19th century

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Millennium: 2nd millennium
Decades: 1800s 1810s 1820s 1830s 1840s
1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s
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Antoine-Jean Gros, Surrender of Madrid, 1808. Napoleon enters Spain's capital during the Peninsular War, 1810

The 19th century (1 January 1801 – 31 December 1900) was the century marked by the collapse of the Spanish, First and Second French, Chinese,[1] Holy Roman and Mughal empires. This paved the way for the growing influence of the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the United States, the German Empire, the Second French Colonial Empire and the Empire of Japan, with the British boasting unchallenged dominance after 1815. After the defeat of the French Empire and its allies in the Napoleonic Wars, the British and Russian empires expanded greatly, becoming the world's leading powers. The Russian Empire expanded in central and far eastern Asia. The British Empire grew rapidly in the first half of the century, especially with the expansion of vast territories in Canada, Australia, South Africa and heavily populated India, and in the last two decades of the century in Africa. By the end of the century, the British Empire controlled a fifth of the world's land and one quarter of the world's population. During the post Napoleonic era it enforced what became known as the Pax Britannica, which helped trade.

The 19th century was an era of rapidly accelerating scientific discovery and invention, with significant developments in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, electricity, and metallurgy that laid the groundwork for the technological advances of the 20th century.[2] The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and spread to continental Europe, North America and Japan.[3] The Victorian era was notorious for the employment of young children in factories and mines, as well as strict social norms regarding modesty and gender roles.[4] Japan embarked on a program of rapid modernization following the Meiji Restoration, before defeating China, under the Qing Dynasty, in the First Sino-Japanese War. Advances in medicine and the understanding of human anatomy and disease prevention took place in the 19th century, and were partly responsible for rapidly accelerating population growth in the western world. Europe's population doubled during the 19th century, from approximately 200 million to more than 400 million.[5] The introduction of railroads provided the first major advancement in land transportation for centuries, changing the way people lived and obtained goods, and fuelling major urbanization movements in countries across the globe. Numerous cities worldwide surpassed populations of a million or more during this century. London became the world's largest city and capital of the British Empire. Its population increased from 1 million in 1800 to 6.7 million a century later. The last remaining undiscovered landmasses of Earth, including vast expanses of interior Africa and Asia, 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. Liberalism became the pre-eminent reform movement in Europe.[6]


Slavery was greatly reduced around the world. Following a successful slave revolt in Haiti, Britain and France stepped up the battle against the Barbary pirates and succeeded in stopping their enslavement of Europeans. The UK's Slavery Abolition Act charged the British Royal Navy with ending the global slave trade.[7] The first colonial empire in the century to abolish slavery was the British, who did so in 1834. America's 13th Amendment following their Civil War abolished slavery there in 1865, and in Brazil slavery was abolished in 1888 (see Abolitionism). Similarly, serfdom was abolished in Russia.

The 19th century was remarkable in the widespread formation of new settlement foundations which were particularly prevalent across North America and Australia, with a significant proportion of the two continents' largest cities being founded at some point in the century. Chicago in the United States and Melbourne in Australia were non-existent in the earliest decades but grew to become the 2nd largest cities in the United States and British Empire respectively by the end of the century. In the 19th century approximately 70 million people left Europe, with most migrating to the United States of America.[8]

The 19th century also saw the rapid creation, development and codification of many sports, particularly in Britain and the United States. Association football, rugby union, baseball and many other sports were developed during the 19th century, while the British Empire facilitated the rapid spread of sports such as cricket to many different parts of the world.

The Industrial Revolution forever modified the economy worldwide.

It also marks the fall of the Ottoman rule of the Balkans which led to the creation of Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Romania as a result of the second Russo-Turkish War, which in itself followed the great Crimean War.


Map of the world from 1897. The British Empire (marked in pink) was the superpower of the 19th century.


Napoleon's retreat from Russia in 1812. The war swings decisively against the French Empire


The discoveries of Michael Faraday formed the foundation of electric motor technology


1819: 29 January, Stamford Raffles arrives in Singapore with William Farquhar to establish a trading post for the British East India Company. 8 February, The treaty is signed between Sultan Hussein of Johor, Temenggong Abdul Rahman and Stamford Raffles. Farquhar is installed as the first Resident of the settlement.
The boundaries set by the Congress of Vienna, 1815.


1816: Shaka rises to power over the Zulu Kingdom. Zulu expansion was a major factor of the Mfecane (“Crushing”) that depopulated large areas of southern Africa


The Great Exhibition in London. The United Kingdom was the first country in the world to industrialise.



The first vessels sail through the Suez Canal


Robert Koch discovered the tuberculosis bacilli. The disease killed an estimated 25 percent of the adult population of Europe during the 19th century.[14]
David Livingstone, Scottish explorer and missionary in Africa
From 1865-1870 Paraguay lost more than half of its population in the Paraguayan War against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.



Miners and prospectors ascend the Chilkoot Trail during the Klondike Gold Rush
Studio portrait of Ilustrados in Europe, c. 1890



For later events, see Timeline of modern history.

Significant people[edit]

Abraham Lincoln in 1863, 16th President of The United States, presided during the American Civil War, assassinated in April 1865
Tsar Alexander II, also known as Alexander the Liberator, was the Emperor of the Russian Empire from 3 March 1855 until his assassination in 1881
José Rizal, a patriot and an advocate for reforms in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era in the late 19th century

Show business and theatre[edit]

Ellen Terry, c. 1880
P. T. Barnum, c. 1860


John L Sullivan in his prime, c. 1882.


Famous and infamous personalities[edit]

Jesse and Frank James, 1872
Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Cody, Montreal, Quebec, 1885
Geronimo, 1887, prominent leader of the Chiricahua Apache

Anthropology, archaeology, scholars[edit]

Heinrich Schliemann, Archaeologist
Franz Boas one of the pioneers of modern anthropology

Journalists, missionaries, explorers[edit]


One of the first photographs, produced in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce
Mathew Brady, Self-portrait, c. 1875

Visual artists, painters, sculptors[edit]

Jan Matejko, Self-portrait, 1892
Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait, 1889

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. In the United States the Hudson River School was prominent. 19th-century painters included:


Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Niccolo Paganini, (c.1819), charcoal drawing
Chopin, by Delacroix, 1838.

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 19th 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, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Richard Wagner. The list includes:


Mark Twain, 1894
Émile Zola, c. 1900

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 Émile 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 21 February 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 Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; the English Charles Dickens, John Keats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson 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, Alexandre Dumas and Charles Baudelaire. Some other important writers of note included:


Mme. Marie Curie, c. 1898

The 19th century saw the birth of science as a profession; the term scientist was coined in 1833 by William Whewell.[18] 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. Dmitri Mendeleev created the first periodic table of elements. 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 a practical everyday lightbulb. Nikola Tesla pioneered the induction motor, high frequency transmission of electricity, and remote control. Karl Weierstrass and other mathematicians also carried out the arithmetization of analysis for functions of real and complex variables; they also began the use of hypercomplex numbers. But the most important step in science at this time was the ideas formulated by Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Their work changed the face of physics and made possible for new technology to come about. The list of important 19th century scientists includes:

Philosophy and religion[edit]

The 19th century was host to a variety of religious and philosophical thinkers, including:

Politics and the Military[edit]

Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor
The last Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu, c. 1867
The allies: Sultan of the Ottoman Empire; Abdulmecid I, Queen of United Kingdom, Victoria and President of France, Napoleon III.


Among the people whose ages are verified by the Gerontology Research Group, as of 03 October 2015 there are only four people (all female) still alive who were born in the 19th century. These people are Susannah Mushatt Jones from Brooklyn, Emma Morano from Italy, Violet Brown from Jamaica and Nabi Tajima from Kagoshima, Japan.The last known living man born in the 19th century was Japan's Jiroemon Kimura who died in 2013, aged 116 and 54 days.

See also[edit]

Supplementary portrait gallery[edit]


  1. ^ See Qing Dynasty; By 1900, mass civil disorder had begun and continuously grown till their ultimate downfall in 1911.
  2. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Inventions. Encyclopædia Britannica.[dead link]
  3. ^ "The United States and the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century". Americanhistory.about.com. 2012-09-18. Retrieved 2012-10-31. 
  4. ^ Laura Del Col, West Virginia University, The Life of the Industrial Worker in Nineteenth-Century England
  5. ^ "Modernization – Population Change". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on April 6, 2009. 
  6. ^ Liberalism in the 19th century. Encyclopædia Britannica.
  7. ^ Sailing against slavery. By Jo Loosemore. BBC.
  9. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica: Herman Willem Daendels [1] Access date 29 March 2009
  10. ^ Frederick Artz, Reaction and Revolution, 1814-1832 (1934)
  13. ^ "Killing ground: photographs of the Civil War and the changing American landscape". John Huddleston (2002). Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-6773-8
  14. ^ "Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis". Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Archived from the original on April 21, 2009. 
  15. ^ Hamdani, Sylviana (3 February 2010). "Taking a Train Trip Down Memory Lane in Indonesia". Jakarta Globe. Retrieved 3 February 2010. 
  16. ^ a b c d e Vickers (2005), page xii
  17. ^ Wahyu Ernawati: "Chapter 8: The Lombok Treasure", in Colonial collections Revisited: Pieter ter Keurs (editor) Vol. 152, CNWS publications. Issue 36 of Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden. CNWS Publications, 2007. ISBN 978-90-5789-152-6. 296 pages. pp. 186–203
  18. ^ "William Whewell". Stanford University. Retrieved 2008-03-03. 

External links[edit]

Media related to 19th century at Wikimedia Commons