The 2003 CIA World Factbook
The 2003 CIA World Factbook
A granular portrait of the world as the CIA understood it on January 1, 2003. This is the Factbook as time capsule: every country, territory, and disputed region catalogued with the dry precision American intelligence applied to global geography, economies, militaries, and populations. For researchers, journalists, and policy obsessives, it is an essential primary source. The 2003 edition captures a world on the cusp of transformation, with new entries for natural gas economies and data that would become historical almost immediately. This is not a book to read cover to cover, but one to open when you need to understand what the United States knew about a nation, its GDP, its military strength, its demographic contours. The Factbook renders the world into sortable, comparable facts. It is the bureaucratic sublime.
