---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'International Lives and National Biographies: The *ODNB* and the World'

---

# International Lives and National Biographies: The *ODNB* and the World 

Christopher N. Warren



Does the name Lola Montez ring a bell?  Maybe Eliza Gilbert or Countess Marie von Landsfeld? (They're all the same person). If not, you're in for a treat.  The woman the *Oxford Dictionary of National Biography* calls an "adventuress in Latin America" was born in Ireland, buried in Brooklyn, and for thirty-nine years in the middle lived one of the most extraordinary lives of the 19th century. For shorthand, consider: this dancer and courtesan who charmed and scandalized audiences worldwide appears not only in the *ODNB* but five other national biographical dictionaries besides (German, Australian, American, Irish, and Italian.)   

Montez, who once more or less toppled a Bavarian government, also travelled to Spain, St. Petersburg, Riga, San Francisco, and Sydney, marrying no fewer than three times while fitting in affairs with Franz Liszt, Alexandre Dumas, and King Ludwig I. She kept a pet bear, stage-whipped an Australian newspaper editor, and once successfully avoided arrest by taking off all her clothes.  While she and a male travelling companion were sailing near Fiji, the companion was lost overboard under mysterious circumstances.  He was but one of several Montez acquaintances to die mysteriously.  

I first encountered Lola Montez thanks to a recent [podcast](http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-9000205) from the *Oxford Dictionary of National Biography*.  Listening to her fascinating life story, which intersected with -- at a minimum -- fifteen different countries, I was struck that this dictionary of *national* biography included such rich detail about a woman whose life was so profoundly *international*.    

This made me wonder, not only about Lola Montez but about all the people in the *ODNB* with international biographies--people whose lives, like Montez', overran the historiographical convenience of the nation. In the *ODNB* are many curates and MPs whose contributions to British history mainly happened within the British Isles, but the Dictionary also includes a vast number of crusaders, merchants, explorers, migrants, refugees, evangelists, scholars, and empire-builders. By looking systematically at the *ODNB*'s places, I wondered, could Britain's Dictionary of National Biography teach us about *other* countries too? Could it tell us how elite and notable Britons, in aggregate, saw the world?  

I might acknowledge that I initially doubted that it could. Ok, maybe there were nuggets about national interactions in the British Isles, but it seemed that a national biographical dictionary conceived originally in the late nineteenth century was inescapably bound to the nationalist projects of its era and thus of little use amidst history’s recent “global turn.” 

Still, to see whether there was anything worth pursuing, I did a quick experiment.  I asked, where were *ODNB* subjects born and where did they die?  The answer, it seemed, might indicate the relative presence or absence of international lives in the *ODNB*.  I was kind of floored by the initial results.  In this dictionary of *national* biography, I found 312 distinct countries of birth and 352 countries of death.  Now, many of these "unique" countries were in fact alternate names, misspellings, historical monikers, anachronistic retrojections, and so forth, but I was nevertheless encouraged. After some rough-and-ready-combining and sifting,  much of which was highly interpretive or arbitrary (Cape Town Colony? Ok, South Africa? Spanish Netherlands? Uh, Luxembourg or Belgium? Netherlands!), I ended up with the data behind Figure 1, which includes all birth-death pairs that appear 15 or more times in the *ODNB*.  Countries on the left are birth locations.  Countries on the right are places of deaths.  On the lines connecting them, width represents the number of people who were born in the country on the left and died in the country on the right .  You can roll your mouse over the lines to see how many indivudiauls were born (source) and died (target) in the given countries. 
 
 # *ODNB* Subjects' Birth and Death Locations

<iframe width="950" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/135.embed?showlink=false"></iframe>

***Figure 1: ODNB Subject's Birth-Death Pairs.**   Countries on the left are birth locations.  Countries on the right are death locations. Width of colored lines represents number of ODNB subjects born (left) or deceased (right) in a given country.  Width of grey lines represents the number of people with a given birth location-death location pair.*

As it turns out, Lola Montez was one of 18 *ODNB* subjects born in Ireland who died in the USA.    
 
# Ranked Country Associations for *ODNB* Subjects

Once I better understood the *ODNB*'s transnational flows at a very broad level by looking at birth and death locations, I wanted to get some more temporal specificity.  This time, I didn't limit myself to birth and death locations but instead made use of some of the supplementary data behind the ODNB. I explain this in more detail in an [article](https://culturalanalytics.org/article/11031-historiography-s-two-voices-data-infrastructure-and-history-at-scale-in-the-oxford-dictionary-of-national-biography-odnb) in the *Journal of Cultural Analytics,* but for every entry in the *ODNB*, biographers were asked to fill out forms indicating any geographical and cultural associations for their subjects (Figure 2).  It occurred to me that linking these associations to subjects' birth dates (uniformly adding 40 years under the assumption that most places become relevant well into a person's life) might offer a new window into the role of various countries in the lives of Britons.  

![](https://i.imgur.com/ZrJLoJH.jpg)
***Figure 2***

After I aggregated and then separated out the country counts by decade, the result was a long table indicating the number of lives in a given decade with documented associations in a given country. Here's a snippet to give you an idea:

| Country | Decade | Count |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
Peru|1820|6
||1830|6
||1840|10
||1850|8
||1860|13
||1870|5
||1880|5
||1890|5
||1900|6
||1910|5

***Table 1***

Now, absolute counts can be misleading. Some countries have larger populations, and the *ODNB* has much [broader coverage for some periods than for others](https://culturalanalytics.org/article/11031-historiography-s-two-voices-data-infrastructure-and-history-at-scale-in-the-oxford-dictionary-of-national-biography-odnb).  In the snippet above, we notice, for instance, that Britons have more associations with Peru between 1840 and 1860, but is this just because there are more total *ODNB* subjects born between 1800-1820?  Once we introduce the temporal variable, it's better to have a measure of *relative* significance.  So, for each decade, I ranked countries by biographical associations and came up with the following charts.  Figure 3 for instance includes fifteen notable countries, which also happen to be the very countries associated with Lola Montez.  

What are we seeing in these charts?  In a sense, we're seeing the rise and fall of nations.  We probably wouldn't know to look for it, but the period we ordinarily refer to as the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, for instance, is inscribed at a very deep level in the *ODNB* (Figure 4).  So too American hegemony. The United States rises in prominence over the 19th-century and by the end of World War II is the top-ranked association for *ODNB* subjects (Figure 5).   

Shorter-term bursts are also discernible.  Switzerland's leap into the top six in the mid-sixteenth-century (Figure 6) is in some ways the story of the Reformation in miniature.  To see South Africa (aka Cape Town Colony) rise so sharply in the late nineteenth-century (Figure 7) is to understand how profoundly colonialism and the Boer Wars affected both Britain and the *ODNB*. 

But, as I argue in the [*CA* essay](https://culturalanalytics.org/article/11031-historiography-s-two-voices-data-infrastructure-and-history-at-scale-in-the-oxford-dictionary-of-national-biography-odnb), it is important to emphasize that these rankings are highly subjective and contingent.  For one thing, different decisions in clumping and splitting  would have yielded different ranks.  Think how cases like East Germany, West Germany, Transjordan, or the USSR might influence raw counts of mentions. But even in its most Platonic version, the data would remain far from offering an objective sense of geopolitical might and influence. 

What we're seeing is not the world as such, but instead the world through British eyes.  There is no view from nowhere.  And that may make the *ODNB*'s sense of the world even more interesting.  



| ***How to Read The Following Charts***  |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| *For each decade, countries were ranked by how many *ODNB* subjects had biographical associations with that country.  The more individuals whose lives intersected with that country in a time period, the higher the rank. Each line in the charts represents the rise, fall, or stasis of a country's rank over time.*      |








<iframe width="1100" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/151.embed"></iframe>

***Figure 3***





## Dutch Golden Age

<iframe width="1100" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/127.embed?showlink=false"></iframe>

***Figure 4***

## American Hegemony

<iframe width="1100" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/125.embed?showlink=false"></iframe>

***Figure 5***



## Reformation

<iframe width="1100" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/131.embed?showlink=false"></iframe>

***Figure 6***





## Boer Wars

<iframe width="1100" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/129.embed?showlink=false"></iframe>

***Figure 7***



## Countries in the British Isles


<iframe width="1100" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/133.embed?showlink=false"></iframe>

***Figure 8***

## Selected Countries, 1780-2000

<iframe width="1100" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/123.embed?showlink=false"></iframe>

***Figure 9***
## Selected Countries, 1460-2000

<iframe width="1100" height="800" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="//plot.ly/~cwarren/119.embed?showlink=false"></iframe>

***Figure 10***


