is available on github or dropbox and the codebook can be found here.

When using this data, please cite it as:

Wilfahrt, Martha. 2026. A Precolonial Paradox? Rethinking Political Centralization and its Legacies. American Political Science Review 120(2), pp. 419-438.