1832
Great Reform Act
After three years of riots, near-revolution, and the threatened packing of the Lords, Parliament passed an act that abolished the worst rotten boroughs and extended the vote to a larger slice of the middle class. The electorate still numbered only one in seven men. But the British constitution had just proved it could bend.
Sa'id ibn Sultan Moves Court to Zanzibar
The Sultan of Oman relocated his capital from dusty Muscat to lush Zanzibar, recognizing that the island's clove plantations and ivory trade were now more valuable than Arabian commerce. Zanzibar became the hub of East African trade - and the center of the Indian Ocean slave trade that would haunt the century.
Cholera Reaches Europe and America
The second pandemic crossed from Asia and swept through Paris, London, and New York. Paris lost nearly twenty thousand in six months; Hegel died of it, or near it. In New York, sixty percent of the wealthy left the city. Cholera made clear what respectable cities had pretended not to notice: their water was killing them.
Goethe Dies
In Weimar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at eighty-two. His last words, it is said, were "More light." Poet, playwright, botanist, optician, civil servant, and friend to Napoleon, he had been for sixty years the incarnation of German letters. His death closed the long eighteenth century of the German mind.