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Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions!  Unfortunately, I could not find a readily-available shapefile of state boundaries from British India (1920s-30s era) which could be used to join to data sets by state.  It seems that the only option would have been to digitize an historical map (or find a detailed one already digitized), geo-reference it, and then manually digitize the boundaries myself, which I didn't have time for. 

The professor and I settled on the compromise of merging the shapefiles for modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (obtained from http://gadm.org), making some adjustments to match modern states more-or-less with their historical equivalents, and proceeding to map from there.  Since this was for illustration during a conference presentation (and not for actual analysis), this compromise was "good enough for government work" [sic].

Thanks again for all of your suggestions.  I did collect a couple of new data sources I hadn't know of before (http://gadm.org and http://www.diva-gis.org/).  If anyone out there is looking for contemporary international data and you have not yet discovered IPUMS-International, one of our students came across it last semester and that also looks handy.

Thanks again for being such a great resource!

Deborah Reichler
Hamilton College

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Haddad, Tanya <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Deborah,

The UK Ordinance Survey may be able to point you in the correct direction. I'm not sure that the historical data you want will be digital, but they have some information about historical maps sourcing on their website:

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/support/historical-maps.html

The British Museum is another source (maybe best source?) - they have a huge collection of maps inherited from the British Empire, but again, not sure what is digital and what is not:

http://www.bl.uk/subjects/maps

Unfortunately, one thing I would worry about is that the data is unlikely to be anything like "public domain" when/if you find it. Copyright on map data is much stronger in the UK (held by the crown), so not entirely as easy to use as you might hope. Items available at the museum might be less restricted, but I really don't know.

I'd love to hear how it turns out!


Tanya


________________________________________
From: Northeast Arc Users Group [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Deborah Reichler [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 1:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [NEARC-L] Searching for shapefile of historical India boundaries

I'm trying to create a couple of simple maps for a faculty member.  She is doing research in 1920s and 30s British India and would like me to create some maps of her data from that era.

I found modern Indian administrative boundaries pretty quickly at http://www.gadm.org/ but have been unable to find any source that has a shapefile or geodatabase (suitable for import into ArcGIS) of Indian states from the British Imperial period.

Would appreciate any leads you might have,
Thanks,
Deborah Reichler
Hamilton College
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