Chartered Colonial Companies

General
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1

Question 1: Should a chartered company that owned large swaths of land be tagged similarly as a country with type=boundary boundary=administrative admin_level=2?

Question 2: If a company such as the Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique owns an island, does France own it too? The biggest example would be the Hudson’s Bay company.

Though it would seem to me that sometimes the companies controlled land for their parent countries and other times they would outright own their own land and later sell it to any country.

2

admin_level=2 is for independent states, admin_level=3 is for protectorates and similar areas. It’s hard to understand why countries like Hungary are on a lower level than British Colonies.

3

This is interesting… Company Rule in India and several organizational/corporate rulers of the Congo (International African Association, International Association of the Congo) would also seem to fall into this category of corporate ownership.

For the British examples, the company charters were granted by the Queen or King, and those charters were governed by English or British law, which makes an argument for admin_level<=3, I would think.

I’d also suggest maybe adding an administrative=corporate tag to distinguish from the expected type of political administrative boundary.

@FK27 - are you recommending admin_level=3 for corporate-held territories? Also - where is Hungary an admin_level=3? Is that as part of an empire? I agree that Hungary should not be a lower level than a colony, even if admin_level hierarchies are often hard to compare across polities.

4

Before 1918, Hungary had its own government and legislation, but a joint army, joint currency and joint diplomacy with Austria.

Colonies did not have the same level of legislation as Hungary had.