19th century

From Metapedia

During the 19th century, the Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Ottoman empires began to crumble and the Holy Roman and Mughal empires ceased.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire became the world's leading power, controlling one quarter of the world's population and one third of the land area. It enforced a Pax Britannica, encouraged trade, and battled rampant piracy. During this time the 19th century was an era of widespread invention and discovery, with significant developments in the understanding or manipulation of physics, chemistry, biology, electricity and metallurgy, largely laying the groundwork for the comparably overwhelming and very rapid technological innovations which would take place the following century. The last remaining undiscovered landmasses of Earth, largely Pacific island chains and atolls, were finally found during this century and, with the exception of the extreme zones of the Arctic and Antarctic, accurate and detailed maps of the globe were available by the 1890s.

Slavery was greatly reduced around the world. Britain forced the Barbary pirates to halt their practice of kidnapping and enslaving Europeans, banned slavery throughout its domain, and charged its navy with ending the global slave trade. Britain abolished slavery in 1834, the United States of America's Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War would end slavery in 1863, and in Brazil slavery ended in 1888 (see Abolitionism). Similarly, serfdom was abolished in Russia.