From top left, clockwise: The coronation of Queen Victoria marked the beginning of her 64-year long reign. Her reign meant the revival of the British Empire, as the United Kingdom rapidly grew powerful territorially and economically. Under her rule, Britain saw a massive upheaval of colonial power, as over a quarter of the world fell into British rule; France's 1830 revolution reinstated liberal values – and later French imperialism – back into French governance and power. The revolution resulted in the dethroning of King Charles X and indirectly rebirthed the French colonial empire; Michael Faraday and John Daniell's studies helped form the basis of electrochemistry via the discovery of electromagnetic induction. Their discoveries moulded a huge part of contemporary chemistry, and forever changed the way people utilized electricity; HMS Beagle circumnavigates the world twice. Its second expedition with Charles Darwin has proven to be particularly pioneering, as the discoveries and theories he made on said voyage, helped him develop the theory of evolution, widely enhanced scientific consensus and knowledge on taxonomy and biology, and birthed the concept of natural selection. Slave and free states grow in number and power; a dynamic movement widely perceived as a prelude to the American Civil War as abolishment and establishment began to socio-politically polarize the United States' society, subsequently forming Union and Confederate states. The telegraph is invented by Samuel Morse. His patent opened the world to global networking and broke long distances as boundaries with it – the first of its kind; an 1832 still-life image developed by a daguerreotype. The daguerreotype was first introduced to the public in 1839. Its release made it the first invention that enabled the public to capture images on a recurrent basis – a move that would eventually nurture the growth of modern-day photography; Hans Christian Andersen publishes his first collection of fairy tales in 1837. His publications profoundly transformed literature, and grew to become one of the most popular and influential storywriters of the 19th century, with stories like The Little Mermaid (as pictured), and Thumbelina; a legacy that today retains as Denmark's national icon.
The 1830s (pronounced "eighteen-thirties") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1830, and ended on December 31, 1839.
In this decade, the world saw a rapid rise of imperialism and colonialism, particularly in Asia and Africa. Britain saw a surge of power and world dominance, as Queen Victoria took to the throne in 1837. Conquests took place all over the world, particularly around the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the British Raj. New outposts and settlements flourished in Oceania, as Europeans began to settle over Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.
China was ruled by the Daoguang Emperor of the Qing dynasty during the 1830s. The decade witnessed a rapid rise in the sale of opium in China,[2] despite efforts by the Daoguang Emperor to end the trade.[3] A turning point came in 1834, with the end of the monopoly of the East India Company, leaving trade in the hands of private entrepreneurs. By 1838, opium sales climbed to 40,000 chests.[2][4] In 1839, newly appointed imperial commissioner Lin Zexu banned the sale of opium and imposed several restrictions on all foreign traders. Lin also closed the channel to Guangzhou (Canton), leading to the seizure and destruction of 20,000 chests of opium.[5] The British retaliated, seizing Hong Kong on August 23 of that year, starting what would be known as the First Opium War. It would end three years later with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842.
The Padri War was fought from 1803 until 1837 in West Sumatra between the Padris and the Adats. The latter asked for the help of the Dutch, who intervened from 1821 and helped the Adats defeat the Padri faction. The conflict intensified in the 1830s, as the war soon centered on Bonjol, the fortified last stronghold of the Padris. It finally fell in 1837[6] after being besieged for three years, and along with the exile of Padri leader Tuanku Imam Bonjol, the conflict died out.
The British government appointed a series of administrative heads of British India in the 1830s ("Governor-General of India" starting in 1833): Lord William Bentinck (1828–1835), Sir Charles Metcalfe, Bt (1835–1836), and The Lord Auckland (1836–1842). The Government of India Act 1833 was enacted to remove the East India Company's remaining trade monopolies and divested it of all its commercial functions, renewing the company's political and administrative authority for another twenty years. It invested the Board of Control with full power and authority over the company.
The English Education Act by the Council of India in 1835 reallocated funds from the East India Company to spend on education and literature in India. In 1837, the British East India company replaced Persian with local vernacular in various provinces as the official and court language. However, in the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent, Urdu instead of Hindi was chosen to replace Persian.[9][10]
In 1834 Grey retired from public life, leaving Lord Melbourne as his successor. Reforms continued under Lord Melbourne, with the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, which stated that no able-bodied British man could receive assistance unless he entered a workhouse. King William IV's opposition to the Whigs' reforming ways led him to dismiss Melbourne in November and then appoint Sir Robert Peel to form a Tory government. Peel's failure to win a House of Commons majority in the resulting general election (January 1835) made it impossible for him to govern, and the Whigs returned to power under Melbourne in April 1835. The Marriage Act 1836 established civil marriage and registration systems that permit marriages in nonconformist chapels, and a Registrar General of Births, Marriages, and Deaths.[14][15]
The first two Canut revolts occurred in the 1830s. They were among the first well-defined worker uprisings of the Industrial Revolution. The word Canut was a common term to describe to all Lyonnais silk workers.
The First Canut revolt in 1831 was provoked by a drop in workers' wages caused by a drop in silk prices. After a bloody battle with the military causing 600 casualties, rebellious silk workers seize Lyon, France. The government sent Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, at the head of an army of 20,000 to restore order. Soult was able to retake the town without any bloodshed, and without making any compromises with the workers. The Second Canut revolt in 1834 occurred when owners attempted to impose a wage decrease. The government crushed the rebellion in a bloody battle, and deported or imprisoned 10,000 insurgents.
August 31, 1839 – The First Carlist War (Spain) ends with the Convenio de Vergara, also known as the Abrazo de Vergara ("the embrace in Vergara"; Bergara in Basque), between liberal general Baldomero Espartero, Count of Luchana and Carlist General Rafael Maroto.
In 1830, France invaded and quickly seized OttomanRegency of Algiers, and rapidly took control of other coastal communities. Fighting would continue throughout the decade, with the French pitted against forces under Ahmed Bey at Constantine, primarily in the east, and nationalist forces in Kabylia and the west. The French made treaties with the nationalists under 'Abd al-Qādir, enabling them to capture Constantine in 1837. Al-Qādir continued to give stiff resistance in the west, which lasted throughout the decade (and well into the 1840s, with Al-Qādir surrendering in 1847).
May 1838 – Lord Durham and his entourage arrive in Upper Canada to investigate the cause of the 1837 rebellion in that province. This leads to Durham submitting the Durham Report to Britain.
United States
United States territories and states that forbade or allowed slavery, 1837.
July 1, 1839 – Slaves aboard the Amistad rebel and capture the ship off the coast of Cuba. Under direction to sail the ship to Africa, the crew sailed the ship to Long Island, New York, where the slaves were taken into custody by the U.S. Navy. The slaves would later win the right to return to Africa in United States v. The Amistad.
March 12, 1830 – Craig v. Missouri: The United States Supreme Court rules that state loan certificates are unconstitutional because they were bills of credit emitted by a state in violation of Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution.
February 16, 1833 – Barron v. Baltimore: The United States Supreme Court rules that the Bill of Right only applies to the federal government, and not the state government.[19]
December 9, 1835 – Texian "army" volunteers, under General Burleson, capture the town of San Antonio de Bejar from the Mexican forces occupying the town under General Martin Perfecto de Cos.
March 6, 1836 – The Battle of the Alamo ends the 13-day siege; approximately 200 defenders (Anglo settlers & Tejano townsfolk) die in a fierce struggle with approximately 5,000 Mexican soldiers.[23]
April 21, 1836 – Battle of San Jacinto: Mexican forces under General Santa Anna are defeated in a battle lasting 18 minutes by the San Jacinto River, Texas. (General Houston is wounded during the battle, and is later relieved of command by interim President David G. Burnet. This action enables Houston to recover from his wounds.)
The 1830s for Mexico saw the end of the First Mexican Republic and saw General Santa Anna move in and out of the presidency in a 30-year span now known as the "Age of Santa Anna". In 1834, President Antonio López de Santa Anna dissolved Congress, forming a new government. That government instituted the Centralist Republic of Mexico by approving a new centralist constitution ("Siete Leyes"). From its formation in 1835 until its dissolution in 1846, the Centralist Republic was governed by eleven presidents (none of which finished their term). It called for the state militias to disarm, but many states resisted, including Mexican Texas, which declared independence in the Texas Revolution of 1836. During the 1840s, other provinces separated. The Republic of the Rio Grande in 1840, and the Republic of Yucatán declared independence in 1841.
May 1838 – An insurrection breaks out in Tizimín, beginning the campaign for the independence of Yucatan from Mexico.
November 1838 – The Pastry War (also known as the First French intervention in Mexico) began with the naval blockade of some Mexican ports and the capture of the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa in Veracruz by French forces sent by King Louis-Philippe. The intervention followed many claims by French nationals of losses due to unrest in Mexico City, as well as the failure of Mexico to pay a large debt to France.
March 1839 – The Pastry War ends with a British-brokered peace.
27 December, 1831 – Sam Sharpe leads a major slave rebellion, also known as the Baptist War. The slave uprising lasted for 10 days and spread throughout the entire island, mobilizing as many as 60,000 of Jamaica's enslaved population. The British colonial government used the armed Jamaican military forces and warriors from the towns of the Jamaican Maroons to put down the rebellion, suppressing it within two weeks. Some 14 whites were killed by armed slave battalions, but more than 200 slaves were killed by troops.
In 1834, Michael Faraday's published his research regarding the quantitative relationships in electrochemical reactions, now known as Faraday's laws of electrolysis.[34] Also in 1834, Jean C. A. Peltier discovered the Peltier "effect", which is the presence of heating or cooling at an electrified junction of two different conductors. In 1836, John Daniell invented a primary cell in which hydrogen was eliminated in the generation of the electricity.
July 2, 1832 – André-Michel Guerry presents his Essay on moral statistics of France, to the French Academy of Sciences, a significant step in the founding of empirical social science.
May 24, 1832 – Francois Arban, early French balloonist makes his 1st ascent.[44]
Automobile
1834 – Thomas Davenport, the inventor of the first American DC electrical motor, installs his motor in a small model car, creating one of the first electric cars.
March 1836 – First monthly part of Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers ("The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club ..., edited by Boz") published in London.
August 7, 1831 – American Baptist minister William Miller preaches his first sermon on the Second Advent of Christ in Dresden, New York, launching the Advent Movement in the United States.
October 27, 1838 – Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs declares Mormons to be enemies of the state and encourages the extermination or the exile of the religious minority, forcing nearly 10,000 Mormons out of the state.[46]
Historians believe that the first cholera pandemic had lingered in Indonesia and the Philippines in 1830. The second cholera pandemic spread from India to Russia and then to the rest of Europe claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.[47] It reached Moscow in August 1830, and by 1831, the epidemic had infiltrated Russia's main cities and towns.
Russian soldiers brought the disease to Poland during the November Uprising.[48] "Cholera riots" occurred in Russia, caused by the anti-cholera measures undertaken by the tsarist government.
The epidemic reached western Europe later in 1831. In London, the disease claimed 6,536 victims; in Paris, 20,000 died (out of a population of 650,000), with about 100,000 deaths in all of France.[49] In 1832 the epidemic reached Quebec, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, Canada; and Detroit and New York City in the United States. It reached the Pacific coast of North America between 1832 and 1834.[50]
^Fay, Peter Ward (1976). The Opium War, 1840-1842: barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the early part of the nineteenth century and the war by which they forced her gates ajar. The Norton library. New York: Norton. ISBN978-0-393-00823-4.
^"Phenakistiscope". History of Science Museum. Retrieved 22 November 2020.
^Robertson, Patrick (1974). The Shell Book of Firsts. London: Ebury Press. pp. 127–8. ISBN0-7181-1279-2.
^Darcy-Roquencourt., Jacques (5 April 2002). "Boulevard du Temple de Daguerre". www.niepce-daguerre.com. Archived from the original on 13 October 2018. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
^Ehl, Rosemary Gene; Ihde, Aaron (1954). "Faraday's Electrochemical Laws and the Determination of Equivalent Weights". Journal of Chemical Education. 31 (May): 226–232. Bibcode:1954JChEd..31..226E. doi:10.1021/ed031p226.
^Kelly, Joyce (1996). An archaeological guide to northern Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Jay I. Kislak Reference Collection (Library of Congress). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. p. 278. ISBN978-0-8061-2858-0.
^Raymond Durand (1980). Robert Bielecki (ed.). Depesze z powstańczej Warszawy 1830–1831: raporty konsula francuskiego w Królestwie Polskim [Memoranda from Warsaw during the Uprising 1830–1831: reports of the French consul to the Kingdom of Poland]. Warsaw: Czytelnik. ISBN978-83-07-00254-5. OCLC7732541.
^Rosenberg, Charles E. (1987). The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. University of Chicago Press. ISBN0-226-72677-0.
^"Cholera's seven pandemics". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. December 2, 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-11.Note: The second pandemic started in India and reached Russia by 1830, then spreading into Finland and Poland. A two-year outbreak began in England in October 1831 and claimed 22,000 lives. Irish immigrants fleeing poverty and the Great Famine, carried the disease from Europe to North America. Soon after the immigrants' arrival in Canada in the summer of 1832, 1,220 people died in Montreal and another 1,000 across Quebec. The disease entered the U.S. via ship traffic through Detroit and New York City. Spread by ship passengers, it reached Latin America by 1833. Another outbreak across England and Wales began in 1848, killing 52,000 over two years.
![[icon]](File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small}
