Overview

Austin sometimes defines a "Nineteenth Century" historical era stretching from 1815 (The Congress of Vienna) to 1914 (The outbreak of the First World War);alternatively, Eric Hobsbawm defined the Long Nineteenth Century as spanning the years 1789 (the French Revolution) to 1914.
During this century, the Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires began to crumble and the Holy Roman and Mughal empires ceased.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire became the world's leading power, controlling one quarter of the world's population and one third of the land area. It enforced a Pax Britannica, encouraged trade, and battled rampant piracy.

Slavery was greatly reduced around the world. Following a successful slave revolt in Haiti, Britain forced the Barbary pirates to halt their practice of kidnapping and enslaving Europeans, banned slavery throughout its domain, and charged its navy with ending the global slave trade. Slavery was then abolished in America and Brazil (see Abolitionism), and serfdom was abolished in Russia

Electricity, steel and petroleum fueled a Second Industrial Revolution which enabled the German Empire, Japan, and the United States to become great powers that raced to create empires of their own. However, Russia and Qing Dynasty China failed to keep pace with the other world powers which led to massive social unrest in both empires.

1800s

1800: The Company of Surgeons are awarded their Royal Charter and become The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

1801: The Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merge to form the United Kingdom.

1801-15: Barbary War between the United States and the Barbary States of North Africa

1803: The United States buys out France's territorial claims in North America via the Louisiana Purchase. This begins the U.S.'s westward expansion to the Pacific referred to as its Manifest Destiny which involves annexing and conquering land from Mexico, Britain, and Native Americans.

1804: Haiti gains independence from France and becomes the first black republic, culminating the only successful slave revolt ever.

1804: Austrian Empire founded by Francis I.

1805-48: Muhammad Ali modernizes Egypt.

1806: Holy Roman Empire dissolved as a consequence of the Treaty of Lunéville.

1807: Kingdom of Great Britain declares the Slave Trade illegal.

1808-09: Russia conquers Finland from Sweden in the Finnish War.

1809: Napoleon strips the Teutonic Knights of their last holdings in Bad Mergentheim.

1810s

1810: The University of Berlin, the world's first research university, is founded. Among its students and faculty are Hegel, Marx, and Bismarck. The German university reform proves to be so successful that its model is copied around the world (see History of European research universities).

1810s-20s: Most of the Latin American colonies free themselves from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires after the Mexican War of Independence and the South American Wars of Independence.

1812-15: War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom

1813-1907: The contest between the British Empire and Imperial Russia for control of Central Asia is referred to as the Great Game.

1815: The Congress of Vienna redraws the European map. The Concert of Europe attempts to preserve this settlement, but it fails to stem the tide of liberalism and nationalism that sweeps over the continent.

1815: Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo brings a conclusion to the Napoleonic Wars and marks the beginning of a Pax Britannica which lasts until 1870.

1816: Year Without a Summer

1816-28: Shaka's Zulu kingdom becomes the largest in Southern Africa.

1819: The modern city of Singapore is established by the British East India Company.

1820s

1820: Liberia founded by the American Colonization Society for freed American slaves.

1821-27: Greece becomes the first country to break away from the Ottoman Empire after the Greek War of Independence.

1823-87: The British Empire annexed Burma (now called Myanmar) after three Anglo-Burmese Wars.

1825: Erie Canal opened connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

1826-28: After the final Russo-Persian War, the Persian Empire took back territory lost to Russia from the previous war.

1825-28: The Argentina-Brazil War results in the independence of Uruguay.

1830s

1830: France invades and occupies Algeria.

1830: The Belgian Revolution in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands led to the creation of Belgium.

1830: Greater Colombia dissolved and the nations of Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama took its place.

1833: Slavery Abolition Act bans slavery throughout the British Empire.

1833-76: Carlist Wars in Spain.

1834: Spanish Inquisition officially ends.

1835-36: The Texas Revolution in Mexico resulted in the short-lived Republic of Texas.

1837-1901: Queen Victoria's reign is considered the apex of the British Empire and is referred to as the Victorian era.

1838-40: Civil war in the Federal Republic of Central America led to the foundings of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

1839-51: Uruguayan Civil War

1839-60: After two Opium Wars, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia gained many concessions from China resulting in the decline of the Qing Dynasty.

1840s

1840: New Zealand is founded, as the Treaty of Waitangi is signed by the Maori and British.

1844: Millerite movement awaits the Second Advent of Jesus Christ on October 22. Christ's non-appearance becomes known as the Great Disappointment.

1844 - Persian Prophet the Báb announces his revelation, founding Bábísm. He announced to the world of the coming of "He whom God shall make manifest." He is considered the forerunner of Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith.

1845-49: The Irish Potato Famine led to the Irish diaspora.

1846-48: The Mexican-American War leads to Mexico's cession of much of the modern-day Southwestern United States.

1846-47: Mormon migration to Utah.

1848: ''The Communist Manifesto'' published.

1848: Revolutions of 1848 in Europe

1848-58: California Gold Rush

1850s

1850: The Little Ice Age ends around this time.

1851-60s: Victorian gold rush in Australia

1851-64: The Taiping Rebellion in China is the bloodiest conflict of the century.

1854: The Convention of Kanagawa formally ends Japan's policy of isolation.

1854-56: Crimean War between France, the United Kingdom, the Ottoman Empire and Russia

1855: Bessemer process enables steel to be mass produced.

1856: World's first oil refinery in Romania

1857-58: Indian Rebellion of 1857

1859: The Origin of Species published.

1870s

1870-71: The Franco-Prussian War results in the unifications of Germany and Italy, the collapse of the Second French Empire, the breakdown of Pax Britannica, and the emergence of a New Imperialism.

1871-1914: Second Industrial Revolution

1870s-90s: Long Depression in Wesstern Europe and North America

1872: Yellowstone National Park is created.

1873: Maxwell's ''A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism'' published.

1874: The British East India Company is dissolved.

1875-1900: 26 million Indians perished in India due to famine.

1876-1914: The massive expansion in population, territory, industry and wealth in the United States is referred to as the Gilded Age.

1877: Great Railroad Strike in the United States may have been the world's first nationwide labor strike.

1877-78: The Balkans are freed from the Ottoman Empire after another Russo-Turkish War in the Treaty of Berlin.

1878: First commercial telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut.

1879: Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa.

1880s

1880-1881: the First Boer War.

1881: First electrical power plant and grid in Godalming, Britain.

1884-85: The Berlin Conference signals the start of the European "scramble for Africa". Attending nations also agree to ban trade in slaves.

1884-85: The Sino-French War led to the formation of French Indochina.

1886: Russian-Circassian War ended with the defeat and the exile of many Circassians. Imam Shamil defeated.

1888: Slavery banned in Brazil.

1889: Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad establishes the Ahmadi Muslim Community.

1889: End of the Brazilian Empire and the beginning of the Brazilian Republic

1890s

1890: The Wounded Knee Massacre was the last battle in the American Indian Wars. This event represents the end of the American Old West.

1894-95: After the First Sino-Japanese War, China cedes Taiwan to Japan and grants Japan a free hand in Korea.

1895-1896: Ethiopia defeats Italy in the First Italo–Ethiopian War.

1896: Olympic games revived in Athens.

1896: Klondike Gold Rush in Canada.

1897: Gojong, or Emperor Gwangmu, proclaims the short-lived Korean Empire: lasts until 1910.

1898: The United States gains control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.

1898-1900: The Boxer Rebellion in China is suppressed by an Eight-Nation Alliance.

1898-1902: The One Thousand Days war in Colombia breaks out between the "Liberales" and "Conservadores," culminating with the loss of Panama in 1903.

1899: Second Boer War begins (-1902); Philippine-American War begins (-1913).

Significant people

Napoleon I, First Consul and Emperor of the French

William Gilbert Grace, English cricketer

Baron Haussmann, civic planner

Sándor Körösi Csoma, explorer of the Tibetan culture

Hong Xiuquan inspired China's Taiping Rebellion, perhaps the bloodiest civil war in human history

Fitz Hugh Ludlow, writer and explorer

Florence Nightingale, nursing pioneer

Ignaz Semmelweis, proponent of hygienic practices

Dr. John Snow, the founder of epidemiology

F R Spofforth, Australian cricket

Sitting Bull, a leader of the Lakota

Chief Joseph, a leader of the Nez Percé

Ned Kelly, Australian folk hero, and outlaw

Abraham Lincoln, United States President

Jefferson Davis, Confederate States President

Elizabeth Kenny, Australian Nurse and found an Innovative Treatment of Polio

Literature

On the literary front the new century opens with Romanticism, a movement that spread throughout Europe in reaction to 18th-century rationalism, and it develops more or less along the lines of the Industrial Revolution, with a design to react against the dramatic changes wrought on nature by the steam engine and the railway. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are considered the initiators of the new school in England, while in the continent the German ''Sturm und Drang'' spreads its influence as far as Italy and Spain.

French arts had been hampered by the Napoleonic Wars but subsequently developed rapidly. Modernism began.

The Goncourts and Emile Zola in France and Giovanni Verga in Italy produce some of the finest naturalist novels. Italian naturalist novels are especially important in that they give a social map of the new unified Italy to a people that until then had been scarcely aware of its ethnic and cultural diversity. On February 21, 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto.

There was a huge literary output during the 19th century. Some of the most famous writers included the Russians Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the English Charles Dickens, John Keats, and Jane Austen; the Scottish Sir Walter Scott; the Irish Oscar Wilde; the Americans Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain; and the French Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire. Some others of note included:

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

François-René de Chateaubriand

Kate Chopin

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Emily Dickinson

Arthur Conan Doyle

Alexandre Dumas, père (1802-1870)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nikolai Gogol

Manuel González Prada

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Juana Manuela Gorriti

Clorinda Matto de Turner

George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin)

Mary Shelley

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Paul Verlaine

Walt Whitman

William Wordsworth

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Science

The 19th century saw the birth of science as a profession; the term scientist was coined in 1833 by William Whewell. Among the most influential ideas of the 19th century were those of Charles Darwin, who in 1859 published the book ''The Origin of Species'', which introduced the idea of evolution by natural selection. Louis Pasteur made the first vaccine against rabies, and also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, including the asymmetry of crystals. Thomas Alva Edison gave the world light with his invention of the lightbulb. Karl Weierstrass and other mathematicians also carried out the arithmetization of analysis. Other important 19th century scientists included:

Amedeo Avogadro, physicist

Johann Jakob Balmer, mathematician, physicist

Henri Becquerel, physicist

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor

Ludwig Boltzmann, physicist

János Bolyai, mathematician

Louis Braille, inventor of braille

Robert Bunsen, chemist

Marie Curie, physicist, chemist

Pierre Curie, physicist

Louis Daguerre, chemist

Gottlieb Daimler, engineer, industrial designer and industrialist