The British imperial matrix, India, the global economy and the rise of capitalism, 1850-1914
Appendix 2: Geographical location
Gazetteers
Theoretically it should be possible to pass data such as that presented in Appendix 1 against a suitable gazetteer to identify coordinates automatically. However, the disambiguation processes needed when locations have had variant names makes such automatic data matching very inaccurate. Therefore the coordinates for this project were checked manually against easily available gazetteers.
There are no comprehensive digital gazetteers for the areas of Asia covered by this project, although a few very specific ones exist. However, there are reasonably comprehensive gazetteers with world coverage which record a wide variety of variant names. They are not true historical gazetteers since the variant names are not time-stamped nor is contextual or reference information provided. Nevertheless they provided sufficient naming information for most places to be identified easily. A few problem cases had to be checked against other sources.
The major problem with these gazetteers is that the coordinate information itself is not very precise, although when expressed as decimal degrees it sometimes appears to be to a satisfying number of decimal places. This is because the data has been converted to decimal degrees from degrees of arc. However, the coordinates are sufficient for a project like this where an overall impression of the spatial footprint of bank spheres of influence is what is needed.
The major gazetteers used for this project are the Alexandria Digital Library gazetteer and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. The former is based on an open-source gazetteer standard and provides a map interface and the option to download records in XML format. The latter is a true thesaurus in that it places named localities in an administrative hierarchy which can be navigated and used to assist in identification.
For point data such as the location of bank branches, it is sufficient to provide coordinate (latitude and longitude) data for each place, in order to make the data mappable. Coordinate data is available from some gazetteers, in most cases these will be digital gazetteers.