From: "Carl W. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Do you know if there is an official list of country possessions?
Not very complicate to build, starting by the ISO 3166-1 and UN (numeric) list of country/territory codes. I have such a list if you want. But all depends on the level of granularity you need: some "territories" in UN and ISO have a single code for the same administrative region, that covers sometimes very distant "possesions" (I'd rather use the term "dependancies"). Some of them have no formal assignment in ISO 3166-1, only some reserved codes or simply no code at all. Examples: Jersey (JE), Guernsey (GE), Chausey Islands (grouped with Jersey?), Paracel Islands (claimed by China). The status of some "possessions" in the Antarctica (AQ) is not clear. They are administered by existing countries for the scientific bases that run there, but have now a limited right for their expansion (the old maps that divided it into sectors to the pole are no longer valid), and the territory itself is placed under an international treaty protected by the United Nations. I can say that of the old French "Terre AdÃlie" which consists in only one antarctic scientific base (Dumont d'Urville), now administered within the "French Austral and Antarctic Territories" (TF), an administrative term that also covers non Antarctic islands such as Kerguelen Islands and Amsterdam Island (this territory, out of the European Union, is administered from Paris by two ministries, and is used mostly as a flagship for commercial navigation).
