During the 19th century, the Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, 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. During this time the 19th century was an era of widespread invention and discovery, with significant developments in the understanding or manipulation of physics, chemistry, biology, electricity, and metallurgy largely setting the groundworks for the comparably overwhelming and very rapid technological innovations which would take place the following century. The last remaining undiscovered landmasses of Earth, largely pacific island chains and atolls, were discovered during this century, and with the exception of the extreme zones of the Arctic and Antarctic, accurate and detailed maps of the globe were available by the 1890s.
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. Britain abolished slavery in 1834, America\'s Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War abolished slavery in 1863, and in Brazil slavery was abolished in 1888 (see Abolitionism). Similarly, serfdom was abolished in Russia.
Eras
Events
Map of the world from 1897. The British Empire (marked in pink) was the superpower of the 19th century.
1800s
1810s
1816: Shaka rises to power over the Zulu kingdom
1820s
1830s
- 1830: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is established on April 6, 1830.
- 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 (including modern-day Panama), Ecuador, and Venezuela took its place.
- 1831: France invades and occupies Algeria.
- 1833: Slavery Abolition Act bans slavery throughout the British Empire.
- 1833–76: Carlist Wars in Spain.
- 1834: Spanish Inquisition officially ends.
- 1834–59: Imam Shamil\'s rebellion in Russian-occupied Caucasus.
- 1835–36: The Texas Revolution in Mexico resulted in the short-lived Republic of Texas.
- 1837–1838: Rebellions of 1837 in Canada.
- 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.

Samuel Morse
1840s
1850s
The Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War
1860s
The first vessels sail through the Suez Canal
1870s
Alexander Graham Bell speaking into prototype model of the telephone

Thomas Edison in 1878
1880s
1890s

A
1954 U.S. stamp featuring
George Eastman.
- )
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 cricketer
- 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
- William Wilberforce, Abolitionist, Philanthropist
- Elizabeth Kenny, Australian Nurse and found an Innovative Treatment of Polio
- Queen Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom
- Franz Joseph I of Austria, Emperor of Austria
Franz Boas one of the pioneers of modern anthropology
Anthropology
Painters
Liberty Leading the People (1830, Louvre)
Monet\'s Impression, Sunrise, which gave the name to Impressionism
The Realism and Romanticism of the early 19th century gave way to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in the later half of the century, with Paris being the dominant art capital of the world. 19th century painters included:
Music
Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata form matured during the Classical era to become the primary form of instrumental compositions throughout the 19th century. Much of the music from the nineteenth century was referred to as being in the Romantic style. Many great composers lived through this era such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Richard Wagner. Others included:
Literature
Main article: 19th century in literature
Charles Dickens

Mark Twain in 1894
Jane Austen
Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain; and the French Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire. Some others of note included:
Science
Charles Darwin
The 19th century saw the birth of science as a profession; the term scientist was coined in 1833 by William Whewell[William Whewell. Stanford University. Retrieved on 2008-03-03.]. 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
- Christian Doppler, physicist, mathematician
- Thomas Edison, inventor
- Michael Faraday, scientist
- Léon Foucault, physicist
- Gottlob Frege, mathematician, logician and philosopher
- Carl Friedrich Gauss, mathematician, physicist, astronomer
- Josiah Willard Gibbs, physicist
- Ernst Haeckel, biologist
- Heinrich Hertz, physicist
- Alexander von Humboldt, naturalist, explorer
- Nikolai Lobachevsky, mathematician
- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, physicist
- Robert Koch, physician, bacteriologist
- Justus von Liebig, chemist
- Auguste and Louis Lumière, inventors
- Wilhelm Maybach, car-engine and automobile designer and industrialist.
- James Clerk Maxwell, physicist
- Gregor Mendel, biologist
- Dmitri Mendeleev, chemist
- Samuel Morey, inventor
- Nicéphore Niépce,inventor
- Alfred Nobel, chemist, engineer, inventor
- Louis Pasteur, microbiologist and chemist
- Bernhard Riemann, mathematician
- Santiago Ramón y Cajal, biologist
- Nikola Tesla, inventor
- Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis
Philosophy and religion
Karl Marx

Friedrich Nietzsche
Otto Von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor
The last shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu in French military uniform
One of the first photographs, produced in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce
The 19th century was host to a variety of religious and philosophical thinkers, including:
- Mikhail Bakunin, anarchist
- William Booth, social reformer, founder of the Salvation Army
- Auguste Comte, philosopher
- Mary Baker Eddy, religious leader, founder of Christian Science
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, philosopher
- Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher
- Karl Marx, political philosopher
- John Stuart Mill, philosopher
- Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher
- Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Hindu mystic
- Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher
- Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, founder of French socialism
- William Morris, social reformer
- Joseph Smith, Jr. and Brigham Young, founders of Mormonism
- Nikolai of Japan, religious leader, introduced Eastern Orthodoxy into Japan.
- Bahá\'u\'lláh founded the Bahá\'í Faith in Persia
- Ellen White religious author and co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Politics
- Susan B. Anthony, U.S. women\'s rights advocate
- Otto von Bismarck, German chancellor
- Napoleon Bonaparte, French general, first consul and emperor
- Napoleon III
- Cecil Rhodes
- John C. Calhoun, U.S. senator
- Henry Clay, U.S. statesman, "The Great Compromiser"
- Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America just before and during the American Civil War.
- Frederick Douglass, U.S. abolitionist spokesman
- Ferdinand VII of Spain
- Joseph Fouché, French politician
- Giuseppe Garibaldi, unifier of Italy and Piedmontese soldier
- Isabella II of Spain
- Gojong of Joseon, Korean emperor
- William Lloyd Garrison, U.S. abolitionist leader
- William Ewart Gladstone, British prime minister
- Ulysses S. Grant, U.S. general and president
- Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism
- Andrew Jackson, U.S. general and president
- Thomas Jefferson, American statesman, philosopher, and president
- Lajos Kossuth, Hungarian governor; leader of the war of independence
- Hong Xiuquan, revolutionary, self-proclaimed Son of God
- Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and politician
- Libertadores, Latin American liberators
- Robert E. Lee, Confederate general
- Abraham Lincoln, U.S. president; led the nation during the American Civil War
- Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada, first Prime Minister of Canada
- Mutsuhito, Japanese emperor
- Tokugawa Yoshinobu, Japanese Shogun (The Last Shogun)
- István Széchenyi, aristocrat, leader of the Hungarian reform movement
- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, French politician
- Queen Victoria, British monarch
- Klemens von Metternich, Austrian Chancellor
See also
Decades and years
References
stq:19. Jierhunnert
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