1834
Emancipation in the British Empire
Eight hundred thousand enslaved people across the British Caribbean were formally freed - though forced into a cruel 'apprenticeship' that looked suspiciously like bondage under another name. Full freedom came four years later. The slaveholders received twenty million pounds in compensation. The formerly enslaved received nothing but their own exhausted bodies.
Zollverein Begins
Eighteen German states abolished tariffs between themselves and agreed on a common external tariff. Prussia, tactfully, had organized the whole thing. It was a customs union before it was a nation - and thirty years before Bismarck, the economic shape of a unified Germany had quietly been poured. Austria's exclusion from the Zollverein ensured that any future German unification would follow Prussian, not Habsburg, lines.
Poor Law Amendment
The Whig parliament overhauled English poor relief, abolishing outdoor assistance and funneling the destitute into workhouses designed to be worse than the worst-paid independent work. Conditions were calculated to deter. Dickens would set Oliver Twist in one within three years. The Victorian poor had a new, stony architecture to endure.
Tolpuddle Martyrs
Six Dorset farm laborers who had sworn a mutual oath to form a union were convicted of administering an illegal oath and sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia. Public outrage built; eight hundred thousand signed a petition. Within three years they had been pardoned, and the British labor movement had its first saints.