Historical Ethnic Geography (HEG)

The Historical Ethnic Geography (HEG) dataset provides coverage of Europe from the nineteenth century to today. It combines information from many ethnographic maps while also capturing local ethnic diversity. In addition, the data are time variant, based on historical information, and independent of changing state borders.

The current version of HEG can easily be digested through the NASTAC data portal.

You may also download the latest version (1.0) of the raw HEG data directly in CSV (UTF-8 encoded), GeoJSON, Shapefile, SQL, and R package formats:

GeoJSON
HEG

Citation

When using this dataset in your research, please cite the following publication:

Cederman, Lars-Erik, Luc Girardin, Carl Müller-Crepon, and Yannick Pengl. 2025. Nationalism and the Transformation of the State: Border Change and Political Violence in the Modern World. Cambridge University Press.

License

Creative Commons License
RShapes by Müller-Crepon, Girardin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This research has benefited from generous financial support from an Advanced ERC Grant 787478 NASTAC.