1798
Napoleon Sails for Egypt
Thirty-eight thousand troops and a crowd of savants - mathematicians, botanists, archaeologists - sailed from Toulon on 400 ships. The Directory was happy to have Napoleon occupied far from Paris. He took Malta on the way, beat the Mamluks at the Pyramids, and opened Egypt to modern Europe. Nelson destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, stranding the army, but the scholarly Description de l'Egypte would reshape Western knowledge of the ancient world.
Malthus on Population
A young English country clergyman published anonymously An Essay on the Principle of Population - arguing that population grew geometrically while food grew only arithmetically, and that famine and misery were therefore mathematical necessities. Economists would call their field 'the dismal science' ever after. Thomas Malthus had few children; he lived to be sixty-eight.
Alien and Sedition Acts
The Federalist Congress, alarmed by French sympathies in the press, made it a crime to criticize the government and empowered the president to deport foreigners. Jefferson and Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in protest. A young American republic discovered its first great civil liberties crisis. The acts expired or were repealed after Jefferson's election, but the debate over wartime restrictions on speech never ended.
Nelson Destroys French Fleet at the Nile
Horatio Nelson found the French fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay at sundown and attacked at once, slipping half his ships between the French and the shore. By dawn thirteen French ships had been taken or destroyed, including the flagship Orient - blown up with such violence that battle stopped for ten minutes.
Lyrical Ballads - Romanticism Arrives in English
Wordsworth and Coleridge, walking the Quantock Hills, published a small anonymous book of poems. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' led it; 'Tintern Abbey' closed it. The preface (added later) argued that poetry should use the language of common men. English Romanticism had a manifesto it had not meant to write.
Irish Rebellion
The Society of United Irishmen - Protestant and Catholic together, inspired by France - rose in Wexford, Ulster, and Mayo. A small French landing came too late. The rebellion was crushed with terrible cruelty on both sides; 30,000 died. Two years later Pitt would dissolve the Irish parliament and bring Ireland into the United Kingdom.
First Saudi State Expands Under Wahhabi Alliance
Muhammad ibn Saud's sons and their religious allies, followers of the reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, raided deep into Ottoman Iraq. They would sack Karbala in 1802, destroying the Shia shrine of Imam Hussein. The Ottoman governors of Baghdad were appalled; the Arabian interior was becoming a new religious and political force.