FROM 1400-1799
This period of world history has the following salient events and processes: (1) the definitive configuration in Europe of the major nation-states; (2) the Protestant Reformation and the virtual dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire; (3) the creation of European world colonialist empires; (4) the consolidation of the Qing Chinese empire; (5) the birth of the USA; and (6) the French Revolution. There were four wars that were of crucial importance for the future of world history: (1) the Thirty Years war; (2) the War of the Spanish Succession; (3) the Seven Years war; and (4) the War of American Independence.
The unification of Spain was accomplished with the conquest of Granada. Portugal had already started building a world empire and Spain followed with the discovery of America. England was not far behind Spain and the Dutch followed in the steps of the Portuguese, who were crucially weakened by the absorption of Portugal by Spain.
England developed into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and in the process became a great naval power. Spain also acquired an European empire when Charles Habsburg became Charles I of Spain and soon after Holy Roman emperor Charles V. But on the European continent, it was France that gradually turned into the dominant land power. Martin Luther launched the Reformation, whose consequences were as much political as religious. France tried to annex northern Italy. Spain faced simultaneously Protestantism in Germany, French imperialism, and rebellion in the Lowlands (to which Protestantism spread). And it had to do it, not from a solid economic base, but with silver from America and loans from German bankers.
The multiple turbulences produced by the Reformation culminated in the savage Thirty Years war, the most important consequences of which were: the irreparable division of the Holy Roman Empire between Catholic and Protestant rulers (forced by circumstances to cohabit a spectral federative empire), the definitive independence of the Netherlands, the rise of Sweden as a major power, the separation of Portugal from Spanish rule, and the strengthening of France and the weakening of Spain. England was not involved because it was concentrating on its internal political process, which resulted in greater economic and naval power and an irrevocable commitment to Protestantism. The Dutch tried to rival England on the high seas, but their respective resources were uneven and England relegated the Netherlands to a minor power. The Ottoman Empire threatened Habsburg Austria, but was crushed at the gates of Vienna and had to go on the defensive.
The Manchus, originally nomads, created a state in Manchuria from where they conquered China and founded the Qing dynasty, which ruled over a vast empire including Tibet. Japan retained the shogunate, also known as bakufu, and although it had demonstrated that it was impregnable to foreign invasion and had a prosperous autarchic economy, militarily it stagnated with respect to Europe. The states of South East Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia) were frequently at each others' throats. Vietnam divided into Tonkin and Annam, but from the latter kingdom the Vietnamese expanded to the Mekong delta, which was taken from the Cambodians. In India, the Delhi Sultanate was replaced by the Mughal Empire, which weakened itself in trying to subjugate the subcontinent and engendered ferocious Hindu resistance in Maharashtra, although the ultimate winners were the British firmly established in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.
When the last Spanish Habsburg died, powerful France staked a claim for a Bourbon succession opposed by the Habsburg. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued, during which the United Kingdom sided against France, but left the war when it appeared that the Habsburg cause could lead to an union of Spain and Austria. A Bourbon was accepted as king of Spain, which was no longer the major power it had once been. Among the results of the war was the creation of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which later became the instrument for the unification of Italy. Even more significant was the elevation of Prussia to the status of kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire.
While western Europe warred, Russia modernized, and it did it so successfully that it eclipsed Sweden and began intervening in Poland, once the most powerful state in eastern Europe but over time enervated by lack of political cohesion. Russia fought successfully against the Ottomans and expanded eastwards with such impetus as to create an Eurasian empire, larger than any past or future.
Dynastic disputes in the Holy Roman Empire eventually led to the Seven Years war, arguably the most important war in history. It ranged Austria, France, and Russia against Prussia and the United Kingdom. The war ended when Russia decided to quit it. After the war, Austria, Prussia, and Russia partitioned Poland.
The Seven Years war had momentous consequences. The British colonial empire grew immensely at the expense of the French colonial empire in India and North America. British global naval supremacy was demonstrated conclusively. The war made Prussia and Russia major European power wielders. French resentment at British gains led to crucial aid for the American revolution. But France's financial situation became desperate, which led to the convocation of the Estates General and soon to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Eventually, Prussia became Germany through defeating France and despoiling it of Alsace and Lorraine. The German alliance with Austria antagonized Russia in the Balkans and resulted in the entente between France and Russia, later joined by the United Kingdom. When a Serb killed the Austrian heir, a rush of events resulted in the First World War. Tsarist fecklessness laid the ground for the Bolshevik Revolution and the constitution of the USSR. Germany's capitulation in this most devastating of wars encouraged extreme nationalism which fostered the rise of Hitler and Nazism climaxing in the Second World war. And in the Post-War, the USSR and the USA were soon at loggerheads in the Cold War.
Even more important than the long chain of events set off by the Seven Years war was the culmination in the United Kingdom of the European process of industrialization that can be traced as far back as the central Middle Ages. No other civilization attained this feat, which does not mean that they could not have given sufficient time.
ca1410-ca1610
Portuguese Colonial empire to Dutch occupation of the Moluccas
1415-1453
Second phase of the Hundred Years War
1431-1833
Thailand to recognition by the USA
1434-1860
Tuscany: The Medici
1436-1437
Johannes Gutenberg invents moveable type.
1448-1523
Sweden breaks up the Union of Kalmar; Norway remains attached to the Danish crown.
1452-1519
Leonardo da Vinci was the elder of the great trilogy of painters of the Italian Renaissance, with Michelangelo and Raphael. His portraits are renowned for the effect of shaded colors called sfumato. Their backgrounds are often evocative, mountainous landscapes. Because of the vastness of his erudition and of his many interests in fields other than art, Leonardo is often cited as the prototype of the Renaissance man.
1460-1866
Denmark to the loss of Schleswig-Holstein
1461-1730
Ottoman Empire to indirect rule by the Janissaries
1465-1912
Morocco to French annexation
ca1469-ca1539
Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism
1469-1700
Spain: unification and Habsburg rule
1471-1528
Albrecht Dürer was the greatest artist of the German renaissance. He was a master of realism in painting--his self-portraits are particularly significant and impressive--and he is considered one of the foremost engravers of all times. His engravings reveal him as a visionary of profound religious feelings, which sometimes reveal a nostalgia for the medieval past.
1474-1564
Michelangelo is generally considered the greatest of all Renaissance masters in both his monumental frescoes and in his powerful sculptures. His paintings in the Sistine Chapel, in the Vatican, are reputed among the must sublime creations of humanity. The central theme on the ceiling of the chapel, the Creation of Man, is an achievement only rivaled by the awesome apse painting of The Last Judgment, in which he represented himself in the flayed skin of the legendary martyr St. Batholomew.
1476-1510
Giorgione was the most outstanding master of the Renaissance in Venice. He is as admired for his use of color as for the daring with which he flouted compositional canons to create paintings which are as natural and convincing as they are enigmatic.
1477-1648
Holy Roman Empire: to the Reformation and to the end of the Thirty Years War
1477-1699
Habsburg Empire to the recovery of Hungary
1480-1676
Russia to tsar Alexis
1483-1520
With Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Raphael forms the generally accepted trilogy of the great Italian Renaissance masters in painting. He is renowned for his madonnas but he was also master of the large-scale fresco murals which combine monumentality and multiplicity with powerful symbolical meanings. His masterpieces in this genre, in the Stanza della Segnature, Vatican City, are The School of Athens and The Triumph of Religion (also known as Disputà).
1483-1546
Martin Luther
1483-1659
France to the treaty of the Pyrenees
1492-1824
Spanish Colonial Empire to the independence of the Spanish American republics
ca1497-1543
Son of an influential painter of the sane name, Hans Holbein was the greatest portraitist of the German renaissance. His realistic portraits are often replete with symbols and allusions, although his most famous subject, Erasmus of Rotterdam, is represented with the utmost simplicity in a profile of the great Dutch humanist writing.
1497-1857
British Colonial Empire to the Great Indian Rebellion
1501-1639
Iran’s restoration and loss of Baghdad to the Ottomans
1509-1588
England to the defeat Great Armada
ca1510-1750
Shaybanids (Uzbeks)
Mongols led by descendants of Shayban, a grandson of Jenghiz Khan, were active along the southern reaches of the Ural mountains. In the early 15th century, they took the name of Uzbeks, probably their Turkic vassals, and under Ab'ul Khair founded a brief nomadic kingdom along the Amudarya River, from where they raided Transoxiana, then ruled by Ulugh Beg (d1449), grandson of Timur (Tamerlane). Abu'l Khair was attacked and defeated by the Oirats or western Mongols and he was abandoned by his initial supporters, among whom were the Kirghiz.
With the help of the Uzbeks, Abu Sa'id, another Timurid, took over Transoxiana. A branch of the Shaybanids sliced off the khanate of Astrakhan from the Golden Horde or Kipchak Khanate in 1466. But the real founder of Shaybanid power was Muhammad Shaybani, grandson of Abu'l Khair, who ca1500, with the backing of the Chaghataite Khanate, then based in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), conquered Samarkand and Bukhara from their last Timurid rulers. The founder of the dynasty then turned on his benefactors and in 1503 took Tashkent. He captured Khiva in 1506 and in 1507 he swooped down on Merv (Turkmenistan), eastern Persia, and western Afghanistan. The Shaybanids stopped the advance of the Safavids, who in 1502 had defeated the Akkoyunlu..
Astrakhan fell in 1556 to Russia. The Shaybanids contested Khurasan with the Persians until in 1597 they were defeated and Khurasan passed definitely to the Persian Safavids. The Turkic Kirghiz took advantage of the Shaybanid defeat at the hands of the Safavids and plundered their Transoxianian lands. By 1600, the Shaybanid domains had been constituted into the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva. In the 18th century, Kokand was an offshoot of Bukhara. The Shaybanid rulers of Bukhara were originally from Astrakhan. The Uzbeks formed the ethnic nucleus of modern Uzbekistan.
1512
Copernicus defends heliocentrism against the prevalent view of the Earth at the center of the universe.
1515-1803
Egypt to the accession of Muhammad Ali
ca1518-1594
Tintoretto was a Venetian late-Renaissance painter who began to move away from strict realism towards unconventional compositions in which movement is highlighted and some representational distortion appears. His audacious style was often applied to large canvasses, notably those in the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice.
1519-1521
The first circumnavigation of the Earth was undertaken by the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan with the patronage of Charles V Habsburg. Five ships left Spain to much opposition from the Portuguese. By the time Magellan made landfall in the Philippines, three ships were left. Magellan was killed in a skirmish between Filipino tribes. The expedition divided: one ship sailed to Panama and foundered, and the third, under the Spaniard Sebastian del Cano, limped home with eighteen men.
ca1523-1569
Pieter Brueghel was the founder, and the greatest member, of a dynasty of Flemish painters. Pieter the Elder did an incomparable series of large canvasses, some with imposing landscapes, about the life of the peasantry in his land. His attitude towards his subjects is between fondness and satire. One of his sons, Jan Brueghel (1568-1625), had such a mastery of texture that he is known as Velvet Brueghel.
1523-1656
Height of Swedish expansion
1525-1701
Prussia to elevation to kingdom
1526
Battle of Mohacs and destruction of independent Hungary by Ottomans
1526-1707
Mughal Empire to Aurangzeb
1535-1803
French Colonial Empire to the sale of Louisiana to the US
1537-1568
The Flemish Gerardus Mercator was the founder of modern cartography.
1542
Andréas Vesalius, in De fabrica corporis humani, launches modern anatomical studies.
1545-1563
Council of Trent: Counter-Reformation
1547-1616
Miguel de Cervantes is the acknowledged master of Spanish literature. He wrote with great versatility in prose and in poetry, but he attained the summit of his art with Don Quijote, which is a veritable representation of the Spanish society of his time done with both levity and bile. The eponymous central character is often described as an idealist, but Quijote was basically what Cervantes said he was: a madman. Cervantes' masterpiece is considered by many to be the prototype of the Western novel.
ca1550-1816
Barbary States
1551-1948
Myanmar: Burmese expansionism, conflict with British India, and independence
1555
Geneva: Calvin is firmly in power.
1556-1830
Flanders: from Spanish to Dutch rule
1559-1871
Sardinia to Italian unification
1560-1815
Genoa to annexation by the kingdom of Sardinia (future Italy)
1564-1616
Shakespeare, the Bard, is the greatest English literary figure. He was a comedian and dramatist as admired in his time as he is in ours. Shakespeare wrote many plays and sonnets. His most famous work is Hamlet, but it is only one summit among many others. Shakespeare dramatized the histories of English rulers as no one has ever done. The authorship of his works has been controversial solely because he lacked an university education.
1569-1795
Decadence and partition of Poland
ca1570
Tulsidas translates the Ramayana from Sanskrit to Hindi.
1571-1610
Caravaggio is considered the founder of the Baroque in painting. He married an earthy realism with extremely innovative composition using a striking chiaroscuro palette. He treated religious subjects in a seemingly irreverent manner although the movement his started, and Baroque in general, is considered an artistic expression of the Counter-Reformation.
1571-1797
Venice to conquest by France
1572-1648
Process of Netherlands independence
1574-1883
Tunisia to French annexation
1577-1580
Francis Drake circumnavigates the globe.
1577-1646
Peter Paul Rubens was perhaps the most productive painter in history. He was a prototypical courtly painter using large canvasses to fuse allegory with nobiliary themes. Classic mythology was a constant theme in his work. His fleshy sensuous figures reveal an extraordinary vitality. He probably had more helpers than any other painter ever, such was the demand for his work among the courts of Europe, where he was well-received and even at one time acted as ambassador of Spain.
1581?-1666
The Dutchman Frans Hals is considered by many as the greatest portraitist of all times. His subjects were the Dutch bourgeoisie but he also painted earthy popular figures with the same masterly broad strokes that characterize his style throughout.
1585-1683
The Tuscan mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Galileo Galilei had to struggle against neo-Aristotelian prejudices in order to diffuse his ideas. He proved the counter-intuitive principle that a body's weight has no effect on its speed in free fall and he came up with a mathematical formulation of a primitive form of the law of gravity. When he was told in 1609 that Dutch opticians had invented the telescope (1600), he built his own and devoted his time to astronomical research. Galileo described the rugged nature of the surface of the moon and he discovered sunspots. He observed the phases of Venus, which confirmed the Copernican idea that the planets revolved around the sun. Galileo insisted that the language of science was mathematics. When he wrote a conversational treatise in which he derided Ptolemaic, Earth-centered astronomy, he fell afoul of the church, but he was not punished, and to close his career he published a summary of his investigations.
1588-1649
England to decapitation of Charles I
1592-1815
Sri Lanka to British occupation
1593-1678
Jacob Jordaens was a Flemish painter with an astounding thematic versatility spanning the utterly vulgar and the extremely refined, but, as in others of his compatriots, he was uninhibitedly exuberant.
1594-1665
Nicolas Poussin is considered the founder of academicism in his realistic and monumental treatment of grand historical and mythological tableaux. However, he was also capable of great warmth and poetry.
1596-1650
Rene Descartes was both scientist and philosopher, but his main contribution to thought was that of the mind-matter duality, which has determined much of philosophical thinking to our times. Newton was influenced by Descartes' speculations on the material and mechanical nature of reality.
1598
The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made very precise observations of planets and stars.
1599-1660
Diego Velasquez is the classic master of Spanish painting. He was an ingenious court painter with a penchant for the representation of ordinary people doing ordinary things.
ca1600-1759
Oirats and Junggar to Chinese overlordship
Junggar or Dzungaria, also known as Mogholistan, is the region north of the Tien Shan Range (northern limit of the Tarim Basin), today in China (Xinjiang) and Kazakhstan. It is limited at the north by the Altai Mountains. When the Oirats or western Mongols, also known as Kalmucks, were driven by the Khalkas or eastern Mongols out of Kobdo (east of Lake Balkash), a branch of the Oirats held out in the Tarbagatai Range (south-east of Balkash). Another branch went south and occupied Lhasa in Tibet, where they founded an independent khanate in 1616.
In 1677, the Oirats of Tarbagatai had established suzerainty over Kashgaria (western Xinjiang). It is this branch of the Oirats which recaptured Kobdo in 1690 from the divided Khalkas. These Mongols proceeded to invade Mongolia to the Kerulen River (eastern Mongolia), but the Oirats were quickly ejected by the Khalkas with the help of the Manchu Qing dynasty, who at that point made Mongolia its vassal (1691).
The territories of the Oirats west of Mongolia became the khanate of Junggar, which in 1717 annexed Lhasa. The Qing, who did not want a reborn and threatening Mongol empire, ejected the Oirats from Lhasa in 1720 and contained them in Junggar itself, although they recognized Junggar sovereignty over Kashgaria. Finally, the persistent Qing dispossessed the western Mongols of Junggar and conquered the entire Tarim basin (1757-1759), thus putting an end to the power of the Oirats.
1602-1845
Dutch Colonial Empire to the agrarian “culture system”
1603-1867
Japan: Tokugawa period to Meiji restoration
1606-1669
Rembrandt is considered by many as the greatest of the Dutch masters. Like other Dutch painters, he worked on commissions for the upper bourgeoisie but he introduced into group portraits such an inventive sense of composition and such a dazzling use of light and shadows that no other equaled him. Despite his success in this genre, Rembrandt's favorite subject was himself, to such a degree that no other painter has left as he did an autobiography in canvass. Rembrandt had also a strong religious inclination, which he expressed in the vast number of engravings that he produced, mostly inspired by the Bible.
1609-1618
Starting from Tycho Brahe's astronomical observations, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler formulated the laws of planetary motion, which became one of the bases of Newton's theory of gravitation. Although Kepler never numbered them, they are usually counted as three: the first one postulates that planets orbit the sun in elliptical trayectories; the second one, that the orbital speed increases as the planet's distance to the sun decreases; and the third, derived from the second, that orbital time also depends on the distance of the planets from the sun.
ca1610-1976
Portuguese Colonial empire to its dissolution
1616
The Italian Pietro della Valle takes the first examples of cuneiform writing to Europe.
1618-1648
Thirty Years War
1619
William Harvey demonstrates the circulation of blood.
1620-1799
Southern India to the conquest of Mysore
1620-1884
Vietnam: French annexation of Tonkin and Annam
1622-1673
Molière was the greatest of the French playwrights of the classic age. His forte was the elegantly crafted comedy in which he was unsparing about the frailties and vanities of humanity, notwithstanding which he was the favorite of Louis XIV, that most egocentric of monarchs, perhaps because Molière vitriol is generally applied to the social-climbing bourgeoisie.
ca1628-1682
Genre painting is usually associated with Dutch masters, by which is meant that they specialized in their chosen themes. Jacob van Ruysdale was the greatest Dutch painter of vast skies and landscapes.
1632-1675
Jan van Vermeer was also a genre painter, the greatest of all. He did interiors that have no equal in the attention to delicate, realistic details. His realism is sometimes mixed with allegory and his representation of people have a contained passion that is all the more moving for being understated. In few painters is the observer so emotionally drawn into the canvass as in Vermeer.
1638
Coke is first made from coal.
1643-1645
A Dalai Lama had the imposing Potala monastery built in Lhasa.
ca1644-1912
China: Qing
1640-1975
Portugal: end of Spanish captivity to liquidation of Portuguese colonial empire
1648-1766
France’s gradual annexation of Lorraine
1648-1798
Switzerland to French control
1648-1815
Holy Roman Empire to its dissolution in the Congress of Vienna
1649-1658
British Commonwealth
1654
Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat formulate the theory of probability.
1656-1815
Sweden to the Congress of Vienna and annexation of Norway
1657-1815
Netherlands to the Congress of Vienna and annexation of Lowlands
1658-1820
Great Britain: Glorious Revolution to George III
1659-1714
France to the War of the Spanish Succession
1662-1878
Papal States to integration with Italy
1664-1687
From 1664, Isaac Newton devoted all his energies to science, initially to the study of light and then to mechanics and planetary motion. In 1665 and 1666, Newton, subscribing to a corpuscular theory of light, broke it down into its spectrum. To eliminate the chromatic aberration, he built the first reflecting telescope. Around 1679-1680, Newton began to think in terms of the attraction and repulsion of bodies. Robert Hooke had a theory on the decrease of the attractive force between objects as distance increased. Also working with Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Newton in 1687 published his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, which contained three laws: that of inertia (why one pitches forwards when brakes are applied abruptly), that the change of motion is a function of the force applied to the moving body, and that every action provokes a reaction (the jet engine principle). The development of the second law in relation to circular motion yielded the law of gravity (from a Latin word for heaviness) by which bodies attract each other in direction proportion to their masses and in inverse proportion to the distance between them. To make these formulations Newton had developed a mathematical method which he called fluxions and was in effect infinitesimal calculus. However, he did not make it public until 1704, by which time the German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz had already made public his own independent use of it. Probably homosexual, Newton was a vindictive and wrathful man. He was knighted in 1705 by Queen Anne, the first scientist to be so honored.
1674-1818
Maratha Kingdoms to British annexation
1675-1684
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz formulated differential and integral calculus. Leibniz was also a prestigious philosopher who concerned himself with the problem of the mind-matter duality. He adumbrated the importance of the subconscious and expressed the historical principle of the "best of all possible worlds", which was derided by Voltaire in Candide (1759).
1676-1725
Russia to Peter the Great
1678
Christian Huygens, in Traité de la lumière, studies the polarization of light.
1684-1721
Antoine Watteau is considered the creator of French Rococo painting. His style abandons the linearity of Poussin. His brush stroke is light and chromatic. Watteau invented the gallant style of settings in which his subjects flirt lightheartedly, as if they lived in a world such as ours but imbued by a touch of magic. He also painted military subjects in the same soft evanescent manner, as if war did not exist.
1685-1750
J.S. Bach explored modern western harmonics, yet he did it in such a way that what emerges is pure musicality rather than the cold formalism one would expect. Bach wrote countless compositions for individual instruments and combinations of instruments. He was the master of the fugue, in which form he used the organ. His masterpieces are innumerable, including hundreds of religious cantatas. But Bach often adapted or orchestrated the works of others when they caught his fancy.
1696-1770
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the master Italian rococo painter, but, and here's where artistic categories tend to dissolve, some of his greatest compositions are monumental fresco allegories. The Rococo in Tiepolo is in the impression of super-abundance that his works impart. Tiepolo invented the technique of painting ceilings with seemingly endless firmaments.
1697
France annexes Alsace.
1669-1748
Habsburg Empire to the War of Austrian Succession
1700
In Florence, Bartolomeo Cristofori invents the piano (also known as pianoforte and fortepiano for the instrument's capability for making the same sound soft or loud).
1701-1714
War of the Spanish Succession
1701-1814
Bourbon Spain to end of War of Independence
1701-1815
Prussia to the Congress of Vienna and acquisition of the Rhineland
1707-1857
Mughal Empire to the end of the Great Indian Rebellion
1713-1815
Sardinia to the Congress of Vienna and annexation of Genoa
1714-1788
C.P.E. Bach, son of J.S. Bach, single handedly invented the sonata-form, which became the structural norm of classical compositions, but, as in the case of his father, his passion for structure did not deter from the intrinsic musicality of his work.
1714
D.G. Fahrenheit invents the mercury thermometer with temperature scale.
1714-1781
France to its participation in the American war of independence
1722-1881
Restoration of Persia to the end of the Ghajar dynastyIran: restora
1724
With his discovery of the "aberration of light", i.e., that a telescope will not keep focused on a star unless it is tilted at a a certain angle, James Bradley demonstrated conclusively that the earth is in orbit around the sun.
1724-1804
Immanuel Kant is often given the accolade of the greatest philosopher since Aristotle. Although there were few limits in Kant's interests and knowledge, his most influential work was in ethics and epistemology. Kant attempted to show that moral behavior is based on reason, not on religious doctrine, but, as he admitted, since reason itself is not constraining the validity of his categorical imperative did not have a copper-bottom guarantee. On knowledge, he believed that the structure of our cognitive faculties are innate and not acquired.
1725-1815
Russia to the Congress of Vienna
1730-1829
Ottoman Empire to the independence of Greece
1732-1809
Franz-Joseph Haydn took the sonata-form and raised to a peak of perfection in 104 symphonies, one of the crowning achievements of Western music. He used the same form in his other instrumental compositions. Haydn also wrote operas and oratorios.
1735-1758
The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus founded modern taxonomy, or the classification of plants and animals. He accepted the division of living beings into the animal and plant kingdoms. The other categories in descending order of specification were (using man as an example): phylum (chordata or backbone), class (mammals), order (primates), family (hominids), genus (homo), species (man). Linnaeus was often wrong, especially on animals, but his categories remained.
1738
D. Bernouilli, in Hydrodymanica, explores the pressure and velocity of fluids.
1740-1748
War of the Austrian Succession
1742-1860
Nepalese integration to recognition by Great Britain
1742-1918
Bohemia: from the loss of Silesia to the formation of Czechoslovakia
1744-1875
Meyer Amschel Rothschild was the founder of the Frankfurt banking dynasty which in 1871 placed the French loan to pay reparations to Germany after the Franco-Prussian war. In 1875, the London branch came up in hours with the four million pounds the British government needed to acquire a controlling interest in the Suez canal.
1745-1772
Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert began together compiling the first encyclopedia. D'Alembert dropped out because of official pressure in 1759 but Diderot completed the task in spite of government hostility. The Encyclopedie was a tremendous success.
1746-1828
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes started as a painter in the Spanish light gallant genre. He became court painter and applied a touch of the satirical by being obstinately realistic. War in Spain transformed him into one of the great engravers of all times employing a realism so crude that it stands as a supreme condemnation of man's inhumanity to man. This bitter perspective also imbues the paintings of his dark period, where the monstrous becomes overwhelming.
1748-1806
Habsburg Empire to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire
1749-1832
J.W. von Goethe was the greatest writer of the so-called Romantic period. Goethe's learning was vast, his curiosity insatiable. In this sense he was, ironically, an inheritor of the Renaissance. His masterpiece, Faust, is a work in verse about an old, study room-bound scholar who thirsts so much for all experience that he makes a pact with the devil. In Werther Goethe portrayed a young man who kills himself from some inner malaise.
ca1750-1878
Autonomous Georgia to Russian annexation
1753
A Royal charter for the British Museum was granted.
1755
The Acadians, French settlers who lived in present day Nova Scotia, were expelled by the British. About 7,000 were transported to various places. The Broussard clan and 600 Acadians are the ancestors of the Cajuns of Louisiana. Many Acadians survived in their homeland, in Quebec, and in New Brunswick.
1756-1771
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart mastered the sonata-form as well as Haydn, although he died young and his production was smaller. But he is undoubtedly the creator of the some of the greatest operas ever composed. His melodic genius is non-pareil.
1756-1763
Seven Years war
1768-1805
Egypt to Muhammad Ali
1772-1802
Vietnam to the union of Tonkin and Annam
1769
James Watt builds the steam engine.
1770-1827
Ludwig van Beethoven began as a classical sonata-form composer, but he soon started breaking free of its constraints to create what some consider the greatest musical opus of all times. Beethoven wrote in all musical genres. His nine symphonies set such a demanding standard of musicianship that for decades in Europe they stood as an achievement that couldn't ever be surpassed, as indeed it hasn't. His quartets develop from exceptional but formally conventional compositions to works in which affects and expressivity overwhelm form, although Beethoven never actually renounced some basic adherence to underlying formal discipline. His last quartet, for example, was cast in the form of a great fugue. Many consider that the seed-bed for Beethoven's experimentation beyond formal canons were his 32 sonatas for pianoforte.
1774-1861
United States of America: from independence to Civil War
1781-1785
Working with telescopes he built himself, the German-English astronomer William Herschel discovers Uranus. He theorized that nebulae or sidereal clouds are composed of stars. Clusters of stars later became known as galaxies.
1783-1864
Gradual Russian subjection of Georgia
1788
In "New theory of the earth", the Scots James Hutton lays the basis of modern geology by stating the principle of uniformitarianism according to which the same forces have shaped the earth over extremely long periods of time. Geological processes are said to be constituted by recurrent cycles of events such as sedimentation, erosion, and upthrusting.
1789-1809
Lamarck, a count whose real name was Jean-Baptiste de Monnet, promoted the concept of the modern museum. In 1801, he published an epochal work on invertebrates. Lamarck subscribed to the theory, known as neptunism, that the earth was shaped by episodes of inundation, but this gave him a sense of the vastness geological time. In other works, he developed an evolutionary theory based on the idea that function makes the organ. But he made the mistake of believing that acquired traits are heritable.
1781-1789
France to the start of the French Revolution
1789-1799
French Revolution to Napoleon
1798-1815
Switzerland: French domination to restoration
1799-1815
Napoleon
1792-1814
French European Empire
1815
End of Napoleonic era and Congress of Vienna
In 1814, Napoleon was packed off to the island of Elba (off the coast of Tuscany) and Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, was crowned. A congress gathered in Vienna to re-structure Europe but the anti-Bonapartist allies now became rivals. In March 1815, Napoleon landed in Cannes. Despite the casualties his wars had caused--the recruitment system had allowed France to uniform millions of soldiers--he was generally acclaimed. Marshal Michel Ney, the hero of the rearguard in the retreat from Russia, hesitated but finally joined Napoleon. This change of sides was crucial and the French military (125,000) rallied to his cause. Ney was later tried and executed. Napoleon chased Louis from the throne. Another large French army was organized. The previous coalition had disbanded and only British and Prussian troops were in the field to face Napoleon. Wellington took command of the allied forces, British (93,000) and German (120,000), in the Lowlands. In June, Napoleon beat back Gebhard L. von Blücher's Prussians and thought he was done with them, but he also sent 30,000 men in pursuit, which left him about even with Wellington. The two greatest military opponents of the 19th century met at Waterloo, near Brussels (13 June 1815). The battle was touch-and-go but Blücher, eluding the force Napoleon sent to pursue him, reappeared and the French were crushed. This time Napoleon was exiled to St Helena, a British speck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where he died at the age of fifty-two.
Results of the Congress of Vienna
The virtually extinct Holy Roman Empire was reconstituted territorially as the German Confederation. The Habsburg Empire lost minor possessions in western Germany, but gained Lombardy and Venetia. Warsaw was awarded to Russia. Prussia retained much of western Poland and the Habsburg Empire Galicia minus Lublin which went to Russia. Krakow was made an independent state which was annexed by the Habsburg Empire in 1848. Naples and Sicily restored to the Bourbons. Norway was ceded to Sweden in retribution for Denmark's French leanings. Both Iceland and Greenland remained under the Danish crown. Genoa ceded to the kingdom of Sardinia. Luxembourg and the territory of Belgium (a country still unborn) were attached to the crown of Netherlands. Luxembourg also had membership in the German Confederation. The independence and neutrality of Switzerland were recognized. The Holy Alliance was an agreement between Prussia, Russia and Austria (later joined by France) to put down any threat to the European monarchical order.
1793
Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin.
1793-1803
A meticulous observer of weather phenomena, John Dalton is considered the founder of meteorology. He subscribed to the view that the atmosphere is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. In considering the atomic theory of matter, he concluded that atoms are not uniform, as previously believed, and that they vary in size and mass. He thus introduced the concept of atomic weights. Dalton was color-blind, hence Daltonism.
1794
The Paris-Lille telegraph line is laid.
1796
The British physician Edward Jenner applies vaccination systematically.
William Jones, chief justice of British India, launches the scientific study of languages by indicating the similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and Persian. This led to the widely accepted theory that there existed a mother tongue designated proto-Indo-European, located ca6500 BCE in a possible homeland north of the Caucasus.
1797-1802
The German geologist Leopold Buch demonstrated the importance of volcanoes in the formation of the earth's crust, thus laying to rest the erroneous notion that all rocks originated in sedimentary accumulations in the seas (neptunism).
1798-1863
Eugene Delacroix was the first master, and possibly the greatest, of French Romanticism in painting. Delacroix was a master colorist and draughtsman. Like academic painters, some of his best known canvasses are large and deal with historical subjects, but they do with such a a genuine passion and pathos that, in expressing his temperament, they are like an incitement to action. He had no compunctions about letting his liberal politics burst out of his works.
1799-1837
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, grandson of a black slave, is considered the master of Russian literature, practically its creator. He wrote many works, in verse and prose, on a diversity of subjects, generally of a romantic nature. He was killed in a duel defending the honor of his flirtatious wife. |