The world in AD 1850

Africa

Egypt was governed by Abbas Hilmi I (1848–54), a grandson of Muhammad Ali whom the Library of Congress country study describes as a traditionalist with no interest in his grandfather’s development plans. He let a railroad be built between Alexandria and Cairo that served British communications with India, on a partly overland route of thirty-one days against three months around the Cape of Good Hope. The Library of Congress study describes the Ethiopian state at Gonder in the early nineteenth century as only nominally a monarchy, with nobles fighting for the title of ras. Kasa Haylu, who had occupied Gonder in 1847 and been crushed by the Egyptians in Sudan in 1848, served Ras Ali, the dominant figure at court, until he rebelled again in 1852; in February 1855 he was crowned Tewodros II. Farther west, the Sokoto Caliphate, founded after the jihad of Usman dan Fodio that began in 1804, had by the middle of the century thirty emirates and the capital district of Sokoto, with Kano the wealthiest and most populous; it stretched 1,500 kilometers from Dori in modern Burkina Faso to southern Adamawa in Cameroon. In the south, Sir Harry Smith, governor of the Cape Colony, had annexed the land between the Orange and Vaal rivers in 1848 as the Orange River Sovereignty and fought the Xhosa from 1850 to 1852. Moshoeshoe’s Sotho defeated British attempts to take their lands in 1851 and 1852, and the Sand River Convention of 1852 recognized the independence of the South African Republic north of the Vaal.

• Three dates, one handshake: Stanley meets Livingstone, 18711871
• "Every record . . . has been lost": Isandlwana, London Gazette, 18791879
• Did the Berlin Conference really carve up Africa?1885
• Article 17, two texts: the treaty clause behind Adwa, March 1, 18961896

West Asia

Naser al-Din Shah came to the Qajar throne in 1848 and reigned until 1896. His prime minister, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir, reformed the tax system, asserted central control over the bureaucracy and the provincial governors, encouraged trade and industry, and founded a school, the Dar ol-Fonun, to teach the new sciences and foreign languages to members of the elite. The power he gathered roused jealousy in the bureaucracy and fear in the shah, and in 1851 he was dismissed and put to death. The Ottoman Empire’s hold on Egypt had been fixed by the London Convention of 1840, which forced Muhammad Ali to give up Syria but recognized him as hereditary ruler of Egypt under nominal Ottoman suzerainty, and by an added protocol of 1841 the Porte closed the Bosporus and the Dardanelles to the warships of all powers. In 1853 Tsar Nicholas I called the Ottoman state “the sick man of Europe,” and in the Crimean War of 1854–56 France and Britain fought beside the Ottomans against Russia.

• Four sealed translations in 1857: Rawlinson, Behistun and cuneiform1847
• How did a canal dug by Egyptians end up owned by Britain and France?1869
• How a Clay Tablet Shook Victorian Britain1872
• Fifty years of Persia's tobacco for 15,000 pounds a year: the Régie1891

Europe

Two years after the revolutions of 1848, the constitution that the Prussian king had imposed on December 5, 1848, with the three-class franchise added in 1849, came into force on January 31, 1850. A union parliament met at Erfurt from March 20 to April 29 to debate a constitution, drafted in 1849 by Prussia, Hanover and Saxony, for a smaller German state under Prussian leadership. On November 29, in the Punctation of Olmütz agreed with Austria, Prussia gave up the union. Austria abolished the Hungarian constitution of 1848 on June 29, placing Transylvania, Croatia, Slavonia and the Vojvodina directly under the imperial crown and dividing the rest of Hungary into five districts. In France a law of May 31 took the vote from people who paid no taxes, people under prosecution and those resident for less than three years. The first world’s fair opened in London on May 1, 1851, in the Crystal Palace, a building of iron and glass put up for the purpose.

• Crystal Palace, 1,851 feet: the Great Exhibition opens, May 1, 18511851
• Why did the revolutions of 1848 spread in weeks and fail in a year?1848
• A 'Stygian pool' in July 1858: Disraeli's bill and Bazalgette's sewers1858
• Murray's trade sale, November 22, 1859: 1,250 copies of the Origin1859

East Asia

Under the Qing, China’s population had doubled from 150 million in 1650 to 300 million by 1800, by the count in Columbia University’s Asia for Educators. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1842, which ended the Opium War of 1839–42, had ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five ports to British residence and trade, limited the tariff to 5 percent and given British subjects exemption from Chinese law. Lin Zexu, the commissioner whose destruction of some 20,000 chests of British opium at Guangzhou had set off that war, died in 1850. In the south, Hong Xiuquan, a village teacher who had failed the imperial examinations for the third time in 1847, gathered followers from the poor and outcast into an army. Columbia dates the Taiping Rebellion from 1850 and puts its cost at more than twenty million lives; the Library of Congress country study dates the uprising from 1851, when Hong proclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, and reports well over 30 million killed before it was put down in 1864. Tokugawa Japan had turned away a United States demand for diplomatic relations when Commodore James Biddle brought two warships into Edo Bay in July 1846. When Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in Edo Bay with four ships in July 1853, Abe Masahiro, chairman of the senior councillors, accepted his demands, and the Treaty of Kanagawa of March 1854 opened two ports to American ships.

• Twelve articles, no Japanese signature: Kanagawa, March 31, 18541854
• Why did Britain fight over opium, and what did the 1842 treaty start?1840
• The Charter Oath of 1868: five sentences at the start of modern Japan1868
• Joseon, an autonomous state: the treaty of Ganghwa, February 26, 18761876

South Asia

The East India Company’s governor-general from 1848 to 1856 was James Andrew Brown Ramsay, the Marquess of Dalhousie. Punjab, where Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) had built a kingdom of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims and expanded into Afghanistan, Kashmir and Ladakh, was annexed in 1849. Under the “doctrine of lapse,” Dalhousie annexed the estates of deceased princes outright: Satara in 1848, Udaipur in 1852, Jhansi and Tanjore in 1853, Nagpur in 1854 and Oudh in 1856. The Library of Congress country study dates the first railroad lines in India to 1850, from Howrah, across the Hughli River from Calcutta, to the coalfields at Raniganj, 240 kilometers away. The first electric telegraph line was laid in Bengal in 1851, and the three presidency postal systems merged in 1854. The same study dates Company rule from 1757 to 1857; on May 10, 1857, Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army mutinied at Meerut, eighty kilometers northeast of Delhi.

• Fourteen carriages, 400 guests, 21 guns: Bombay to Thane, April 16, 18531853
• Peak XV becomes Mont Everest in a letter Andrew Waugh sent in 18561856
• Why did the 1857 uprising end the East India Company's rule of India?1857
• Six counts of the dead: the Lords debate India's famine, July 18781877

Central Asia

Three Uzbek dynasties held the oases: the Qongrats in Khiva, the Manghits in Bukhara and the Mins in Kokand. In Bukhara, Amir Nasr-Allah (1827–60) was known as Amir-e Qassab, “Amir the butcher,” for his ruthless elimination of his opponents. Encyclopaedia Iranica records that in Kokand all power lay with the Kipchak tribe from 1844 to 1852, until Khudayar Khan, in his first reign (1845–58), organized a coup against them. Khiva had forced the Turkmen oasis of Marv back into submission in 1849, and from 1851 its khan, Mohammad-Amin, led annual campaigns against the Turkmen there. Russia’s forts were already on the steppe: the Raimsk fortress near the Syr Darya delta and the fortress of Kopal in Semirech’e were built in 1847, Kokandi and Russian troops clashed twice on the Syr Darya in 1852, and in 1853 Russian troops under Perovsky, governor-general of Orenburg, took the Kokandi stronghold of Aq Masjed and renamed it Fort Perovsky. The Library of Congress country study on Uzbekistan describes the khanates as caught between Russia on the steppe and Britain in Afghanistan, in the contest that came to be known as the Great Game.

• A lame dervish from Tehran to Samarkand: Vámbéry's ten months, 1863–641863
• Was the Great Game spycraft, or Russia's conquest of Central Asia?1865
• Humble servant of the Emperor of All the Russias: Khiva, August 18731873
• Coast or frontier? The 1875 debate that sent Zuo Zongtang to Kashgar1877

The Americas

Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of February 2, 1848, Mexico had given up New Mexico and Upper California and accepted the incorporation of Texas into the United States, in return for US$15 million from the United States; the Library of Congress country study on Mexico says the war cost Mexico more than half its territory. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky introduced resolutions on the lands on January 29, 1850; the Senate debated them for seven months and voted them down, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois then carried substitute bills through both houses. On September 9 California was admitted as a free state, territorial governments were created for New Mexico and Utah, and Texas accepted a boundary in return for ten million dollars in five percent stock. A stricter Fugitive Slave Act was approved on September 18, and an act of September 20 banned bringing slaves into the District of Columbia for sale from January 1, 1851. In Brazil, where the Library of Congress dates the Second Empire of Pedro II from 1840, the government outlawed the African slave trade in 1850 after London authorized its navy to seize slave ships in Brazilian waters, even in ports; within five years even clandestine landings had stopped. Coffee made up 50 percent of Brazil’s exports in 1841–50, and Brazil went on to intervene militarily to end the rule in Buenos Aires of Juan Manuel de Rosas, president of Argentina in 1829–33 and 1835–52.

• Seven to two, March 6, 1857: the Dred Scott decision1857
• January 1, 1863: what the Emancipation Proclamation freed and left out1863
• Sixteen bonds a mile, trebled in the mountains: Promontory, 18691869
• How did Haiti win freedom in 1804, then pay France for it until 1888?1804

Oceania

Queen Victoria signed the Australian Constitutions Act on August 5, 1850, separating the Port Phillip District from New South Wales as the colony of Victoria. The Museum of Australian Democracy records that by 1850 the district had more than 70,000 people and nearly six million sheep, two-fifths of the Australian total; the news reached it on November 11, 1850, and separation took effect on July 1, 1851. The same Act provided for a Legislative Council in Van Diemen’s Land with two-thirds of its members elected. An Order-in-Council of May 22, 1840, had ended transportation of convicts to New South Wales, and on November 18, 1849, Earl Grey wrote to Governor Fitzroy that no more would be sent; Van Diemen’s Land still received convicts, and Western Australia, founded as a private settlement, took its first boatload from the Scindian at the beginning of June 1850. In Sydney the act founding the University of Sydney, proposed by William Charles Wentworth in 1848, was signed on October 1, 1850.

• 'Taxation without representation is tyranny': Eureka, 1854–551854
• Why do the Māori and English texts of the Treaty of Waitangi differ?1840
• The Cooper Creek depot emptied nine hours before Burke returned1861
• Fifty-six pages in Joe Byrne's hand: Ned Kelly, 1878–18801880

Sources

• U.S. Library of Congress, Egypt: A Country Study, Abbas Hilmi I, 1848-54 and Said, 1854-63
• U.S. Library of Congress, Ethiopia: A Country Study, The Reestablishment of the Ethiopian Monarchy
• U.S. Library of Congress, Nigeria: A Country Study, Usman dan Fodio and the Sokoto Caliphate
• U.S. Library of Congress, South Africa: A Country Study, The Voortrekker Republics and British Policies
• U.S. Library of Congress, Iran: A Country Study, The Qajars, 1795-1925
• U.S. Library of Congress, Turkey: A Country Study, External Threats and Internal Transformations
• Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO: Chronik 1850
• Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO: Chronik 1851
• U.S. Library of Congress, China: A Country Study, The Opium War, 1839-42
• U.S. Library of Congress, China: A Country Study, The Taiping Rebellion, 1851-64
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864)
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Key Points across East Asia, 1750–1919
• U.S. Library of Congress, Japan: A Country Study, Decline of the Tokugawa
• U.S. Library of Congress, India: A Country Study, The British Empire in India
• U.S. Library of Congress, India: A Country Study, The Sikhs
• U.S. Library of Congress, India: A Country Study, The British Raj, 1858-1947
• Encyclopaedia Iranica: Central Asia vii. In the 18th–19th Centuries
• U.S. Library of Congress, Uzbekistan: A Country Study, Arrival of the Russians
• U.S. National Archives, Milestone Documents: Compromise of 1850
• U.S. Library of Congress, Mexico: A Country Study, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
• U.S. Library of Congress, Brazil: A Country Study, The Second Empire, 1840-89
• Museum of Australian Democracy, Documenting Democracy: Australian Constitutions Act 1850 (UK)
• Museum of Australian Democracy, Documenting Democracy: Order-in-Council ending transportation of convicts 22 May 1840 (UK)
• Museum of Australian Democracy, Documenting Democracy: Ordinance enabling transportation of convicts to Western Australia 29 December 1849 (WA)
• Museum of Australian Democracy, Documenting Democracy: University of Sydney Act 1850 (NSW)