Bilateral Cultural Agreements, 1935-1972: a Curated International Text Corpus

This is a curated text corpus composed of the texts of bilateral general cultural agreements signed between 1935 and 1972 and deposited with either the League of Nations Treaty Service (LTS) or United Nations Treaty Service (UNTS) and published by those organizations. All texts are in English, either as an original language or in the translation provided by these treaty services.

The complete list of bilateral treaties included in this corpus is available here. The source documents can be found online in PDF form through the UNTS website. We were able to identify this selection of agreements thanks to the electronic World Treaty Index (worldtreatyindex.com), or eWTI [1]. An edited version of the portions of the eWTI related to cultural agreements is available at: zenodo.org/record/5159745. Discussion of the principles of selection behind this corpus, including a definition of "general cultural agreements," can be found in this article (B. G. Martin, "The Rise of the Cultural Treaty," International History Review, 2022); as well as in this log, which documents the decision-making process. The 464 agreements collected in this corpus represent almost exactly half of the total number of general cultural agreements signed between January 1935 and December 1972 (49.88% of 931). The remainder were not deposited with the League of Nations or the UN; some were published in national treaty collections.

I assembled this corpus, together with Roger Mähler and Andreas Marklund of Humlab, Umeå University, between 2018 and 2020, as part of the research project "The Culture of International Society," which was funded by a generous grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, P16-0900:1). Sincere thanks to Roger and Andreas, as well as to Milada Jamroskovic, who conducted many hours of painstaking editing.

Read about the project at: benjamingmartin.com/cultintsoc.

Code related to the project, including text analysis tools designed for this corpus, is available at the project's GitHub page.

Please contact me with questions or suggestions: benjamin [dot] martin [at] idehist.uu.se

[1] Paul Poast, Michael James Bommarito and Daniel Martin Katz, ‘The Electronic World Treaty Index: Collecting the Population of International Agreements in the 20th Century’, SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, February 15, 2010), online at: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2652760.