Timeline of Events and Ideas

Events

1453-1530: The rise to world predominance of the Ottoman Empire, by the end of which it is the envy of all the world's rulers. In 1453, the Ottomans capture Constantinople and dissolved the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. They thereby finally dissolve the Roman Empire, which had lasted for some 1500 years. By the 1520s, the Ottomans have conquered the Arab world and much of North Africa, proclaiming the Ottoman Sultan the Caliph (spiritual and political leader) of all Islam. They have also conquered much of the Balkans. The Empire is more religiously tolerant than the Christian states, mostly abjuring the religious persecution which was so common during the European Wars of Religion. It creates separate courts with jursidictions over the people of the leading religions in the the empire: Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Roman Catholics. The Empire adopts Persian as the language of the court, the arts, and the ruling classes; in the 16th century, it experiences a great flowering of the arts, crafts, and philosophy.

1478: Creation by the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon of the Spanish Inquisition, aimed at defending and policing Catholic orthodoxy and monitoring recent converts from Judaism or Islam. It was controlled by the state, and existed until 1834.

1480-1: The rising Ottoman Empire unsuccessfully invades southern Italy, and then retreats. Catholic Europe takes note of this sign of the Ottomans' political and military power.

1492: Spain reconquers Granada, and orders Jews to leave the Iberian Peninsula or convert to Christianity. Most leave, while the converts come to be called "[Jewish] conversos." Confessing Jews will not be permitted to settle in Spain for almost 400 years. The more liberal-minded and tolerant Ottoman Empire learns of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, and invites them to settle in its territories in the Eastern Mediterranean and Arab world, sending ships of the Ottoman Navy to convey the Sephardim to their new homes. Some Sephardim communities travel as far as southern India before settling.

1492-8: Columbus arrives in the Americas, enslaves some Caribbean people and ships them back to Spain, and eventually realizes that South America is a separate continent from Asia. Spaniards begin to colonize the Americas.

1496: The Kingdom of Poland passes the Piotrkow Statutes, forbidding peasants from leaving estates without the permission of the lord. This establishment of serfdom in what had previously been largely serfless societies is followed in Bohemia (ca. 1500), Hungary (1514), Prussia (1526), and Russia (1602), leading to the rise of the second serfdom in Eastern Europe. These systems of serfdom will last until the middle of the 1800s.

1497: Portugal, pressured by the Spanish monarchs, orders all Jews and Muslims resident in its territory to convert to Christianity or leave. End of religious toleration in Spain and Portugal until the 1750s.

ca. 1500: In the Americas, the Inca Empire in the Andes and the Aztec Empire in Mexico are at the height of their power and glory, with networks of cities that astounded the first Spanish visitors with their size and orderliness.

ca. 1500: Europeans begin to adopt the tenets of racism. They also begin the Atlantic slave trade, taking abducted Africans to be sold as slaves in the Americas.

ca. 1500-ca. 1700: The early modern witchcraft craze. Throughout Europe and its colonies, a maniacal fear of witches gripped the populace, resulting in many mass trials of alleged witches.

1501: Founding of the Safavid Empire in Persia, a great state based on Shia Islam. The Safavids would convert most Persians from Sunni Islam to Shi'ism, and make Persia the world's least Shia state. (To this day, most Iranians, Iraqis, and Azerbaijanis are Shias.) The Safavids would rule Persia until 1736.

1501-2: Castile orders all Muslim residents to convert to Christianity or leave. Many leave for North Africa or the Ottoman Empire. Those who convert become the Moriscos.

1516: The Ottoman Empire conquers Palestine from the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. Palestine will be under nominal Ottoman control until the British conquer it in 1917.

1517: Martin Luther nails 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. TheReformation begins, and soon after it, the European Wars of Religion, which will last until 1648. The Ottoman Empire conquers Mamluk Egypt. The Ottomans will rule Egypt until the British Empire occupies the country in 1882.

1519-21: The Conquest of Mexico. The Conquest of the Americas is in full flower, and with it the epoch of European overseas empires. Millions of indigenous South and North Americans die of European-borne diseases.

1520-1683: The period of greatness of the Ottoman Empire. From 1520 to 1566, it declared the Sultan the Caliph of Islam and acquired dominance over present-day Iraq, Hungary, and coastal Libya. It then turned its attention north and westward to Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine, beginning the long struggle between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian states of Central Europe and the Mediterranean: the Ottomans defeated the Christians time and again, and acquired more of their territory. By 1683, it ruled or exacted tribute from the gates of Vienna to the Horn of Africa, and from Algiers to the Persian Gulf. It sent navies into the Indian Ocean to curtail the growing influence of the Portuguese in those waters, and made alliances with the Mughal Empire against the Ottomans' eastern enemy, the Persian Empire of the Safavids.

1524-1629: Persia's Safavid Empire reaches the peak of its power and glory, under Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524-1576) and especially Shah Abbas I (r. 1588-1629). Under Tahmasp, the Safavids consolidate their rule of the eastern Caucasus; under Abbas, their rule comes to encompass most of present-day Greater Iran: from eastern Anatolia to Kandahar, and from the Caucasus to near Karachi. Tahmasp's government sees the emergence of global markets for luxury artifacts; with this in mind, it supports the Persian rug industry and other crafts, with an eye to selling their products to global consumers. The government invests heavily in supporting Persian rug weaving, founding its first great center at Tabriz. It is at this time that Persian rugs become highly desired by global consumers, as they have been ever since. Tahmasp also aids the fledgling Mughal Empire in consolidating its hold on northern India. So great is the prestige and achievement of Safavid Persia under Tahmasp and Abbas that the Mughal Empire imports and adopts Persian culture and language for its ruling classes. Many of the administrators, thinkers, and artists of Mughal India are invitees from Persia. In turn, Abbas's regime, from its new capital at Isfahan, cultivates the arts and crafts, with an eye to sales on the global market, and to seizing from the Ottomans the title of the leader of Islamic culture. Melding influences from China, Turkey, Arabia, and Europe, Persian artisans create buildings, textiles, pottery, and metalwork of the highest quality. To sell these goods, the Empire fosters economic and cultural exchange with Europe and the world. Isfahan becomes the display case for these achievements, and quickly acquires world fame, luring many of the best Muslim philosophers and artists to live within its walls. To crown these achievements, the Safavids towards the end of Abbas's reign defeat the mighty Ottomans and the Portuguese Empire in several battles, consolidating their hold on the Caucasus, and for a time wresting Baghdad from the Ottomans and Hormuz and Bahrain from the Portuguese.

1526: Spain requires all Muslims resident in its lands to convert to Christianity or leave.

1540: Founding by Ignatius Loyola of the Society of Jesus--the Jesuits--in order to defend and propagate the Catholic faith by "ministration of the Word of God." They would go on to fame for their efforts and sacrifices in missionary work, education, and scholarship. The Jesuits were one of the chief agents of the rebirth of scholastic philosophy, and three of the great thinkers of the 16th- and 17th-century's second scholasticism--Luis de Molina, Cardinal Bellarmine, and the greatest philosopher of the second scholasticism, Francisco Suarez--were members of the order. The Jesuits initially welcome Conversos and Moriscos as members. They early become advocates within Catholicism of the theory of government by consent of the community, a doctrine first developed by Calvinist Protestants.

1542-1653: The creation, conquest, and colonial settlement of the Kingdom of Ireland. Tudor England declares Ireland a client Kingdom, and embarks on conquering the whole island. The Tudors, Stuarts, and Cromwells send English settlers to colonize the whole island an stamp out Gaelic culture, and brutally crush rebellions.

1545: The Catholic Church convenes the Council of Trent, in order to plan a response to the growing popularity of Protestantism. The principles and program it lays down are the founding ideas of the Counter-Reformation.

cf. 1550: France begins admitting Jews as residents, ending its expulsion of all Jews, decreed in 1394.

1555: Pope Paul IV decrees that all Jews living in the Papal States of central Italy must lock themselves in walled ghettoes at night.

1556-1707: The period of greatness of the Mughal Empire. During this period, the Mughals come to rule almost all of the Indian subcontinent, and perhaps a quarter of the world's population. They create a polity that is the marvel of European visitors. From the famous Peacock Throne, the cosmopolitan Emperors Akbar, Jahangir, and Jahan from 1556 to 1658 create a multicultural political regime that is for most practical purposes non-confessional and secularist. Their commitment to religious pluralism goes so far that Akbar and Jahangir allow public debates between Islamic mullahs and Jesuit missionaries on the merits and demerits of their creeds. Their successor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) extends the Empire throughout all of the subcontinent, but curtails official pluralism. Basing itself on a Persian cultural foundation, the Empire fosters trade, learning, and the arts, as well as cultural and economic exchange between East Asia, southwest Asia, north Africa, and Europe.

1562-1598: The French Wars of Religion. French Protestants (Huguenots) and Catholics engage in civil war, struggling to defend and suppress the new Protestant faith.

1568: The Dutch revolt against the Spanish empire, beginning their Eighty Years' War with Spain.

1572: The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France. The most anti-Protestant Catholics in France rise up in a series of massacres of French Protestants, outraging Protestants across Europe. Many prominent French Protestants, including the philosopher Petrus Ramus, are slain.

1574: England emancipates the last of its serfs. Serfdom continues in Scotland until 1799.

1581: The Dutch Republic declared. It would last until conquered and extinguished by Revolutionary France in 1795.

1593: The Jesuits ban all persons of Jewish or Muslim descent from joining their order, some years later restricting the ban to people with a Jewish or Muslim ancestor within five generations. The ban holds until 1946.

1598: The new King of France, the ex-Protestant Henry IV, publishes the Edict of Nantes, ending government persecution of Protestants and guaranteeing them certain rights and toleration.

1600: Founding of the British East India Company, as a joint-stock company aimed at trade with India. Often considered the most powerful business corporation in world history, it would eventually conquer and rule much of South Asia before its final dissolution in 1874.

1602: Founding of the Dutch East India Company, which in turn founds in the same year the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the oldest such exchange in the world. The Company traded its stock on the Exchange. The Company would go on to conquer and rule much of present-day Indonesia before finally being dissolved by the Dutch government in 1800.

1607: Founding of the first permanent British settlement in the Americas at Jamestown, Virginia.

1609-1614: Spain forces the Moriscos (descendants of those Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism) to leave Spain. All property they could not carry out with them was expropriated by the state. European racism is increasing.

1609-1924: In 1609, British settlers in Jamestown begin to raid Powhatan communities, demanding food. Thus began the (U.S.) American Indian Wars, which would continue until the last defeat of the Apache in 1924.

1618: The Thirty Years' War begins, a religious war between Catholic and Prostestant states in Germany.

1619: The Dutch East India Company conquers present-day Jakarta, and begins to consolidate Dutch rule over Indonesia, which will last until 1950.

1633: Japan closes itself off to trade with the outside world anywhere except at the port of Nagasaki. Foreigners are not allowed to enter anywhere else in Japan and Japanese forbidden to leave. This policy of Sakoku remains in force until 1854, when the United States forces Japan to abolish it.

1638: Presbyterian Scots by the thousands sign a National Covenant to maintain presbyterian religion and church government.

1639: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (England, Scotland, and Ireland), including the English Civil Wars, begin in Scotland.

1644: Founding of the Qing or Manchu dynasty in China, which will rule China until 1912.

1647: England's New Model Army holds the Putney Debates over what a kind of constitution a post-revolutionary England should have. Levellers within the Army argue for a widespread franchise and equality before the law, while elitist officers argue that those possessing great property should have superior political status.

1648: Peace of Westphalia. Eighty Years' War and Thirty Years' War concluded. Modern system of independent sovereign states established.

1649: Charles I of England beheaded by order of Parliament. The English monarchy dissolved, and the English Commonwealth created. The Levellers John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, and Richard Overton, prisoners of England's new Parliamentary government, issue "An Agreement of the Free People of England, Tendered as a Peace Offering to this Distressed Nation," arguing for equality before the law, freedom of religion, near-universal male suffrage, annual parliaments, no consecutive terms for representatives, no state-sanctioned monopolies, no military conscription, and that the people were the ultimate sovereign in the political order. They hoped many persons would sign the Agreement in a kind of referendum. The document is often seen as a forerunner of the U. S. Constitution.

1651: England passes the Navigation Acts, a series of restrictions on international trade, which banned the import of goods from outside Europe on non-English ships, and required goods imported from Europe to be carried on either English ships or ships from the exporting country. The Acts would remain in effect until 1849.

1657: England allows Jews to immigrate, 350 years after expelling them. Growth of the English culture of religious toleration.

1660: Restoration of the English monarchy. End of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

1670: The Emperor in Austria orders all Jews expelled from Vienna.

1673: France begins establishing colonies in India: it will maintain colonies there until 1962.

1683: The Ottoman Empire reaches the peak of its territorial dominance, ruling or exacting tribute from the gates of Vienna to the Horn of Africa, from Algiers to the Persian Gulf. The Ottoman army besieges Vienna, and is finally repulsed. It is at about this time that the Ottomans repudiate Persian as the language of the court, the arts, and the ruling classes, adopting Turkish for such matters; some scholars today see this as the result of proto-nationalism, under Western influence.

1685: The Catholic James II comes to the throne of England, and a struggle between him and Parliament quickly begins. Parliament, which is anti-Catholic and anti-Nonconformists, sees James's attempts to institute toleration for those groups as illegitimate power grabs, evincing a design at establishing absolute monarchy and Catholicism in England, following the model of Louis XIV in France. James did indeed increase the power of the Crown and state, and built a large standing army. He in turn saw Parliament as bigoted and backward in opposing the move to a strong centralized state. Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes, ending religious toleration of non-Catholics living in France.

1688: The Glorious Revolution in England. James II is deposed, and, fleeing the country, allegedly drops the Great Seal into the Thames, so as to end the continuity of legitimate government. The Protestants William and Mary begin to rule as King and Queen. Parliament's official intolerance of Catholics in Great Britain will continue for more than a century.

1689: The English Parliament passes the Bill of Rights, which declares that there shall be no absolute monarchy, no standing army without Parliamentary consent, no taxation without Parliament's consent, freedom of speech, and freedom to petition the Crown.

1692: The Salem witch trials in Massachusetts result in the judicial murder of dozens of innocents accused of witchcraft. This injustice, quickly condemned throughout the colony, would eventually topple the theocracy in Puritan Massachusetts, which had overseen the trials.

1697-1698: Czar Peter the Great of Russia visits Western Europe intent on learning its science, engineering, and social organization. He brings back many ideas to Russia and begins the Europeanization of Russia, including adopting the Julian calendar, in preparation for war with the Ottoman Empire for control of the Black Sea.

18th century: The Atlantic slave trade is at its peak. Decline of the gunpowder empires--the Ottomans, the Safavids of Persia, and the Mughal Empire. By mid-century, it is clear that these racially inclusive empires have been surpassed in economic, political, cultural, and military power by the great European states. It is by then clear that only one non-European polity is still the European's equal in those dimensions--Qing China.

1703: Russia under Peter seizes a small town on the Baltic from the Swedes and founds the city of Saint Petersburg, intending it to be the new capital of Russia, built as a Western city. Beginning of the century-long rise of Russia. At the beginning of the century, it is no match for such polities as Mughal India, Qing China, or the Ottoman Empire. 100 years after the founding of Petersburg, it is unquestionably more powerful. Throughout the century, it gobbles up pieces of the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires.

1720-1750: Decline of the Mughal Empire. The Mughals, who in 1707 ruled Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent, begin to lose significant territory to the Maratha Empire, a Hindu regime coming from the south of India. At the same time, European merchants in India's ports begin exerting more pressure on the Mughals to do what they wish. The Mughals find it increasingly difficult to resist. Things become so bad that the Persians under their new Afsharid dynasty invade the Empire and in 1739 sack and loot its capital of Delhi: among the booty they take back to Persia is the famous Peacock Throne.

1735: The British Parliament passes the Witchcraft Act, making it a criminal offense to accuse anyone of having magical powers or performing witchcraft. End of the witch hunts in Britain.

1750-1814: The suppression of the Jesuits. After two centuries of growing power and official favor, the crowns of the Spanish Empire, French Empire, Portuguese Empire, and Naples turn against the Jesuits, thinking that they interfere with royal power and in the crowns' increasing desire to model their societies on Enlightenment notions. Their governments ban the Jesuits, arrest them, forbid them to teach, and confiscate their many properties in the colonies and the metropole.

1754-1814: The so-called "Sixty Years' War" in the North American Great Lakes region occurs, with fighting among indigenous tribes, Britain, France, and the United States. It ultimately ends with the European conquest and settlement of the territory, with many indigenous people being forcibly removed to lands further west.

1755: Great Lisbon earthquake. Thousands of lives are lost, which spurs many thinkers to consider the problem of evil.

1757: The British East India Company conquers Bengal and begins to acquire more of the territory that will become its Empire in India. It starts to rule Bengal, thus beginning its 100 years of rule in India, the "Company Raj." In China, the Empire creates the Canton system, requiring all non-Russian European merchant ships to trade only in the port of Canton. This policy was in response to the growing influence of European merchants and European interests in Chinese politics and the Chinese economy. Beginning of the relative decline of China compared to Europe, and therefore of European global hegemony. It would soon become clear that no polity in the world could equal the economic, political, military, and cultural power of any of the great European states.

1772: British courts determine chattel slavery to be unenforceable within England and Wales (but not in the British colonies).

1773: Under heavy pressure from the Crowns of France, Spain, Portugal, and Naples, Pope Clement XIV officially suppresses the Jesuits.

1775: British Parliament abolishes the Scottish system of indentured servitude of colliers and salters.

1777: The Constitution of the Vermont Republic abolishes chattel slavery, making it the first constitution to do so.

1778: France bans inter-racial marriage within metropolitan France.

1780-1800: Birth of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

1789: (First) French Revolution begins. End of the Age of Enlightenment. Age of Revolution and Romanticism begins.

January 1789: With popular unrest in France, the Crown summons representatives of the three estates: the aristocracy, the priesthood, and the common peoples, to assemble in the Estates General, for the first time since 1614.

17 June 1789: Led by the Abbe Sieyes, the representatives of the Third Estate declare themselves the National Assembly of France, representing the whole nation or people. They invite the other two Estates to join the new Assembly. The new National Assembly claims to be the supreme authority of France, given that it represents the sovereign people. The Revolution begins.

26 August 1789: French National Constituent Assembly adopts the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It declares that "men" are born and remain free and equal in rights; that social distinctions may only be founded on the general good; that the aim of political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; that these rights are to life, liberty, property, and resistance to oppression; that the source of sovereignty resides principally in the Nation, and that no body nor individual can exercise any political authority that does not expressly spring from it; that liberty consists in the freedom to do anything that does not injure anyone else; that all persons have the civil rights of speech, assembly, religion, and opinion; that all citizens are equal before the law; and that public offices should be awarded based only on talent. It remains notably silent about chattel slavery and the status of women.

ca. 1789-1794: The Inquisition bans the dissemination of the French Declaration in any Spanish colony.

1790: The United States passes the Naturalization Act, which limits naturalization as a citizen to "free white persons of good moral character."

1791: Haitian Revolution begins. The only slave revolt to found a sovereign state. The French National Assembly approves, and the King accepts, the Constitution of 1791. It creates a liberal constitutional monarchy, with separation of powers, an elected Legislative Assembly, and an independent judiciary. France is divided into its departments, the old provinces and feudal divisions being abolished, and the boundaries of the departments designed to cut across those old units so as to build a more united nation. The French National Assembly passes the Le Chapelier Law, which outlaws guilds, trade unions, and workers' strikes. It declares the French Republic committed to the principles of free individual enterprise. Strikes remain a crime in France until 1864.

September 1792: The French Legislative Assembly organizes elections for a new National Convention, with universal male suffrage. The Convention is to have legislative, executive, and constitutional-drafting powers.

20 September 1792: France permits divorce and inter-racial marriage.

21 September 1792: In its first act, the Convention establishes the French Republic and dissolves the monarchy.

24 June 1793: The French Constitution of 1793 is ratified by universal male suffrage, but not implemented by the Convention, due to the state of war. Its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen declares equality the fundamental right, along with liberty, security, and property. It grants the same particular rights as the 1789 Declaration, but also grants rights to commerce, public assistance, education, work, and rebellion against oppressive government. It abolishes chattel slavery, but does not mention women.

July 1793: The Committee of Public Safety begins to assume dictatorial powers in France, beginning the Reign of Terror.

1793-4: Antonio Narinio, a public official in present-day Colombia, disseminates the first translated copies of the 1789 French Declaration all over Spanish America.

4 February 1794: The French National Convention legally abolishes slavery in all French colonies.

July 1794: Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety ousted in a coup. End of the Terror. The Directory takes power in France.

1795: Poland partitioned by the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Prussia. It would not be a sovereign state again until 1918. The Directory promulgates a new constitution for France, the Constitution of the Year III, preceded by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1795. This Constitution resembles that of 1791, taking an elitist liberal form, with a liberal set of rights and duties, a bicameral legislature, a suffrage based on payment of taxes and maleness, and the five person Directory holding emergency powers to suspend constitutional rights in the name of public safety. Revolutionary France conquers the Dutch Republic; Dutch liberal-republicans dissolve the Republic and create the Batavian Republic, a more genuinely representative and popular republic, but which is a client state of the French Republic.

1796: Gracchus Babeuf leads the Conspiracy of the Equals, a revolutionary plot aiming to violently overthrow the Directory and establish the communist government outlined in the Conspiracy's Manifesto of the Equals. The plot is discovered, the leaders arrested, and Babeuf executed in 1797. Its legend grows through the 19th century.

1797: Revolutionary France and the Austrian Empire, which had been fighting in northern Italy, sign a treaty in which they agree to carve up the oligarchic Venetian Republic. The Republic is dissolved, after 1000 years of existence that inspired republicans throughout Europe. Italian republicans, who had been hoping that France would encourage democratic reforms but keep the Venetian Republic a sovereign state, feel betrayed.

1799: Napoleon Bonaparte launches a coup d'etat against the Directory on the 18th Brumaire (9 November) and becomes after a popular referendum (not a competitive election) First Consul of the French Republic in 1800. He begins consolidating a dictatorship by referendum. End of the First French Revolution.

ca. 1800: Mexico and other soon-to-be-independent countries of Spanish America are close to parity with Western Europe and the United States in terms of economic productivity and technological endowments. But at this point begins a great divergence. Within 100 years, the United States and Northwest Europe will be far ahead, economically, of all of Spanish America except Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, giving rise to the puzzle of Latin American underdevelopment.

1800: The Dutch government dissolves the Dutch East India Company and begins direct rule of the Dutch East Indies.

20 May 1802: Bonaparte passes a law restoring chattel slavery in some French colonies. The Haitian revolutionaries then fight for independence from France.

1803: The Napoleonic Wars begin.

1804: Haitian Republic declared. The first independent nation of Latin America. Abolishes chattel slavery and indeed bans all slavery and servitude. Under pressure from Southern slaveowners, the U. S. government refuses to recognize the Haitian government until 1867.

1805-1848: Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian in the Ottoman army, takes control of Egypt and sets about liberating it from Ottoman rule. In the process, he leads Egypt into economic industrialization and political reform, creating a European-style state with a mechanized military, a complex bureaucracy, and a monopsonist economy with the state as the sole original buyer.

1806: Napoleonic France conquers most of Germany, and dissolves the Holy Roman Empire.

1807-1819: Prussia embarks on a series of liberal reforms, abolishing serfdom, abolishing guild monopolies, emancipating Jewish residents, reforming landholding, allowing peasants to own land, and abolishing internal customs duties.

1808: Napoleon invades French ally Spain and installs his brother as King. The new government institutes liberal reforms, the abolition of the Spanish Inquisition, the abolition of feudalism, the abolition of internal customs, and the implementation of the Code Napoleon. Regional juntas immediately spring up rejecting the new government and declaring loyalty to the deposed King Ferdinand. War begins.

1810-1821: The instability in the government of Spain causes Spanish Americans to question the legitimacy of the Crown-appointed rulers of their colonies. Insurgents begin to declare independence from Spain, and the Spanish American Wars of Independence commence.

1812: The liberal-dominated rebel parliament of Spain (the Cortes of Cadiz) establishes a new constitution for the Spanish Empire, locating sovereignty in the nation, making Roman Catholicism the state religion, granting citizenship to all male persons descended solely from persons living in the Spanish Empire and themselves living in the Empire for 10 years (i.e., excluding African-descended men from citizenship),

abolishing the Inquisition, setting up a constitutional monarchy with regular parliaments, and guaranteeing a free press and free enterprise.

1814: The French evicted from Spain. The restored Spanish King Ferdinand immediately repudiates the liberal constitution of 1812, restoring absolute monarchy. Pope Pius VII restores the Jesuits.

1815: Napoleon finally defeated. The Congress of Vienna establishes the German Confederation as an alliance-cum-confederation of the former states of the Holy Roman Empire. Parts of Prussia and the Austrian Empire are included, as are 37 other sovereign states. The Rhineland, which had been occupied by France for some 20 years and was the home of most German Jews, is ceded to Germany. The Congress also acts to institutionalize the hegemony of the few great imperial powers over all of Europe.

1815-1820: The government of France follows the policies of the Doctrinaires, a group of moderate liberal constitutional monarchists who support the principles of 1789, but not those of 1792. The

Doctrinaires are led by the philosopher Pierre Royer-Collard.

1818-1866: The members of the German Confederation begin to lower internal trade duties and establish customs unions among themselves, in order to protect their infant industries from highly developed British and French competitors. Austria refuses to join this emerging Zollverein (Customs Union).

1819-1830: The European decade of reaction. Prussia, Spain, the Austrian Empire, France, and Britain all halt liberal reforms, institute reactionary policies, and brutally crush organized dissent. Prussia, for example, strips the Rhineland Jews of the equal civil rights and equality before the law they had been granted by the French occupiers. This abrogation of a right breeds great resentment, and the Rhineland becomes a hotbed of revolutionary ideas.

1820-1830: The French Doctrinaires lead the parliamentary opposition to France's governing ultra-royalists, who oppose the principles of 1789 and seek to bring back the ancien regime.

1820-1834: The Liberal Revolution and Civil Wars in Portugal. Portuguese liberals attempt to re-found Portugal on the principles of liberal constitutional monarchy and a market society. They are opposed by defenders of absolute monarchy and a pre-market economy. The liberal monarchists win, transforming Portugal into a liberal constitutional monarchy and market economy, which will last from 1834 to 1910.

1820: A liberal uprising in Spain forces the Crown to accept the liberal 1812 constitution. Beginning of Spain's Liberal Triennium.

1821: Mexico attains its independence from Spain, abolishes the Inquisition, and declares its intention to abolish slavery.

1823: The European powers, alarmed by the threat posed to the balance of power by an increasingly republican Spain, decide to intervene. The ultra-royalist Bourbon French invade, defeat the liberal army at the Battle of Trocadero, topple the liberal government, annul the 1812 constitution, and restore absolute monarchy. The U. S. Supreme Court decides, in Johnson v. M'Intosh, that indigenous tribes cannot sell their land to private non-indigenous persons, but only to the U. S. government. This decision is still valid law in the U. S.

1824: The Mexican Constitution of 1824 abolishes slavery. Many Anglophones in Mexican Texas ignore the provision and keep their slaves.

1828: Founding of the Democratic Party of the United States, the world's oldest political party still in existence.

1829: Vicente Guerrero, a mestizo with visible African ancestry, becomes the 2nd President of Mexico, 180 years before the U. S. would have an in any way non-white President. Great Britain passes the Roman Catholic Relief Act, removing most civil disabilities on Roman Catholics, and giving hope to British Jews for similar emancipation.

1830: The increasingly reactionary Bourbon monarchy of France is overthrown in the July Revolution, France's Second Revolution, which institutes a moderate liberal, constitutional monarchy with free press and jury trials. Louis-Philippe of the House of Orleans, the "Citizen-King," is made "King of the French," not King of France, to symbolize that his authority was derived from the sovereign people, not from God. The Indian Removal Act is signed into law by U. S. President Andrew Jackson: it authorizes the federal executive to force indigenous tribes off their established homelands in the southeastern United States and move them to new reservations west of the Mississippi River. The Belgian Revolution begins, in which liberal-nationalist Belgians seek independence for their Catholic country against the Protestant- and conservative-dominated Kingdom of the Netherlands.

1830-1847: France conquers Algeria, the first act in the so-called "New Imperialism," a scramble for empire which would end ca. 1914 with the European-descended nations ruling most of the planet.

1831: Giuseppe Mazzini founds Young Italy, a secret society aimed at uniting Italy and overthrowing the Austrian Empire and Papacy's control of parts of Italy. Belgium is recognized as an independent country by the European great powers, and Leopold I is elected "King of the Belgians" by a liberal Belgian National Congress.

1831-1842: The U. S. government begins forcibly removing Choctaws, Seminoles, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Cherokee under the Indian Removal Act; thousands die in death marches from their southeastern homelands to Oklahoma, in what is now called the Trail of Tears. The Seminoles resist, and a 10 year war ensues, leaving a rump tribe living in the Florida Everglades.

1832: The first British Reform Act is passed, increasing the franchise so that any male national paying 10 pounds a year in taxes could vote.

1833: Britain passes the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which would abolish chattel slavery throughout the British Empire by 1843.

1833-1839: The liberals acquire power in Spain: the Carlists, conservative supporters of absolute monarchy, then rise in arms, and a civil war--the First Carlist War--breaks out. It ends in victory for the liberals.

1834: The Spanish Inquisition is finally abolished, by the new liberal government. Mazzini and others found the umbrella organization, Young Europe, for the societies Young Poland, Young Germany, Young Italy and, later, Young France. The organization is dedicated to the republican-nationalist principles of liberty, equality, fraternity, humanity, and national self-determination. It aims to overthrow the pan-Europe hegemony of a few great imperial powers set up by the Congress of Vienna, and to replace it with a confederation of European nation-states, relating on equal terms.

1835: The Mexican government, under Santa Anna, overturns the previous liberal-republican federalist constitution and institutes a centralist, elitist, authoritarian-religious constitution (the "Siete Leyes"). Secession movements and rebellion break out all over Mexico. In perhaps the first general strike in North America, striking workers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania win a ten-hour workday for wage workers in the city.

1836: Anglophone- and slaveholder-dominated Texas--one of the Mexican states in rebellion against Santa Anna--declares its independence from abolitionist Mexico, founding the Republic of Texas. The Texans defeat Santa Anna, who accepts their independence, but defeats all the other Mexican rebellions. Spain recognizes Mexico's independence, making it the first former Spanish colony so recognized.

1837: Spain under the liberal-republican Progressive Party--heirs of the Liberal Triennium--passes a new liberal constitution, with a broad franchise.

1839: The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society is established in England, to campaign for abolition around the world. It continues its work today as Anti-Slavery International.

1839-42: Qing China and Britain fight the First Opium War over British merchants' selling opium to Chinese. China is defeated and cedes Hong Kong to Britain. China forcibly opened to trade with Europe and the Americas. Thus begins what 20th-century Chinese nationalists called "the Century of Humiliation": a series of invasions, defeats, conquests, and forced openings by Western and Japanese forces of Chinese territory and society.

1839-1876: The Tanzimat Era of the Ottoman Empire. Rapidly outpaced and outpowered by its rival empires in West Europe and Russia, the Ottoman Empire embarks on an era of reforms, aimed at acquiring some of the benefits of the new European order without having to sacrifice core Ottoman values. The Empire institutes equality before the law for all persons, regardless of religious confession; protected civil liberties for all subjects, regardless of their religion; allowed more internal free exchange and free movement, and reorganized the civil and military services along more meritocratic lines.

ca. 1840: The Industrial Revolution completed in England: England has created a full industrial economy, with a majority-urban population, a factory system, a huge urban working class, and an enormous population of paupers. Western continental Europe, the rest of Great Britain, and the United States are industrializing.

1840s: The Hungry Forties. Potato blight causes famine in Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, and Belgium, and food shortages across Europe. Ireland and the Highlands are devastated, and hundreds of thousands emigrate to the Americas and Australasia.

1843: Britain abolishes slavery throughout the British Empire.

1843-1851: A civil war in Uruguay between the liberal-republican free-trader Colorado party and the protectionist-traditionalist landowner Blanco party leads to a nine-year siege of the capital, Montevideo, by the Blancos. With support from freed slaves and the British Navy, the Colorados ultimately defeat the siege, with Giuseppe Garibaldi commanding their navy. Garibaldi becomes a hero to the world's liberal-republicans.

1844: The liberal-conservative Moderate Party takes power in Spain from the liberal-republican Progressive Party. Marx and Engels become friendly at Paris, and begin their historic partnership.

1845: The United States annexes Texas, incorporating it as a state. Spain under the Moderate party passes a new liberal-conservative constitution, which restricts the franchise to less than 1% of the population. Marx is expelled from France by order of Guizot, then Interior Minister: it is perhaps the only time in history when one great political theorist is banished by another.

1845-1852: The Great Famine in Ireland (an Gorta Mor). Perhaps a million Irish people die of famine, and hundreds of thousands emigrate to the Americas or Australasia. Ireland's political masters in London are widely blamed for an incompetent and uncaring response, as are liberal English economists: the English economist Nassau Senior notoriously said that the Famine "would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good."

1846-1847: The United States declares war on Mexico and invades, capturing Monterrey, Veracruz, Puebla, and finally Mexico City.

1847: Founding at London of the Communist League, the first Marxist political organization, dedicated among other things to the ultimate overthrow of private property and to rule by the proletariat.

1847-1901: The Caste Wars in Yucatan. Indigenous Mayan communities rise up against European-descended elites in Yucatan, fighting against what they saw as a grab of their ancestral lands, as well as against oppression, exploitation, and cultural extermination.

1848: France and Denmark abolish slavery throughout their respective empires. The Revolutions of 1848, or Springtime of the Peoples, break out across Europe in this year. These liberal-nationalist-republican-socialist revolutions will ultimately be defeated by conservative forces by 1849, but they would permanently reshape the politics of Europe. Pope Pius IX decrees an end to the Jewish ghettoization in the Papal States, ordering that the walls and gates of the ghettoes be knocked down and that Jews be permitted to move about as freely as Gentiles.

January 1848: Liberal revolution breaks out at Palermo against the conservative Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Garibaldi hears of it in Uruguay and sails with some members of his Italian legion for Italy.

February 1848: The Third French Revolution topples the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. The Second French Republic is declared, and its radical republican government institutes a right of all citizens to work, National Workshops for them to work in, universal male suffrage, and an industrial (workers') parliament presided over by Louis Blanc.

March 1848: Liberal, nationalist, and socialist groups break out in insurrection across the German Confederation and the Austrian Empire. Beginning of the March Revolution. The Kingdoms of Sardinia and Tuscany declare war on the Austrian Empire: First Italian War of Independence.

April 1848: Universal male suffrage in France elects a moderate and liberal Constituent Assembly.

May 1848: Mexico cedes to the United States, in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the present states of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. In Frankfurt, a newly elected German National Assembly meets in Frankfurt, with representatives from all the German states, most of them professors. This "Professors' Parliament" seeks to establish a constitution for all the German states.

June 1848: The increasingly liberal and non-socialist French government closes the National Workshops, and workers in Paris rise in rebellion. The army crushes the rebellion with great loss of life.

July 1848: A convention is held at Seneca Falls, New York, concerning women's rights: the first large convention to do so. The convention issues its Declaration of Sentiments, chiefly authored by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Declaration stated that women should be given equal rights, including the right to vote.

November 1848: The new French Constitution is promulgated, proclaiming universal male suffrage and separation of powers. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte is then elected President, and quickly enters a struggle with the increasingly elitist National Assembly, which soon abolishes the universal suffrage. End of the Third French Revolution.

December 1848: The German National Assembly ratifies "the Basic Rights for the German People," including equality before the law.

1849: Britain repeals the Navigation Acts, adopting a free-trade policy.

February 1849: The Pope flees Rome after a liberal uprising. Declaration of the Roman Republic, led by Giuseppe Mazzini and others. Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Italian Legion move to defend it against the Pope's supporters.

March 1849: The German National Assembly ratifies a new constitution for a united Germany, which is to be a liberal constitutional monarchy. The assembly offers the crown to the King of Prussia, who rebuffs them. Austria defeats Piedmont-Sardinia and Tuscany in the First Italian War of Independence.

April 1849: To please the Catholics who had voted him into power, Louis Napoleon sends an invading force to conquer the Roman Republic and restore the Pope. Garibaldi leads the defense of Rome.

Summer 1849: The conservative aristocracy finally crushes the revolutions in Germany and the Austrian empire, partly by playing the liberals against the nationalists and the socialists.

July 1849: The French conquer the Roman Republic and restore the Pope. Garibaldi retreats to San Marino. The French forces remain as protectors of Rome until 1870. With the political reaction, the Pope decrees that Jews living in the Papal States again by confined to the ghettoes at night.

1850-1864: The Taiping Rebellion creates the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a Christian state in southern China, which embarks on a series of reforms, notably including gender equality. The Rebellion is ultimately crushed by traditionalist Qing China and European military forces, in a civil war that cost perhaps 25 million lives.

December 1851: Louis Napoleon instigates a military coup, abolishing the French National Assembly and restoring universal male suffrage. Becomes dictator of France, and later is elected Emperor of the French in a referendum.

1853-4: A U. S. Navy squadron under Matthew Perry attacks buildings in Edo Bay, aiming to force Japan to open itself to foreign trade. Japan agrees, opening several ports to foreign trade.

1856-60: The Second Opium War is fought between Qing China and Britain, France, and Russia. A Britano-French force captures Beijing and imposes terms. China suffers national humiliation.

1857-1861: Mexico promulgates a new liberal-republican constitution and embarks on a period of liberal-republican reform, with Benito Juarez, the Chief Justice and then President, as its chief architect. Juarez, a full-blooded Zapotec Indian, becomes President in 1858. The new constitution and laws proclaim the standard civil rights, declare equal rights for male citizens, restrict the privileges of the church and military, separate church and state, seize unused property belonging to the church, push Indian communities to assimilate to liberal industrial society, curtail communal landowning by peasants, and abolish the death penalty. Conservatives rise in arms against the reforms.

1858: French begin to conquer parts of Vietnam, until by 1893 they control all of Indochina. The British Crown takes control of India away from the British East India Company, with the British government ruling India directly as the British Raj.

1859: Piedmont convinces the French Empire to join them in a war against Austria for the liberation of Italy: Second Italian War of Independence ends that year with Piedmont capturing Lombardy from Austria.

1859-1869: A French company, with the permission of the Egyptian government, digs the Suez Canal.

1860-1863: Japan is thrown into economic crisis by the changes wrought by the opening to the West.

April 1860: Uprisings in Sicily lead Garibaldi to recruit 1,000 volunteers and invade Sicily.

September 1860: Garibaldi captures Naples, defeats the Sicilian army, and then hands the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies over to the Kingdom of Piedmont.

1861: Russian Empire abolishes serfdom. Russian capitalism begins to take off.

1861-1864: France invades and captures central and eastern Mexico. The Second Mexican Empire is created, supported by Mexican conservatives and clericals, with Maximilian of Habsburg as Emperor. Maximilian quickly embarks on liberal reforms.

1861-1865: The U. S. Civil War occurs, over whether U. S. states have a right to secede from the Union and over whether chattel slavery can be tolerated. The Union wins, answering both questions in the negative. Perhaps 750,000 people die because of the war, almost 2% of the total population.

1861-1895: Qing China embarks on a period of economic and military Westernization--but not social reform.

1863: The Dutch empire abolishes chattel slavery.

1863-4: Anti-opening forces try to expel Westerners from Japan. Naval forces of the U. S., Britain, France, and the Netherlands bombard and capture Japanese ports.

1864-1866: The Mexican republican forces, under President Benito Juarez, resist French attempts to conquer all of Mexico.

1864: Founding at London of the International Workingmen's Association, with Karl Marx among its leaders. Also called the First International. Besides revolutionary Marxists, the International includes in its early years Proudhonian mutualists, Italian republicans, Italian nationalists, and individualist anarchists. The U. S. government, in what is now called "The Long Walk," forcibly removes some 9,000 Navajo from their homeland in eastern Arizona to a reservation in New Mexico 500 miles away. Garibaldi visits London, publicizing his international project for the liberation of Hungary, Croatia, and Greece, as well as Italy. Seeking to shore up support for their regime, the French Parliament of Napoleon III makes strikes legal; they hope by this to gain political support from the working classes.

1865: The United States abolishes chattel slavery and federal troops occupy the defeated Southern United States. The U. S. moves troops to the border with Mexico, threatening war if France does not withdraw.

1866: The first congress of the First International is held at Geneva. Founding of the National Labor Union, the first national labor federation in the U. S: it pressed for the exclusion of Chinese workers, the eight-hour-day, and arbitration over strikes.

1866-1867: France withdraws its troops from Mexico. Maximilian's Empire falls and he is put to death by the Mexican liberal-republicans under Juarez, who retake control of the country.

1866-1877: Reconstruction in the Southern United States. The U. S. government forces Southern states to give black men the right to vote. Black men are voted to high elected office, including the U. S. Congress. Southern racists resent this, and form secret societies for racial terrorism like the Ku Klux Klan.

1867: The U. S. government, under Republican President Andrew Johnson, finally recognizes the government of Haiti and establishes normal diplomatic relations. The International League of Peace and Freedom meets in Congress at Geneva, inviting liberals, republicans, revolutionaries, socialists, and anarchists to join. Revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Giuseppe Garibaldi famously embrace at this Congress. Garibaldi calls at the Congress for the Papacy's abolition.

1867-8: Japan begins to Westernize in the Meiji Restoration:

industrializing; instituting land reform; adopting a bicameral legislature; creating a Prussian-style bureaucracy and university system; and a military with universal male conscription.

1868: Mikhail Bakunin and his revolutionary anarchist followers join the First International. He and his followers at first make common cause with Marx and his followers, as "the Collectivists," against the Proudhonian mutualists. The Vatican issues a decree forbidding Catholics from taking part in electoral politics in the growing Kingdom of Italy, as a response to what it viewed as anti-church measures being passed by that polity. The ban would remain officially in place until 1918.

1868-1874: The Glorious Revolution of Spain. Liberal-republicans in Spain overthrow the moderate-conservative Queen, establish a new liberal constitution based on universal male suffrage (1869) and eventually establish the First Spanish Republic (1873-4). In October 1868, they permit Jews to return to Spain.

1869: Founding at Washington D. C. of the Colored National Labor Union, a segregated affiliate of the National Labor Union. Founding of the Knights of Labor, a catch-all U. S. union which pushed primarily for the eight-hour-day, an end to child labor, and a progressive income tax.

July 1870: The Franco-Prussian War begins. The First Vatican Council issues its doctrine of papal infallibility: when the Pope officially claims to speak for the Catholic Church on a question of faith or of morals, the doctrine he issues is infallible.

1 September 1870: The French Empire is defeated by Prussia at the battle of Sedan.

4 September 1870: The Third French Republic established. Giuseppe Garibaldi leads the volunteer Army of the Vosges to defend the Republic against the Prussian invasion.

20 September 1870: The French garrison having left Rome to fight Prussia, the Italian nationalists under the King of Italy (Piedmont) lay siege to Rome. The Papal State falls to the Italian nationalists.

September 1870-January 1871: Prussia lays siege to Paris, eventually capturing it. The French Republic surrenders to Prussia.

18 January 1871: The German Empire is proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, held by the Prussian occupiers. The King of Prussia is proclaimed Emperor of Germany. Otto von Bismarck, the creator of the Empire, becomes Chancellor of Germany.

March-May 1871: After the Prussian army leaves Paris, the people of the city rise against the government of the Republic. The Paris Commune is declared and led by the working classes, who elect a Communal Council. It establishes a republican and social-democratic government, passing many laws that would later be adopted by the Republic. The Republican government led by Adolphe Thiers lays siege to the city and brutally crushes the Commune. After warning the government of their intentions, the Commune had killed some supporters of Thiers in reprisal for his many executions of Communards. These reprisals would soon be repaid a hundredfold: thousands of Communards were killed in the ensuing counter-reprisals and judicial murders of the "White Terror," which the Republican government did very little to stop. The Whites' ferocity following the Communards' restraint taught Marx and revolutionary communists a lesson they would not forget.

October 1871: Rome and Latium are annexed by the Kingdom of Italy in a plebiscite. Italy is unified. The Kingdom quickly grants the same legal rights to Jews as to Christians, thus ending the age of the ghettoes in Italy.

1872: The Equal Rights Party contests the election for President of the United States, with Victoria Woodhull its candidate for President and Frederick Douglass its candidate for Vice President. Woodhull is the first woman presidential candidate in the world.

1872-1876: The Third Carlist War breaks out in Spain, with the anti-liberal and regions'-rights Carlists challenging the centralizing liberal-republican government.

1873: Establishment by Spain's liberal-republican government of the First Spanish Republic. Francesc Pi I Margall, a libertarian socialist and disciple of Proudhon, is briefly President of the Republic, becoming perhaps the first self-professed socialist to be the head of government of a major state. The National Labor Union in the U. S. collapses; many of its ex-members join the Knights of Labor.

1874: The First Spanish Republic is overthrown in a coup and the House of Bourbon restored to the throne by the new conservative liberal government. End of the Spanish Glorious Revolution.

1875: Founding at Gotha, Germany, of what would become known as the Social Democratic Party of Germany: the programme it issues is soon criticized by Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. The party arises from the merger of the non-Marxist General German Workers' Association and the Marxist Social-Democratic Workers' Party of Germany, forming what was then called the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. It calls for peaceful political reforms aimed at universal suffrage, workers' rights, and an end to wage labor and exploitation.

1876: Spain's governing conservative liberals defeat the Carlists and abolish the last of the old regional privileges. They establish a new conservative liberal constitution with a limited suffrage and strong central government. Founding of the Socialist Labor Party of America, the first socialist political party in the U. S. A.

1876-1878: The First Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire. Pressured by the intellectual and political movement of the Young Ottomans, the Ottoman government adopts a constitution requiring a bi-cameral parliament and constitutional limitations on the Sultan. Two parliaments were elected and took their seats during this period, until the Sultan and his supporters abrogated the constitution and returned the Ottoman Empire to absolute monarchy.

1876-1910: Porfirio Diaz leads an uprising against Mexico's liberal-republican government, and installs himself as President and dictator re-elected in referenda, in a period called "the Porfiriato." Diaz embarks on a program of economic and industrial modernization, which sees immense economic growth and technological progress. At the same time, Diaz crushes democracy, abolishes federalism, represses dissent, and embarks on savage wars against the Apache and other indigenous tribes in the north: in his words, eliminating politics in Mexico, and replacing it with administration. Mexico is filled with vast haciendas, employing Indians in indentured servitude and crushing economic exploitation.

July 1877: In a general strike in St. Louis and East St. Louis, Missouri, workers take over the railways, cattle yards, and meat packing plants of the two cities. They establish a "St. Louis Commune" which was abolished when the strike was crushed at the end of July by federal troops and deputized police.

1878: The U. S. Knights of Labor move to include women and blacks, but continue to exclude Chinese workers, agitating against them. The German Parliament, led by Bismarck, passes Anti-Socialist laws repressing socialist parties. The laws are specifically aimed at the Socialist Workers' Party, which is fast increasing in size and electoral strength.

1880s: U. S. Federal troops having left the Southern states with the end of Reconstruction, Southern racists retake power and begin passing state laws purging black voters from the polls. By the end of the decade, it is extremely difficult for any black citizen to vote in a Southern state. Jim Crow is born.

1881-1920: The Scramble for Africa. The states of Europe conquer, partition, and rule all of Africa, seeking cheap raw materials and new markets. By 1920, all of Africa was European-ruled, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia.

1882: Britain occupies Egypt and establishes control over the country. It will rule the country directly until 1922 and as a protectorate until the Egyptian Revolution in 1952. Britain maintains the military occupation until 1947. Death of Garibaldi.

1883: Bismarck and the German Parliament begin to pass welfare-state laws aimed at helping alleviate the plight of German workers so as to wean them away from socialism. By the time he left power in 1890, Bismarck had pushed through national health insurance, national accident insurance, national old-age pensions, and national disability insurance.

1884: Founding at London of the Fabian Society, which would become Britain's leading socialist association and lead in the planning and construction of the British welfare state. It was famous for its rejection of Marxism. Its early leaders are Beatrice and Sidney Webb, soon joined by the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the novelist H. G. Wells. Founding at London of Toynbee Hall, one of the first settlement houses and a leader in the settlement house movement, which sought to have rich and poor live close together, interact frequently, and learn from one another. It offered classes and cultural events, and did charitable work among the poor; it still does so today.

1884-1885: The Knights of Labor lead successful strikes on the Union Pacific Railroad and the Wabash Railroad.

1885-1908: Leopold II, King of the Belgians, founds the Congo Free State as a colony owned privately by himself. From then until its dissolution in 1908, his employees ruthlessly extact materials and enslave, exploit, and massacre the locals. Millions die of brutal mistreatment and exploitation. The oppression and injustices inspire Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Arthur Conan Doyle's indictment, The Crime of the Congo.

1886: The Haymarket Affair: a labor demonstration in Chicago organized by the Knights of Labor ends with a bomb being thrown at police and the police firing on the crowd. Seven men were sentenced to die for the bombing on slender evidence. The Knights' reputation was tarnished by the association with "anarchist violence"; membership declines to virtual inconsequence by the end of the century. Founding of the American Federation of Labor, which would benefit from the Knights' decline. The more apolitical AFL in its early decades concentrated solely on higher pay, better work conditions, and a shorter workday.

1887: The Truck Amendment Act makes it illegal in Britain to pay most tradesmen and manual workers in anything but the common currency: many workers had until then been paid only in tokens redeemable only at stores owned by the employer.

1888: Brazil abolishes chattel slavery.

1889: The U. S. government, pressured by would-be settlers, opens up a large part of the Indian Territory in Oklahoma to white American settlement. The Brazilian bourgeoisie overthrows the Brazilian Empire and establishes the Republic of Brazil, an elitist republic founded on the ideas of Auguste Comte's social-religious positivism. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr open Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house in which educated women live and welcome the working class to educational and cultural events, and do humanitarian work and research among the poor.

July 14 1889: The Second Socialist International is formed at the International Workers' Congresses at Paris. They present one of the first calls for an 8-hour workday, and also call for workers' rights and universal suffrage.

1889-1914: The so-called golden age of Marxism (vide Leszek Kolakowski). Marxism becomes the leading ideology of the labor movement in Continental Europe, and the leading ideology of the socialist movement everywhere except Britain. It is adopted as the official ideology of many workers' political parties and becomes a powerful political and intellectual force.

1890s: The southern United States, and many other countries around the world, embark on a program of legally enforced racial segregation of public places. Jim Crow is ascendant in the US. The rest of the country is largely indifferent.

1890: The German Parliament refuses to renew the Anti-Socialist Laws. Bismarck resigns as Chancellor a few days later. The newly legalized Socialist Workers' Party wins 35 Reichstag seats in elections later that year.

1891: Pope Leo XIII issues the encyclical De Rerum Novarum, on the condition of labor and industrial justice. It calls on employers and workers to form both joint and separate associations (manager-worker groups, trade groups, and workers' unions), calls on the state to intervene in the economy to protect and promote well-being, defends private property, and calls on employers to always pay workers enough to live in at least frugal comfort. Today's Social Democratic Party of Germany, then called the Socialist Workers' Party, adopts at its Erfurt Congress an explicitly Marxist ideology, in a platform drafted by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. It would remain officially committed to Marxism until 1959.

1892: Founding of the Italian Socialist Party, which would be the leading socialist party in Italy until the 1950s. A general and cross-racial strike by the workers in New Orleans, Louisiana, ends after four days with the workers being granted most of their demands, namely a ten-hour day and higher wages.

1893: The self-governing British Colony of New Zealand grants women's suffrage, becoming the first of today's sovereign states to do so.

1894-5: Imperial Japan defeats China in the First Sino-Japanese war, removing Korea from China's suzerainty and annexing Taiwan (Formosa). Japan replaces China as the leading power in East Asia. French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, is, on slender evidence, accused, convicted, and imprisoned for treason by the French Army for spying for Germany. Many leading French republicans and socialists of the day are firmly convinced of his guilt.

1895-1896: Italy tries to join the Scramble for Africa by invading and conquering Ethiopia. Their forces are defeated and repulsed by the Ethiopians, who become the only African nation to successfully repel the Scramble.

1896: At their London Congress, the Second International expels the anarchist groups from membership.

1896-1898: Real evidence emerges that another officer was the real culprit in the Dreyfus Affair. The French military bring more false charges against Dreyfus, and there ensues an outcry and accusation throughout republican France that the conviction was driven by anti-Semitism. Emile Zola's famous J'Accuse! trumpets these accusations.

1896-1920: Formation of the Dervish State in the Horn of Africa, under Muhammad Abdullah Hassan. This state managed to repulse and defeat several British and Italian invasions for 25 years, becoming legendary in Africa and the Middle East. They were finally defeated and conquered when the British Royal Air Force bombed their capital city.

1897: The meeting of the First Zionist Congress at Basel, Switzerland, chaired by Theodor Herzl. It forms the Zionist Organization and adopts the Basel Declaration:

"Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine. For the attainment of this purpose, the Congress considers the following means serviceable:

"1. The promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine.

"2. The federation of all Jews into local or general groups, according to the laws of the various countries.

"3. The strengthening of the Jewish feeling and consciousness.

"4. Preparatory steps for the attainment of those governmental grants which are necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose."

1898: The U. S. government declares war on Spain and intervenes in the Cuban war of independence, invading Cuba and the Philippines. In the ensuing treaty, it acquires Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as colonies, with temporary control over Cuba, which was promised eventual independence. The Spanish Empire is reduced to colonies in northwest Africa. Beginning of the U. S. overseas empire, which lasts until 1946. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party is founded in Minsk as an explicitly Marxist political party seeking the emancipation of the working class by social revolution. Co-founded by Vladimir Lenin, it would be the predecessor party of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik).

1899: Dreyfus is re-tried, convicted but then pardoned, and set free. All French republicans have joined his cause, against the pro-clerical, anti-republican supporters of the Catholic church. The Socialist Workers' Party of Germany repudiates socialist revisionism, as advocated by Eduard Bernstein and others.

1899-1902: The Philippine War of Independence against the United States ends in defeat for the Filipino revolutionaries: the Philippines will remain a U. S. territory until independence in 1946.

1900: First Pan-African conference held, in London, at which W. E. B. Du Bois first made his famous statement that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line."

1901-1906: While the U. S. federal government is making some tentative efforts toward creating a regulatory state, the State of Wisconsin under Governor Robert M. La Follette, Sr., passes a raft of legislation which transforms Wisconsin into a regulatory-welfare state.

The United States government as a whole will not create such a state until the New Deal of the 1930s.

1902: The U. S. grants Cuba limited independence and withdraws its troops. The newly formed Commonwealth of Australia grants (white) women the right to vote.

1904-5: Russo-Japanese war for suzerainty over Korea and Manchuria. The Russians are decisively defeated by Imperial Japan. Japan establishes a protectorate over Korea.

1905: Founding at Chicago of the International Workers of the World, a syndicalist union aiming to unite all workers to achieve the end of capitalism and wage labor through the use of strikes and industrial actions: founders included Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, and Daniel De Leon. The French Republic disestablishes Catholicism as the official religion, and officially separates the State from any church or religious creed in its policy of laicism.

1905-06: The 1905 Russian Revolution results in the Czar's agreeing to a constitutional monarchy. The 1906 constitution sets up a bicameral Duma and recognizes the standard civil rights, as well as limited political rights for citizens.

1906: The New York anthropologist Madison Grant and the Bronx Zoo open an exhibit in which Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy, is displayed in a cage with animals.

1906-1909: The U. S. invades Cuba and governs it directly for three years.

1906-1914: The Liberal government of Great Britain passes a raft of legislation which transforms Britain from a laissez-faire to a regulatory-welfare state. David Lloyd-George is the architect of the change, assisted by Winston Churchill.

1907: Oklahoma is admitted to the United States as a state. The Indian Territory is dissolved.

1908: Belgium dissolves the King's privately-owned Congo Free State and reestablishes it as a colony run by the Government of Belgium.

1908-1920: Second Constitutional Era of Turkey and Young Turk Revolution. In 1908, the Young Turks overthrow the absolutist government of the Ottoman Empire and re-establish it as a constitutional parliamentary monarchy. The new government commits to setting the Empire on course to provide multi-party representative government, freedom of religion, women's rights, free markets, civil rights for all residents, equal political rights for all citizens, and full exploitation of the benefits of science, technology, and industry.

1909: Founding of what would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida Wells-Barnett, and others. Organization dedicated to the betterment of colored people and to their attainment of equal rights. Aristide Briand, a self-professed socialist, becomes Prime Minister of France, and thus the first avowed socialist to be head of government in any of the world's great powers.

1910: The Portuguese Republican Revolution. Republicans in Portugal rise up against its conservative liberal monarchist government and overthrow it, creating a new state, the Portuguese Republic, a secular anti-clerical market-based republic founded on republican principles. Japan annexes Korea. Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin becomes the first self-professed socialist elected to the U. S. Congress.

November 1910: After a rigged election to re-elect Porfirio Diaz as President of Mexico, his liberal-democrat opponents take up arms against the governent. Beginning of the Mexican Revolution, which lasts until 1920. The revolutionaries fight for democracy, an end to racial exploitation, and protections for workers.

1911-1912: The Chinese Revolution of 1911. It ends in the abdication of the last Qing dynasty emperor, Puyi. The Republic of China is declared, with Sun Yat-Sen its first Provisional President.

1912: The last US Presidential election in which neither a Democrat nor Republican came in second in either the electoral college vote or the popular vote. Woodrow Wilson of the Democratic Party wins the electoral college vote and a plurality of the popular vote. Theodore Roosevelt of the Progressive Party comes in second in both votes. Eugene Debs, socialist candidate for President, receives 6% of the popular vote, the largest share ever won by a declared socialist in a US presidential election. Lenin, Stalin and others found the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik), the first Bolshevik political party. This party would seize the reins of power during the Russian Revolution and in 1918 would relabel itself as a "Communist" party. Benito Mussolini becomes the editor of Avanti!, the official newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party.

1913: Norway gives women the right to vote, the first sovereign state to do so. The newly-elected US President, Woodrow Wilson, approves the racial segregation of federal government offices in Washington DC. In January, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Adolf Hitler, Josip Broz Tito, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper were all living in Vienna, and Joseph Stalin was visiting Trotsky.

April 1914: The Ludlow Massacre in Colorado occurs; a tent city of mineworkers and their families striking against their Rockefeller employers is attacked by company guards and the Colorado National Guard, who kill dozens, including children.

August 1914: Outbreak of the First World War, driven by European nationalism and competition for overseas empires with their large markets. The German and Austro-Hungarian Empires declare war against

Russia, France, and Great Britain, which return the favor. Socialist and Marxist members of national parliaments rally to their flags and vote for war, flagrantly violating the socialist and Marxist commitment to international proletarian solidarity. As a result, the Second International collapses. The war will end in the destruction of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empires.

December 1914: Benito Mussolini, having been expelled by the Italian Socialist Party for his advocacy of Italy's entering the war, repudiates socialism and takes up the cause of revolutionary nationalism. Founds with the revolutionary national syndicalist Alceste de Ambris the Fascio (League) for Revolutionary Action, predecessor of what would become in 1921 the National Fascist Party.

1914-1918: In the war, millions of Europeans are killed, and nationalism and liberal capitalism are widely blamed for the catastrophe. International socialists see an opportunity.

May 1915: Italy enters the war, allying with Russia, France, and Britain, and declaring war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 1915-1934: The U. S. invades and ocupies Haiti.

Ideas

ca. 1450: Johannes Gutenberg invents a printing press with metal movable type in Mainz, Germany. Though such presses already existed in Korea and China, they at that time printed in Chinese characters, requiring hundreds of different characters. Gutenberg, using the Latin alphabet, needed only a few dozen characters. The invention rapidly spread throughout Germany, Italy, and France, and was quickly followed by a cheaper method--the printing of short books by carved woodblocks. By 1500, many millions of copies of books had been printed in Europe. One group of intellectuals would soon exploit the new technology: the humanists, who were challenging the Scholastic philosophy which had dominated Europe and its universities for some two hundred years. It is estimated that the works of one humanist author of the period, Desiderius Erasmus, sold almost a million copies before his death in 1536.

ca. 1453-1465: As a result of the Ottoman capture of Constantinople and all of Greece, many Greek intellectuals opt to reject their new political masters and flee to Catholic Europe, especially the city-states of Italy. Some of them were Platonist philosophers, and their ideas get a sympathetic hearing from Italian intellectuals enthusiastic about the new ideas of classical humanism, and dissatisfied with the reigning philosophy, Thomist Scholasticism, founded as it was on Aristotelian ideas.

1462: Founding at Florence by the philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the statesman Cosimo de' Medici of the Platonic Academy, which began reintroducing Plato's ideas to Catholic Europe after some two centuries in which they had been eclipsed by the Aristotelianism of the Scholastics (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) and most Jewish philosophers (e.g., Maimonides). The Renaissance is in full swing in Italy, and word of the new ideas quickly spreads to the rest of Catholic and Orthodox Europe. Italy quickly becomes recognized as the leading center for new philosophical thinking: Paris, Oxford, the German universities, and Greece are no longer in the lead.

1484: Ficino publishes the first Latin translation of all Plato's works, allowing Platonic ideas to be rediscovered in Catholic countries for the first time in two centuries. While most Catholic intellectuals read Latin, few read Greek, even though many of Plato's works were available to Catholic thinkers in Greek editions.

1486: Pico della Mirandola, one of the leading humanists and Platonists, delivers his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, arguing that Man has no place in the Great Chain of Being--rather, he is created by God to appreciate and understand the whole of God's work, and also to change himself through his unique free will. When he does appreciate and understand it, and change himself in light of this understanding, he mounts the Chain to communion (and equal dignity?) with God and the divine. With its encomium to Man, his capacity to understand the reason of things, and his ability to master himself, the Oration is often called "the Manifesto of the Renaissance."

1492: Antonio de Nebrija publishes Grammar of the Castilian Language, the first grammar of a European language other than Latin. Beginning of the Spanish Golden Age in culture, especially literature and the arts, which will last until 1681.

1513: Machiavelli circulates copies of The Prince.

1516: Sir Thomas More publishes Utopia, his great description of an ideal community where property was either owned in common or by the government. Pietro Pomponazzi, an Italian philosopher committed to an Christian Aristotelian philosophy free of Thomas Aquinas's ideas, influenced by the new humanism and sympathetic to Platonist criticisms of the Scholastic philosophy, publishes On the Immortality of the Soul. That book ignites a scandal by arguing that all we can know is that the soul dies with the body; if the soul is immortal, we must take that on faith alone, reason does not entitle us to that conclusion.

1524: Francisco de Vitoria elected to the Chair of Theology at the University of Salamanca, Spain. From this post, he would found the Aristotelian philosophy of Late Scholasticism, headed by his School of Salamanca, which he also founded. Late Scholasticism would challenge the Platonism and anti-Scholasticism dominating Renaissance thought, set forth the principles underlying modern international law, and found just war theory. The School of Salamanca (based both in Salamanca, Spain, and Coimbra, Portugal) flourished between 1524 and about 1640; in those years, it became the leading center of systematic philosophical thought in the Catholic world.

1530: Influenced by the new humanist ideas, and desiring a seat of learning more loyal to the state than the church-run universities, Francis I of France establishes the College Royal (now the College de France), which unlike the universities offered lectures free to the public.

1531-2: Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy and The Prince posthumously published.

1534: Cambridge University Press founded, currently the world's oldest publishing house.

1543: Nicolaus Copernicus publishes On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, a work defending heliocentrism. Andreas Vesalius publishes On the Fabric of the Human Body, a work giving essentially correct accounts of most features of human anatomy. With these two works, the Scientific Revolution begins. The Catholic Church takes no official position on Copernicus's theory until 1616--Protestant theologians were the first to challenge the theory as irreligious.

1550-1551: Debate held at Valladolid over the Spanish colonists' treatment of indigenous peoples. Bartolome de Las Casas, former Bishop of Chiapas, argues that they should be treated as free rational persons who ought not be coerced into Christianity, and ought not be enslaved or enserfed. Juan Gines de Sepulveda argues that they were naturally disposed to slavery, and so could rightly be coerced into Christianity and enslaved or enserfed.

1551: Foundation of the University of Lima and the Royal University of Mexico, the first universities in South and North America, respectively.

1552: Las Casas publishes A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, decrying the enormities and oppressions done to indigenous Americans by their new Spanish masters.

1559: The Prince is the first book placed on the Catholic Church's newly created Index of Forbidden Books. Discourses on Livy is also placed on the Index.

ca. 1563-5: Bernardino Telesio publishes On the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles, a remarkable work which challenged Aristotelian metaphysics; advocated observation-based philosophizing; defended an empiricist stance on knowledge; explained all things in the universe in terms of matter, heat, and cold; defended metaphysical materialism, and argued that all things are capable of sensation. For his challenges to scholasticism and Aristotelianism, in the name of an anti-metaphysical cosmology, Francis Bacon called him "the first of the moderns."

1573: The French-Swiss Calvinist lawyer Francois Hotman publishes Franco-Gallia, arguing that political sovereignty resides in the people, that government gains its authority in a contract made with the people through their representatives, that it is not wrong to oppose or resist a government that violates the terms of that contract, or of natural law, and that it can be right to break a law that violates those terms. This defense of a right of resistance would be taken up and developed by the Jesuit philosophers Juan de Mariana and Francisco Suarez.

1575: Founding of the University of Leiden, which would become one of Europe's leading intellectual centers in the 17th century, attracting students and thinkers from all over Europe and its colonies.

1576: Jean Bodin publishes Six Books of the Commonwealth, arguing that sovereignty resides in the lawmaking body of a state, that it is inalienable and indivisible, and that it is legally unlimitable: no law can prevent the sovereign from passing whatever law it pleases. Also argued, against Hotman and other defenders of a right of resistance, that actively seeking to overthrow the sovereign is always unjustified, and that one can rightly disobey a law only if convinced that it violates natural law.

1579: Huguenot thinkers in France publish Vindiciae contra Tryannos (Defenses against Tyrants), developing the corporative conception of the social contract. According to this conception, government receives its legitimate power in a grant from the community as a corporate body, not from the individuals comprising that community. Governments acquire legitimate authority when that community consents--through its rightful representatives--to alienate its power to the government. Therefore, the right of resistance to oppressive government is borne by the whole community, not by individuals. People do have a right to resist their government when it flagrantly violates the contract, but only insofar as the community through its duly authorized representatives recognizes and declares that the government has spurned the contract. There is, then, no genuine right of resistance to oppressive government enjoyed directly by individual persons. The community-as-corporation is the bearer of that right.

1580: Michel de Montaigne's Essays first published, in which he proposes to study humanity and himself with utter candor. His central theme is that human nature varies and can fly to extremes. The Essays both defend and presume skepticism, and it is regarded as the founding work of modern skepticism.

1583: Founding at Florence of the Accademia della Crusca, whose original purpose was to preserve the beauty of the Florentine language, as spoken and written by Petrarch and Dante.

1584: Justus Lipsius publishes On Constancy, the founding work of Neo-Stoicism, in which he argued that men should overcome their emotions, and live by the calm light of unemotional reason. Neo-Stoicism would greatly influence the philosophies of Descartes, the rationalists, and Kant.

1594-7: The Anglican philosopher Richard Hooker publishes Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which presented to Britons the corporative or communitarian conception of the social contract, developed by the Huguenots and soon by Jesuit philosophers.

1598: The opening of Gresham College in London, which gave--and still gives--public lectures in astronomy, geometry, divinity, law, medicine, music, and rhetoric. It soon became a gathering place for people inspired by Francis Bacon's new philosophy (see below).

1599: The Spanish Jesuit philosopher Juan de Mariana publishes On the King and the Institution of Kingship, developing the corporative or communitarian conception of the social contract (and a collective right of resistance) influenced by the ideas laid out in the Huguenots' Vindiciae contra tyrannos of 1579.

1600: Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake in Rome after trial by the Inquisition for his commitment to the existence of a plurality of worlds and for his pantheism; not, as is commonly thought, for his advocacy of Copernicus's heliocentrism.

1605: Francis Bacon publishes The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human, presenting his famous arguments for the importance of encouraging learning and science in society, and his famous divison of fields of inquiry according to what he considered the important problems that needed to be addressed.

1609: Johannes Kepler publishes Astronomia nova (New Astronomy, Based upon Causes, or Celestial Physics, Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motions of the Star Mars, from the Observations of Tycho Brahe). In it, he lays down physical causes for the motions of the planets, arguing that their orbits are elliptical and that the Sun powers their motions. With this, heliocentrism had a powerful argument in its favor.

1612: Francisco Suarez, a Jesuit and the leader of the School of Salamanca, publishes A Treatise on the Laws and God the Lawgiver, one of the two founding works of modern natural law theory, bringing subjective rights into the framework of natural law. This book further develops the corporative or communitarian theory of the social contract, and justifies a collective right of resistance. The Accademia della Crusca publishes Vocabolario della lingua italiana, the first of the great dictionaries of national languages.

1616: The Catholic Inquisition orders Galileo not to hold Copernican heliocentrism. It also places Copernicus's works on the Index "until corrected," which meant that heliocentrism had to be presented as a hypothesis, not as a fact.

1620: Bacon publishes Novum Organum Scientiarum (New Instrument of Science), presenting his inductivist approach to scientific inquiry, presenting and defending the experimental method, and challenging the deductive approach to empirical problems.

1623: Tommaso Campanella publishes The City of the Sun, a sketch of an ideal polity conceived as an organic unity aiming at the well-being of the whole, in which there is community of property, all who work are equal citizens, every line of work is given equal dignity, and everyone is made acquainted with all forms of work.

1625: Hugo Grotius publishes De jure belli ac pacis, the other founding work of modern natural law. Modern natural rights tradition has begun.

1628: William Harvey publishes De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart and the Blood), giving an essentially correct account of how the heart pumps blood througout the circulatory system.

1632: Galileo publishes Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The Scientific Revolution is in full swing.

1635: Founding by the French crown of the Academie Francaise, in order to "give exact rules to our language, to render it capable of treating the arts and sciences."

1636: Founding of what would become Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1637: Descartes publishes Discourse on the Method. With this and the earlier works of Bacon, Galileo, and Grotius, early modern philosophy has begun. France-and especially Paris--become the center of philosophy in the Catholic countries, inheriting that mantle from Salamanca and Coimbra. Beginning of the decline of the School of Salamanca.

1641: Descartes publishes Meditations on First Philosophy: Age of Reason has begun.

1644: The English Parliamentarian and Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford during the English Civil Wars (Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince. A Dispute for the Just Prerogative of King and People, presenting the corporative or communitarian theory of the social contract, and using it to justify the uprising against the King of England.

1645: Various adherents of Bacon's "New or Experimental Philosophy" begin to hold meetings at Gresham College in London to discuss the new philosophy and experiments. They will go on to found the Royal Society.

1647: Hobbes publishes De Cive (On the Citizen).

1649: All Hobbes's works relating to religion placed on the Index, where they would remain until 1966. Descartes publishes The Passions of the Soul, his theory of the emotions.

1650: Death of Descartes.

1651: Hobbes publishes Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil. Radically revises social contract theory, setting it on individualistic foundations. Attacks both communitarian social contract thinking, and political republicanism. Defends absolute monarchy on individualistic social-contract grounds, rejecting founding it on divine right of kings. Denounces the influence of priests and religious thinkers over government.

1651-ca.1750: The Hunting of Leviathan. Hobbes's theories attacked by numerous philosophers. "Hobbist" was a pejorative term, and it was socially dangerous to be labelled one.

1656: James Harrington publishes The Common Wealth of Oceana, laying out a vision of an ideal republic, in which property in land is limited to a certain amount, and rotation in office is required.

1660s-1670s: The Cartesian philosophy becomes widely taught at universities around Europe.

1660: Founding of the Royal Society (Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge), originally as a "College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning"

1662: Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole publish Logic; or, the Art of Thinking (Port-Royal Logic), disseminating the methods of Descartes's philosophy. It would be a standard text in logic until the 20th century.

1663: Spinoza publishes Principles of the Cartesian Philosophy, Demonstated with the Geometrical Method. All Descartes's

unexpurgated works placed on the Index, until 1966.

1666: Parliament bans Hobbes from publishing in England works concerning human conduct, on grounds that his philosophy tended to support atheism, blasphemy, and profaneness. Founding at Paris of the French Academy of Sciences.

1667: Henry More, a leader of the Cambridge Platonists, publishes Enchiridion Ethicum.

1670: Spinoza anonymously publishes Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

1672: Richard Cumberland publishes De legibus naturae, grounding morality in the happiness of human beings, and arguing a duty of benevolence.

1674: Tractatus Theologico-Politicus banned in the Dutch Republic.

1674-5: Nicolas Malebranche publishes The Search after Truth (Concerning the Search after Truth. In which is treated the nature of the human mind and the use that must be made of it to avoid error in the sciences), a great contribution to philosophy in the Rationalist tradition founded by Descartes.

1677: Death of Spinoza. His Ethics, Tractatus Politicus, and Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding are posthumously published.

1678: Ralph Cudworth, a leader of the Cambridge Platonists, publishes The True Intellectual System of the Universe: the first part, wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated.

1679: Death of Thomas Hobbes. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus placed on the Index, where it would remain until 1966.

1680: Malebranche publishes Treatise on Nature and Grace. Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha posthumously published.

1684: Malebranche publishes Treatise on Ethics.

1684-1687: Pierre Bayle publishes News from the Republic of Letters.

1686: Leibniz writes, but does not publish, his Discourse on Metaphysics. It would not be published until 1846.

1687: Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, presenting a unifying theory which can explain heliocentrism and the findings of Galileo, Kepler, and Tycho Brahe in terms of a law of gravitation.

1688: Malebranche publishes Dialogues Concerning Metaphysics and Religion. The Marquess of Halifax publishes The Character of a Trimmer, arguing that regimes are pulled in different directions by those with extreme opinions for and against change, and that the politician's task is therefore to avoid both the anarchy of virulent criticism and the despotism of repression by gradual change, reconciliation, and centrist politics.

1689: John Locke publishes Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government, Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Malebranche's Treatise on Nature and Grace placed on the Index, until 1966.

1690: Spinoza's posthumous works placed on the Index, where they would remain until 1966.

1697: Bayle publishes Historical and Critical Dictionary, which famously defends fideism, skepticism, and toleration.

1698: Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government published, giving a defense and picture of republican government. All Bayle's works placed on the Index, until 1966.

1699: The French bishop Fenelon publishes the didactic novel The Adventures of Telemachus. The novel argues for a parliamentary government, an aristocratic constitutional monarchy, a league of nations to promote European peace, an end to luxury and return to simplicity, and an end to the mercantile system, state monopolies, and imperialism. The novel greatly angers Louis XIV, since it by implication heavily criticized his bellicose absolute monarchy, with its imperialism, mercantilism, and crushing taxes. It quickly becomes one of the most-read works of the emerging Enlightenment.

1700: Founding at Berlin of what will become the Royal Prussian Academy of the Sciences, at Leibniz's urging. Leibniz is its first president.

1704: Death of Locke. End of the Age of Reason. Age of Enlightenment begins, with Locke and Newton as its tutelary deities, and Voltaire their great propagandist.

Thomas Jefferson to John Trumbull, February 1789: "Bacon, Locke and Newton...I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived...and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical & Moral sciences."

1704-5. Leibniz writes (but does not publish) New Essays on Human Understanding, his challenge to Locke's Essay. It would finally be published in 1765.

1705. Samuel Clarke publishes Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God.

1706. Death of Pierre Bayle. Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke begin publishing their debate. Clarke publishes A Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainly of the Christian Revelation.

1707: Collins publishes The Use of Reason. Malebranche's Search after Truth placed on the Index, until 1966.

1708. Collins and Clarke conclude publishing their debate.

1709. George Berkeley publishes Theory of Vision. The French bishop Bossuet's Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture is posthumously published. In this work, which perhaps by implication criticizes the political ideas of Bossuet's sparring partner Fenelon, and also of Jean Bodin, Bossuet argues that kings should have absolute political authority, and that this authority is theirs by divine right--a grant from God, not from Church or Pope. He proves this by appealing to the Bible.

1710. Leibniz publishes Theodicy (Essays of Theodicy on the goodness of God, the freedom of man and the origin of evil). Berkeley publishes Principles of Human Knowledge.

1711: Shaftesbury publishes Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, founding the moral sense school of ethics, according to which we have a non-reflective faculty, primarily emotional or aesthetic, that distinguishes right from wrong and drives us to value the right.

1712. Christian Wolff publishes Powers of the Human Understanding in German. Malebranche's Treatise on Morality and Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion placed on the Index, where they would remain until 1966.

1713. Abbe de Saint-Pierre publishes Projet de paix perpetuelle (Project for Perpetual Peace). Collins publishes Of Free-thinking. Berkeley publishes Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Leibniz proposes to the Austrian Empire that it establish an Austrian Academy of Sciences; this is finally done in 1847. The new Bourbon government of Spain founds the Royal Spanish Academy, "to fix the voices and vocabularies of the Castilian language with propriety, elegance, and purity."

1714: Bernard de Mandeville publishes The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Leibniz composes Principles of Nature and of Grace, founded on Reason and Monadology. John Toland publishes Reasons for Naturalizing the Jewish People.

1715. Leibniz and Clarke begin their correspondence.

1716. Leibniz and Clarke conclude their correspondence. Death of Leibniz in November.

1717. Clarke publishes the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. Collins publishes Human Liberty.

1718. Saint-Pierre publishes Discours sur la Polysynodie.

1719. Wolff publishes On God, the World and the Soul of Man in German.

1720. Leibniz's Monadology posthumously published by Wolff and others. Berkeley composes De Motu, his examination of the foundations of Newton's physics. Wolff publishes On Man’s Acts of Commission and Omission in German. Mandeville publishes Free Thoughts on Religion.

1721: Montesquieu publishes Persian Letters. Wolff publishes On the Social Life of Man in German.

1723: Wolff publishes On the Operations of Nature in German. Mandeville publishes Search into the Nature of Society.

1724: Collins publishes On the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion. Wolff publishes On the Intentions of Natural Things in German.

1725: Francis Hutcheson publishes An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, which develops the moral sense theory of ethics, argues that only benevolent actions are properly speaking moral, and presents one of the first appearances of the famous utilitarian phrase, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Giambattista Vico publishes the first edition of his Scienza Nuova (Principles of a New Science Concerning the Nature of the Nations, Through Which the Principles of a New System of the Natural Law of the Gentes are Retrieved), laying down a philosophy of history which presents a social constructionist view of society and its institutions, emphasizes the impact that the pre-rational and poetry have on human thought and institutions, stresses the influence of socially-embedded individuals over social change, and lays the groundwork for a secular history of all humanity. It is also one of the first works to use and clearly articulate the concept of cultures, treating cultural differences both as something to be explained and something that explains. The work was not a wide success during the Enlightenment, but would become a key text of the philosophy of history 100 years later, with the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet calling Vico "the Copernicus of the philosophy of history."

1726: Joseph Butler publishes Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, refuting psychological egoism.

1727: Death of Newton.

1728: Hutcheson publishes An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections and Illustrations upon the Moral Sense. Wolff publishes Logic Treated according to the Scientific Method in Latin.

1730: Wolff publishes Ontology in Latin.

1731: Cudworth's Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality posthumously published. John Gay publishes Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principles of Virtue or Morality, which further advances proto-utilitarian themes.

1732: Wolff publishes Empirical Psychology in Latin. Mandeville publishes The Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity. Berkeley publishes Alciphron. Alexander Pope begins publishing Essay on Man.

1733: Voltaire’s Letters on England published in London. Pope continues publishing Essay on Man.

1734: Voltaire’s Letters on England published in French as Lettres philosophiques. Voltaire writes, but does not publish, Traite de metaphysique. Wolff publishes Rational Psychology in Latin. Pope concludes publishing Essay on Man. Locke's Essay placed on the Index, until 1966.

1736. Butler publishes The Analogy of Religion. Wolff begins publishing Natural Theology in Latin.

1737. Wolff concludes publishing Natural Theology.

1738. Voltaire publishes first edition of Elements de la Philosophie de Newton. Wolff begins publishing Universal Practical Philosophy in Latin.

1739: David Hume publishes the first two books of his Treatise of Human Nature. Wolff concludes publishing Universal Practical Philosophy. Cudworth's True Intellectual System placed on the Index, until 1966.

1740: Hume publishes the third and final book of the Treatise. The work, in his words, "fell dead-born from the press," and was almost entirely ignored for several decades. Emilie du Chatelet publishes Foundations of Physics (Institutions de Physique), a treatise examining Newtonian physics and Leibnizian metaphysics. Wolff begins publishing The Law of Nature in Latin.

1744: Mandeville's Fable of the Bees placed on the Index, where it would remain until 1966. The French Academy of Sciences begins publishing the Geometrical Map of France, which will be complete in 1793. It would be the first topographic map of a whole country.

1745: La Mettrie publishes Natural History of the Soul, presenting a materialist theory of the mind. Great outcry ensues: he is forced to leave Paris for the more free-press Netherlands.

1746: Condillac publishes Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge.

1747: Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui publishes Principles of Natural Law. This book grounds morality in a sort of rationalist utilitarianism a la Pufendorf. Burlamaqui claimed that the laws of nature were those that a rational egoist would follow. The book and his posthumous Principles of Political Right (1751), were widely influential until the 1780s, and his theory of constitutionalism and separation of powers influenced the framing of the U. S. Constitution. He defended a mixed government, in which the elites had more power than the non-elites: this irked Rousseau. His claim that people have a right to pursue happiness influenced Jefferson.

1748: Montesquieu publishes On the Spirit of the Laws; Or, on the Relation the Laws Must Have with the Constitution of Each Government, Its Mores, Its Climate, Its Religion, Its Commerce, etc. Hume publishes An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. La Mettrie publishes Man a Machine. He then publishes Discourse on Happiness, or, Anti-Seneca. More outcry at his materialst hedonism: he is forced to leave the Netherlands for the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Wolff concludes publishing The Law of Nature.

1749: David Hartley publishes Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations, founding the psychological school of associationism. Diderot publishes Letter on the Blind.

1750: Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes A Discourse on whether the Restoration of the Sciences and Arts Has Contributed to the Purification of Morals, arguing that progress in the arts and sciences has harmed virtue and moral conduct. The discourse quickly makes him famous throughout Europe. La Mettrie publishes Systeme d’Epicure.

1751: Hume publishes An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Voltaire publishes Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations. La Mettrie publishes L’Art de Jouir. Burlamaqui's Principles of Political Right posthumously published. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws placed on the Index, until 1966.

1751-1772: The publishing of the Encyclopedie, edited by D'Alembert and Diderot. The first volume is published in 1751.

1754: Jonathan Edwards publishes An Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions Respecting that Freedom of the Will which is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency. Condillac publishes Treatise on Sensations, presenting his sensationist theory of the mind. The theory will preoccupy French philosophy for the next 80 years.

1755: Rousseau publishes A Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. The Abbe Morelly anonymously publishes The Code of Nature; or, the True Spirit of the Laws. In this work, he argues that private property is a main source of wrongdoing, that the natural state of human beings is one of community of property and equality, that the government should try to bring about that state within society, that eliminating the right to unused private property would eliminate poverty and wrongdoing, and that police, organized religion, and marriage should also be abolished. These ideas greatly influenced later critics of private property, like Babeuf, Fourier, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, and Marx.

Hutcheson's A System of Moral Philosophy posthumously published. Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn publish Pope, A Metaphysician! Kant publishes Universal Natural History.

1757: Hume publishes The Natural History of Religion.

1758: Helvetius publishes De l'esprit: Or, Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties. Emer de Vattel publishes The Law of Peoples [Nations]; or, Principles of Natural Law, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns. The Catholic Church decides that a book's advocating heliocentrism as a fact rather than a hypothesis is no longer a sufficient reason to place the book on the Index. End of the Scientific Revolution, and beginning of the Reign of Science: the Enlightenment is in full swing. (However, unexpurgated versions of Galileo's Dialogue and Copernicus's De Revolutionibus were still banned.)

1758-9: Linnaeus publishes the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae, introducing binomial classification of animals.

1759: Voltaire publishes Candide, or, Optimism. Adam Smith publishes The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the greatest work of the moral sentiments school. Encyclopedie officially banned; is allowed to continue publication in secret. Helvetius's De l'esprit placed on the Index, until 1966.

1761: Holbach publishes Christianity Unveiled. Mendelssohn publishes Philosophical Writings. All Hume's works placed on the Index, until 1966.

1762: In April, Rousseau publishes On the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right. In May, he publishes Emile: Or, on Education. That work's "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" rejects original sin, revelation, and the doctrine that there is one true religion. The book was that year banned and publicly burned in Paris and Geneva, and warrants were issued in Paris for Rousseau's arrest. Montesquieu's Persian Letters placed on the Index, until 1966. Kant submits the Prize Essay on morality.

1763. Thomas Bayes’s "Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances" posthumously published: the founding document of the Bayesian theory of probability.

1764: Cesare Beccaria publishes On Crimes and Punishments, a proto-utilitarian treatment of the subject which excites wide admiration. Voltaire begins publishing Dictionnaire philosophique. Thomas Reid publishes An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, a challenge to Hume's empiricism and skepticism and a defense of common-sense realism. It is the founding document of the school of Scottish Common-Sense philosophy.

1765-1769: William Blackstone publishes Commentaries on the Laws of England. Inter alia, it enshrines and systematizes the doctrine of coverture, according to which a married woman has no independent legal rights of her own, but that all her legal rights fall under the control of her husband.

1766: Kant publishes Dreams of a Spirit-seer. Holbach anonymously publishes Christianity Unveiled; or, an Examination of the Principles and Effects of the Christian Religion. Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments placed on the Index.

1767: Adam Ferguson publishes An Essay on the History of Civil Society, arguing that with the spread of the division of labor and the norms of commercial society, moral corruption occurs; which must be resisted by a return to civic virtues. Mendelssohn publishes Phaedo, or, on the Immortality of the Soul.

1768: Joseph Priestley publishes An Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty, offering one of the first clear distinctions between political and civil rights.

1768-1778: Abraham Tucker publishes The Light of Nature Pursued, which developed utilitarian themes, arguing for psychological egoism and that individual interests could be reconciled through God's will in the interests of the whole, on which morality is founded.

1770: Holbach anonymously publishes System of Nature; or, on the Laws of the Physical World and the Moral World, advocating a universal materialism and determinism that denied free will and the existence of God. Kant publishes the Inaugural Dissertation. Voltaire concludes publishing his Dictionnaire philosophique.

1772: Holbach anonymously publishes Le bon-sens; or, Natural Ideas Opposed to Supernatural Ideas. Diderot publishes Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville. Encyclopedie concludes publication.

1773: Holbach anonymously publishes Natural Politics; or Discourse on the True Principles of Government, and The Social System; or, Natural Principles of Morals and Politics, with an Examination of the Influence of Government on Customs and Mores. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, begins publishing The Origin and Progress of Language, eventually concluded in 1794. In it, he presented as hypothesis the claim that humans and apes shared a common ancestral ape, exploring the implications of the hypothesis.

1774: Johann Gottfried Herder publishes This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity, his first major work in the philosophy of history, arguing that history sees the unveiling of increasing reason and humanity, and also that people in different historical epochs have radically different mentalities. Jules Michelet was to call Herder "the Kepler" of the philosophy of history, to Vico's Copernicus.

1776: Jeremy Bentham publishes A Fragment on Government. Adam Smith publishes An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Death of David Hume. Holbach anonymously publishes Universal Morality; or, the Duties of Man Founded on Nature and

Ethocracy; or, Government Founded on Morality. Helvetius’s De l’Homme: Ses facultes intellectuelles, et son education posthumously published.

1777: Lessing composes (and publishes?) "On the proof of the spirit and of power." Lessing also begins composing "The education of the human race."

1778: Death of Rousseau.

1779: Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion posthumously published. Emilie du Chatelet's Discourse on Happiness posthumously published.

1780: Gaetano Filangieri publishes the first two books of his The Science of Legislation, treating the general principles of legislation and of political economy. Lessing completes "The education of the human race." Bentham prints, but does not publish, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

1781: Kant publishes Critique of Pure Reason; which in a few years stuns the German philosophical world. Condorcet publishes Reflections on Negro Slavery, which denounces it. De Borda publishes Memoire sur les elections au scrutin, advocating the Borda Count method for elections.

1783: Filangieri publishes the third book of his Science of Legislation, dealing with principles of criminal law, and criticizing the organization of the Catholic Church. Friedrich Jacobi and Mendelssohn begin their Lessing-Spinozism correspondece. Kant publishes Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science.

1784: Kant and Moses Mendelssohn both publish their essays on "What Is Enlightenment?", Kant arguing that it is the individual's decision to use their reason and understanding to decide the chief questions of morals and religion for themselves, and Mendelssohn arguing that it is the improvement of people's ability to use theoretical reason: that part of reason dealing with factual questions, as opposed to moral questions. Kant also publishes Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. Filangieri's Science of Legislation placed on the Index, until 1966. James Ramsay publishes An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, which inter alia challenged Hume's scientific racist claims in the Essays.

1784-91: Herder publishes his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, continuing his themes of historicism and the progress of humanity, arguing that human nature itself changes through history.

1785: Kant publishes Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Condorcet publishes Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions, founding social choice theory. William Paley publishes Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, a leading work of conservative utilitarianism. Jacobi publishes his Spinoza correspondence with Mendelssohn. Reid publishes Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.

1786: Kant publishes Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Sciences.

1787: Mary Wollstonecraft publishes Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Condorcet publishes Letters…on the Futility of Dividing the Legislative Power, arguing for political rights for women. The Federalist Papers begin publication. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (John Stuart) publishes Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species.

1788: Kant publishes Critique of Practical Reason. Reid publishes Essays on the Active Powers of Man. Condorcet publishes Essai sur la constitution et ses functions des assemblees provincials. The Federalist Papers end publication.

1789: The Abbe Sieyes publishes What Is the Third Estate?, arguing that the common people of France constitute or represent the whole nation, and thus there is no need for separate representation of the aristocracy and the priesthood in the French Estates General. This appeal to civic nationalism--which locates the source of all political authority in the nation, civically conceived--would be highly influential in the Estates' General transformation that June into the National Assembly. The pamphlet also made the first recorded use of the term "social science." Bentham publishes Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; utilitarianism in the strict sense has been founded. Lavoisier publishes Elements of Chemistry, publicizing the chemical revolution, in which chemistry was re-founded on the law of the conservation of energy and the oxygen theory of combustion.

1790: Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London. Kant publishes Critique of Judgment.

1791: James Mackintosh publishes Vindiciae Gallicae, answering Burke's Reflections and defending the doctrine of the rights of man and liberal revolution.

1792: Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wilhelm von Humboldt writes The Limits of State Action, his defense and presentation of classical liberalism, but does not publish it for fear of the Prussian censor. It would be published posthumously in 1851.

1793: William Godwin publishes Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, advocating strict act-utilitarianism in morality, anarchism in politics, and the doctrine of the perfectibility of humankind. Kant publishes "On the Common Saying: That May Be True in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice." The French Academy of Sciences completes publication of the Geometrical Map of France, the first topographical map of a whole country.

1793-1797: Herder publishes Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, his work of political philosophy, arguing from a cosmopolitan but nation-respecting standpoint for liberal-republican politics and state support for the needy.

1794: Condorcet writes Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind while imprisoned by the Terror. He dies in prison that year.

1794-5: Fichte publishes Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge.

1795: Condorcet's Sketch, which advocates the perfectibility doctrine, posthumously published.

1796: Fichte publishes Foundations of Natural Right, one of the last great works of social contract theory until John Rawls's Theory of Justice. Gracchus Babeuf's co-conspirator Sylvain Marechal publishes Manifesto of the Equals arguing that private property and inequality are the source of all social evils, for equal education and diet for all, for community of property in all things, for mandatory work for all, for a modest and frugal life for all, for banning revealed religion and entertainment, for total rule by government, and that the real equality of all people which these principles seek to promote is worth sacrificing even all the arts. Louis Bonald publishes Theory of Political and Religious Power, which presents the organic conception of society, criticizes what he saw as the atomism of Enlightenment thought, and challenges the normative individualism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. Joseph de Maistre publishes Considerations on France, laying the blame for the French Terror on the rationalism and social-contract thinking of the Enlightenment, and arguing that government had to be founded on religion and fear of punishment. With these two works, counter-revolutionary theory is founded.

1797: Kant publishes The Metaphysics of Morals, the theory of political and individual morality for which the Groundwork and its categorical imperative supply the foundation. The book consists of two parts: Metaphysical first principles of the doctrine of right, dealing with the moral principles regulating politics and law; and Metaphysical first principles of the doctrine of virtue, dealing with duties and virtues of individual conduct.

1798: Thomas Malthus anonymously publishes the first and most unqualified edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculation of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. Challenges the perfectibility doctrine and the possibility of a society of equals. Fichte publishes The System of Ethics according to the Science of Knowledge.

1798-1799: Fichte publishes On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World Governance, arguing that God is simply the world's moral order. Is charged with atheism and dismissed from his professorship at Jena.

1802: The French Ideologue Pierre Cabanis publishes On the Relations between the Physical and the Moral Aspects of Man, arguing for materialism about the mind. Founding of The Edinburgh Review, which would be until the middle of the century the main organ of Whig liberal-non-radical opinion in Britain. Among other things, it would publish T. B. Macaulay's famous critique of James Mill's deductivist and proto-rational-choice Essay on Government.

1803: Jean-Baptiste Say publishes A Treatise of Political Economy: Or, Simple Exposition of the Manner in which Wealth Is Formed, Distributed, and Consumed, publicizing Say's Law: "a glut can take place only when there are too many means of production applied to one kind of product and not enough to another."

1804: Death of Kant.

1807: Hegel publishes The Phenomenology of Spirit.

1808: The utopian socialist Charles Fourier publishes his first book: Theory of the Four Movements and of General Destinies, arguing that human nature could be perfected if society allowed for the freer play, correctly channeled, of the natural emotions, and arguing that societies pass through four major stages: Savagery, Barbarism, Patriarchalism, and [Bourgeois] Civilization. The utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon publishes Introduction to the Scientific Works of the 19th Century, giving a positivist account of science and its development.

1809: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck publishes Zoological Philosophy: Or, an Exposition of Considerations bearing on the Natural History of Animals, arguing for (1) evolution of species by means of a complexifying chemical force and adaptation to environments by the use and disuse of inheritable acquired characteristics, and (2) the descent of human beings from anthropoidal apes. Bentham publishes Catechism on Parliamentary Reform.

1813: The socialist Robert Owen publishes A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character. Saint-Simon publishes Memoir on the Science of Man, urging that the social sciences be approached positivistically and founded on physiology.

1814: Benjamin Constant publishes The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and their Relation to European Civilization, two pamphlets, of which the first argued that Bonaparte's spirit of conquest was contrary to the age's commercial spirit, so that it would lose out in the end; and the second examined the harms done to the psyches and morals of people subjected to systematic abuses of declared political rights, especially the way in which all citizens eventually become complicit in the tyranny.

1815: Constant publishes Principles of Politics Applicable to All Represenative Governments, defending the separation of powers, a bicameral legislature, a moderate federalism, a property-owning qualification for voting, the standard civil liberties, jury trials, and an independent judiciary.

1817: David Ricardo publishes his great Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, the central text of classical economics; it set and executed as the central task of political economy the specifying of the laws that regulate distribution of goods and services. Hegel publishes Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, his summary presentation of his philosophical system.

1817-1818: The French Ideologue Destutt de Tracy publishes all of Elements of Ideology.

1818: Arthur Schopenhauer publishes the first edition of The World as Will and Representation. Like Hume's Treatise, it falls dead-born from the press, and is almost entirely ignored.

1819: Sismondi publishes New Principles of Political Economy, or, On Wealth in its Relations with Population, arguing against the Mandevillean doctrine that the pursuit of individual self-interest produces the greatest good for all, that after an economic crisis a laissez-faire economy would revert to an equilibrium only in the long run and after a frightful amount of suffering, and for unemployment compensation and sick leave for workers. Thomas Wright Hill and Rowland Hill help found the Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement of Birmingham, whose bylaws describe their method of the single transferable vote, a system that will later be taken up by many countries. Constant gives his famous lecture "On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns," distinguishing ancient liberty--concerned with equal participation in political decision-making--from modern liberty--freedom from interference and to engage in commerce. The lecture argues that moderns need to keep both forms of liberty alive, and reconcile them. Bentham's Traite de legislation civile et penale placed on the Index, until 1966.

1820: James Mill first publishes his Essay on Government. Destutt de Tracy's Elements of Ideology placed on the Index, until 1966.

1820-1822: Francois Guizot, a leading Doctrinaire and future Prime Minister of France, gives his famous lectures at the Sorbonne on The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe. In them, he criticizes social contract theory, on the ground that legitimacy comes not from conformity to everyone's will but from conformity to right reason; defends representative government, on the ground that de facto sovereignty is only granted temporarily and for as long as its wielder's actions satisfy the principles of justice, and that it is the best mechanism for having the opinion of society represented in government; and argues that political representation must be organized so as to best promote officials' having genuine and relevant knowledge about all segments of society and their opinions.

1821: Hegel publishes Elements of the Philosophy of Right.

1822: Charles Fourier publishes his magnum opus, Theory of Universal Unity, in which his utopian socialist ideas are laid down, including his famous analysis of the thirteen basic human passions and how they are corrupted in industrial society; his survey of the 144 evils of industrial society, including the waste and inefficiency caused by free enterprise and the misery and boredom of most wage-labor for bosses; an acute analysis of the ways in which life in free enterprise capitalism degraded and pinched and corrupted the natural emotions of people; and his proposals for the phalansteries in which people would be attracted to efficient and joyful work by the proper channeling of the passions and a culture of free love. Saint-Simon publishes Of the Industrial System, arguing that society should be led by an authoritarian socialist government directed by industrialist businessmen and scientist-engineers, with industrial parliaments to represent the interests of workers.

1823: Death of David Ricardo. Saint-Simon publishes The Catechism of the Industrialists, arguing that the industrialists, led by the bankers, should organize into one great congress and have control over the national budget. This congress must guarantee to workers the right to paid employment.

1824: The Anglo-Irish socialist William Thompson publishes An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, arguing that it is only if they get all the value of what they produce that workers have security; that the more security workers have, the greater their incentive to work; that things not made by work should be equally distributed, and that every failure to give the worker the full value of her productions must promote the more equal distribution of wealth. Bentham and James Mill begin publishing The Westminster Review, a journal of ideas which becomes the mouthpiece of philosophic radicalism, and an alternative to the non-radical liberalism of The Edinburgh Review.

1825: Thompson publishes Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery; criticizing inter alia James Mill's doctrine that married women did not need the vote because their interests were fully represented by their husband. The socialist Thomas Hodgskin publishes Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital; or, the Unproductiveness of Capital Proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen, arguing against the doctrine of Mill, Bentham, and Ricardo that the capitalist is entitled to the great rewards given him under laissez faire because he performs a great service. The argument is that people should be rewarded based on the utility of the work they do, and all the capitalist does (as a pure capitalist) is buy labor and sell its produce, which is not useful enough to warrant the vast profits some capitalists acquire. Death of Saint-Simon. Upon his death, his disciples Auguste Comte, the banker Olinde Rodrigues, Prosper Enfantin, and Armand Bazard publish the journal The Producer and found the Saint-Simonian movement, which will have a huge influence on the thought and political policies of the July Monarchy and the Second French Empire.

1826: Founding by Bentham and other Philosophic Radicals of University College London, with the aim of making available a non-confessional university education.

1827: Thompson publishes Labour Rewarded. The Claims of Labour and Capital Conciliated; or, How to Secure to Labour the Whole Products of its Exertions, arguing that Hodgskin's proposal would make the economy even more competitive, that competition should be replaced by cooperation in small workers' communes, and that all who work should receive the same compensation. Jules Michelet publishes a French translation of Vico's work, bringing Vico's historicism to a wide audience. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason placed on the Index, until 1966. Condorcet's Sketch also, until 1966.

1828: Guizot gives his famous lectures at the Sorbonne on The General History of Civilization in Europe, arguing that European civilization is pluralistic, in that it has always seen a competition of equally powerful institutions and values; that that competition is the key to the development of European civilization; that class conflict was a key driver of that competition and hence of social change; that from the Middle Ages to the present, two crucial trends were the destruction of aristocracy and the destruction of local liberty and local self-government; that what is crucial to preserving liberty is a balance between central government and local self-determination; and that the great threat to liberty in 19th century France came from an atomized delocalized populace and an all-powerful centralized state. Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, both of whom will soon journey to the United States and publish celebrated studies of its democracy, are in the audience.

1829: James Mill publishes An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, bringing to a high pitch the associationist psychology. Fourier publishes The New Industrial World, a summary of the economic part of his theory. T. B. Macaulay publishes in The Edinburgh Review his famous critique of Mill's deductivism and proto-rational-choice assumptions in his Essay on Government.

1829-1830: The Saint-Simonians Enfantin, Bazard, Abel Transon, and Hippolye Carnot organize and give a series of public lectures in Paris expouding the doctrines of their school. These would be collected in the Exposition of the Doctrine of Saint-Simon, a founding document of socialism which would have a massive influence on socialism and the policies of the French state. Their ideas exert a great influence throughout the 1830s: on the Philosophic Radicals in England, especially John Stuart Mill; on Thomas Carlyle; and in Germany on the poet Heinrich Heine, the writer Rahel Varnhagen, on the Young Germans, and above all on the Young Hegelians, including Feuerbach, D. F. Strauss, Moses Hess, and Karl Marx.

1830: Thompson publishes Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities on the Principles of Mutual Co-operation, United Possessions and Equality of Exertions and the Means of Enjoyments.

1830-1842: Auguste Comte publishes Cours de philosophie positive, the founding text of positivism.

1831: James Mackintosh publishes Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy. John Herschel publishes A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. Jules Michelet publishes Introduction to Universal History, arguing that history is the record of the interminable struggle of "man against nature, spirit against matter, liberty against necessity; and that we see in history the progressive triumph of liberty. Death of Hegel.

1831-32: Alexis de Tocqueville spends nine months in the United States to inspect U. S. prisons. While there, he systematically gathers data and information on the new republic and its society.

1832: John Austin publishes The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, the founding document of legal positivism. Death of Bentham.

1833: Charles Lyell publishes Principles of Geology, arguing that the earth's present geological state is not the result of cataclysms, as Georges Cuvier's previously dominant theory had argued, but of the long-drawn-out aggregrate effects of imperceptible motions occurring right now. This theory of the tremendous effects that small events compounded over millennia could have would great influence Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

1834: The Royal Statistical Society founded, under the name of the Statistical Society of London. The French follower of Saint-Simon Pierre Leroux publishes an article titled "Individualism and Socialism," which is one of the first prominent usages of the two words.

1835: Tocqueville publishes the first volume of Democracy in America, this one on political institutions. James Mill publishes A Fragment on Mackintosh, replying to the latter's Dissertation. Adolphe Quetelet publishes On Man and the Development of His Faculties; or, an Essay on Social Physics, which made the stunning finding that the statistics for crimes in a nation remained roughly the same year after year: from the national crime statistics, one could, after controlling for population change predict with a good deal of accuracy and confidence how many murders there would be next year. This raised the question of whether the social structures and patterns discovered by social statistics challenged the possibility of free will. The book also presented the concept of the statistically average person and being one of the first applications of statistics to social patterns. Galileo's Dialogue and Copernicus's De Revolutionibus removed from the Index. Oberlin College in Ohio becomes the first college in the United States to regularly admit African-American students.

1837: William Whewell publishes History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times. Oberlin College becomes the first co-educational college or university in the English-speaking world.

1838: Cudworth's Treatise Concerning Freewill posthumously published.

1839: The socialist Louis Blanc publishes The Organization of Work, arguing against a competition-based economy, in favor of equal wages, for the principle to each according to her needs, from each according to her ability, for nationalizing credit, and for using that credit to start workers' cooperatives which would put non-cooperative private enterprise out of business. Founding of the American Statistical Association.

1840: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon publishes What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, notoriously arguing that property is theft, by which he meant that private property in unused land or goods constituted the theft of what ought to be common property of all persons. Tocqueville publishes the second volume of Democracy in America, this one on civil society and associations. Whewell publishes Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History, in two parts: History of Scientific Ideas and Novum Organon Renovatum. Pierre Leroux publishes his great socialist-republican treatise, On Humanity. The French socialist and advocate of workers' cooperatives Etienne Cabet makes one of the first recorded uses of the word "Communism."

1841: Friedrich List publishes The National System of Political Economy, arguing against the free-traders that industrializing nations are wise to protect domestic industries, and that all rich industrialized nations have used protectionist measures. Schopenhauer publishes The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, consisting of the essays "On the Foundation of Morality" and "On the Freedom of the Human Will." The first argued that the basis of morality was the motive of compassion, and that the only actions of genuine moral worth were those motivated by compassion for others. The second argued that human beings seen externally have no free will, but seen internally solely from the perspective of their own will, which is what makes the individual what she is, humans have free will. Ludwig Feuerbach publishes The Essence of Christianity, arguing that religion is the consciousness of humanity's capacities and objective nature, and that God is identical to that objective nature, i.e., to the nature of humanity. Founding of the Journal des Economistes, by Say's French disciples, who advocated free trade and laissez-faire. It was undoubtedly the most famous economic journal of the 19th century, publishing works by Bastiat, Walras, and Pareto, and devotedly read by John Stuart Mill.

1842: Founding of the American Ethnological Society by Albert Gallatin and others. It is today a leading society for ethnology, the study of nations, peoples, and ethnic groups.

1843: John Stuart Mill publishes A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. Vincenzo Gioberti publishes On the Civil and Moral Primacy of the Italians, a key work in the rising Italian nationalism as well as a claim to Italy's cultural primacy in Europe. The Economist begins publication, then as now defending free trade.

1844: Marx publishes On the Jewish Question. He writes, but does not publish, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, presenting his famous theory of how labor is alienated under capitalism. Schopenhauer publishes an expanded edition of The World as Will and Representation, which begins to find readers, including the composer Richard Wagner.

1845: Friedrich Engels publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England, which offered a searing account of the misery of English industrial workers and their families and argued that their class had been better off before the Industrial Revolution. Frederick Douglass publishes Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, one of the great portraits and indictments of American chattel slavery. Max Stirner publishes The Ego and Its Own (The Individual and His Uniqueness), arguing that rational people will do only what is in their self-interest, that there are no such things as rights, that property is kept and acquired only through power, that the state and society are owed no allegiance, that people should associate in unions of egoists only when and to the extent that it is in their own self-interest to do so, and that to be free is to fully realize that you are doing only what is in your own self-interest.

1845-1846: Marx and Engels write The German Ideology, which puts forward their materialist conception of history. It is not published until 1932.

1846: Carl Gustav Carus publishes Psyche: On the Developmental History of the Soul, proposing the first worked-out theory of what we would today call the unconscious mind, its workings, and how they influence the conscious mind and our behavior.

1847: Proudhon publishes The System of Economic Contradictions: Or, Philosophy of Poverty. Marx replies with The Poverty of Philosophy: An Answer to The Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon. Beginning of the struggle between anarchism and Marxism. Tocqueville submits two parliamentary reports justifying French conquest of Algeria on moral civilizing-mission grounds. The Austrian Academy of Sciences is founded, after Leibniz had proposed it in 1713.

1848: Marx and Engels publish Manifesto of the Communist Party, giving the programme of their Communist League. Mill publishes Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy.

1849: Henry David Thoreau publishes Resistance to Civil Government, arguing that citizens are morally permitted and even obligated to resist and break unjust laws. All of Vincenzo Gioberti's works placed on the Index, until 1966. Juan Donoso Cortes, a former moderate liberal turned counter-revolutionary by the 1848 revolutions, gives in the Spanish Parliament his famous Discourse on Dictatorship, urging the necessity of repressive dictatorship when faced with a fractured and revolutionary society.

1850: The laissez-faire economist Frederic Bastiat publishes The Law, arguing from a theory of natural rights to the view that the aim of law and state should be to protect the liberty and property of people, and to defend the institutions of a free market. It should not aim at socialist goals nor at large redistributions of wealth.

1851: Herbert Spencer publishes Social Statics: or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. Offers a radical democratic theory which advocated giving the vote to all women and children, nationalizing land, and a right to ignore the state. Donoso Cortes publishes his Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism, arguing for a counter-revolutionary politics of absolute monarchy and Catholic hegemony. John Chapman and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) buy The Westminster Review and open it to discussions of evolution.

1852: All Proudhon's works placed on the Index, until 1966. Marx publishes in New York The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louiis Bonaparte.

1853-5: The conservative and anti-democrat Arthur de Gobineau publishes An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, a founding work of scientific racism. In it, he argued that there was a natural inequality of races, with the Aryan race the greatest and most valuable; he explained the decline of civilizations, social revolutions, and the rise of democracy as the (to him) tragic result of mixing of higher and lower races.

1855: Ludwig Buechner publishes Force and Matter: Empiricophilosophical Studies. It quickly becomes "the Bible of German materialism" in philosophy and a key text for German freethinkers.

1856: Mill's Principles of Political Economy placed on the Index, until 1966. Tocqueville publishes The Old Regime and the Revolution, arguing that the French Revolution saw an intensification of the centralization of power that had been taking place under the Old Regime, and explaining why the revolution took place in France and not elsewhere, and why it so successfully swept away so much of the Old Regime.

1856-64: Rudolf Hermann Lotze publishes Microcosm: Ideas on Natural History and the History of Humanity, arguing that the scientific view of human beings and the causes of their actions and the common-sense view of human beings and the causes of their actions are, properly understood, perfectly compatible.

1857: Death of Auguste Comte.

1858: Proudhon publishes On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, considered by many to be his greatest work.

1859: Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; within a few years, evolution of species (though not natural selection) becomes widely accepted by intellectuals. Mill publishes On Liberty. Schopenhauer publishes the third edition of The World as Will and Representation, right before his death and the height of his fame in the 1860s. Alexander Bain publishes The Emotions and the Will, his great treatment of moral psychology and the free will problem from the associationist theory of mind, incorporating the results of introspection and experiment. Founding in Germany of Historische Zeitschrift (Historical Journal), the first journal dedicated to publishing the critical historical science championed by Leopold von Ranke, which insisted on rigorous checking and provision of sources; a strong desire to avoid presenting fictions as verifiable facts; and presenting the past as it actually was, not in a false way primarily aimed at illustrating some point for one's contemporaries. Death of Tocqueville.

1860s: The concept of the Renaissance becomes widely established in European culture, in which it is understood as a period and movement in the 15th and 16th centuries in which there flourished humanism and optimism about humanity's powers, and a decisive break was made with the Middle Ages' worldview and conception of humanity.

1860: Giuseppe Mazzini publishes On the Duties of Man, Addressed to Workingmen, a summary of his nationalist-republican principles which aimed at showing how they served the interests of the working class. Herbert Spencer publishes "The social organism," in The Westminster Review, arguing that there are significant analogies between organic bodies and social bodies: this is one the founding documents of the organic theory of society. Death of Schopenhauer.

1861: Mill publishes Utilitarianism and Considerations on Representative Government. Proudhon publishes On War and Peace. Henry Sumner Maine publishes Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas, famously arguing that European societies have evolved from being organized around status to being organized around contract.

1862: Victor Hugo publishes Les Miserables, his great treatment of social injustice; one of the greatest social and philosophical novels ever written. Moses Hess publishes Rome and Jerusalem, his searing depiction of the subordination of the Jews in Europe, with his famous call to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. Spencer publishes First Principles of a New System of Philosophy, laying out the foundations of his Synthetic Philosophy, which reduces all natural laws to a law of progressive evolution, and bases an entire practical and theoretical philosophy on it. This system would be immensely influential through the 1890s. Ivan Turgenev publishes Fathers and Children, his great treatment of the relations between the doctrines of liberalism and existential nihilism, the view that life has no meaning or intrinsic value. Bertrando Spaventa, a Hegelian who was then possibly the leading secular philosopher in Italy, publishes what we today call Italian Philosophy in its Relations with European Philosophy.

1863: Proudhon publishes The Principle of Federation. Nikolai Chernyshevsky publishes What Is to Be Done?, his blueprint, in the form of a novel, of a revolution aimed at achieving a socialist society. This book would greatly influence Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries.

1864: Comte's Cours de philosophie positive placed on the Index, until 1966. Victor Hugo'sLes Miserables placed on the Index, until 1959. Herbert Spencer publishes Principles of Biology, in which he coins the phrase "survival of the fittest." George Perkins Marsh publishes Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, one of the first studies of how human actions can harm the natural environment. It hypothesized that great civilizations could undermine themselves by over-straining their natural environments. It became one of the founding documents of the conservation movement.

1865: Mill publishes Auguste Comte and Positivism, his famous critique of Comte's later philosophy and "religion of humanity." Pasquale Villari delivers his famous address on "Positive Philosophy and Historical Method," one of the founding documents of positivism in Italy. Control of Harvard College is passed from the Massachusetts state government to overseers appointed solely by alumni. Death of Proudhon.

1866: Dostoyevsky publishes Crime and Punishment, his famous study of how people use the idea that the end can justify the means to hide from themselves the true selfish motives for their wrongful conduct.

1867: Marx publishes the first volume of Capital: Critique of Political Economy.

1868: Alexander Bain publishes Manual of Mental and Moral Science, his great summa of the associationist theory of the mind, of results achieved in its analysis by introspection and experiment, and of a utilitarian theory of free will and morality. Otto von Gierke publishes The Law of Associations (Die Genossenschaftsrecht), arguing that corporate personality is not a fiction, but real; and that it arises prior to action of the state.

1869: Mill publishes The Subjection of Women. Eduard von Hartmann publishes The Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of the Natural Sciences, arguing that complete happiness is impossible because as the human intellect advances, the human mind becomes more susceptible to suffering, and intellectual progress is inevitable. Finds much evidence of the workings of the unconscious in many domains. Tolstoy publishes War and Peace, the title taken from Proudhon's book of 1861.

1871: Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, arguing that all humanity comes from a common source; that "races" are not separate species; that differences among the "races" are of negligible biological importance; and that fundamental traits of reasoning, emotion, sympathy, and enjoyment of beauty are possessed by other animals besides humans. Marx publishes The Civil War in France, his famous examination of the conflict's progress and causes. Edward Tylor publishes Primitive Culture, presenting the ethnographic conception of culture as the rules, habits, practices, and ideas of a society; arguing that the human mind is fundamentally the same everywhere; and showing that there are no natural differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups. The book is widely regarded as the first great work of academic anthropology. Henry Maine publishes Village Communities in East and West.

1871-1874: The marginalist revolution in economics begets neoclassical economics. William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras each independently refound economics on the marginal utility theory of value. Where the classical economics of Smith, Say, Ricardo, Mill, and Marx sees the production of commodities as the fundamental economic act, neoclassical economics sees it as the allocation of scarce resources among alternatives by a sovereign chooser. Where the classicals think that the fundamental economic question is how an economic surplus gets distributed and is put back into the production of new commodities, neoclassicals think it is how prices acquire the values they bear. Where the classicals think the most urgent problem is explaining the causes of nations’ wealth and poverty, growth and decline, the neoclassicals think it explaining how an economy’s price system can be in a stable equilibrium. The classicals see producer and consumer as the fundamental economic actors, whereas the neo-classicals see the consumer, the merchant, the financier, and the producer as fundamental. Where the classicals think dynamic questions (growth and change) are fundamental, the neoclassicals think statics is fundamental. Where the classicals make distribution and conflicts of interest central, the neoclassicals make market clearance and mutual gains central. And while the classicals think macro-economics is if anything more theoretically important than micro-economics, the neoclassicals think macro-economics reducible to micro-economics, and that economies' "decisions" on savings and investment can be assumed to be the same as individuals' decisions on those matters.

1872: Dostoyevsky publishes Demons (The Possessed), his even-handed critique in the form of a novel of revolutionary ideologies and ideologues for their ruthlessness; and of the Russian establishment's inept responses to them.

1873: Mikhail Bakunin publishes Statism and Anarchy, his famous survey of the prospects for anarchist revolution in Europe, and his critique of the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he claimed would end in a permanent dictatorship repugnant to anarchists. Death of John Stuart Mill.

1874: Henry Sidgwick publishes The Methods of Ethics, now widely considered the greatest work of moral philosophy ever published. Franz Brentano publishes the first volume of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, in which he famously distinguished mental from physical phenomena by holding that the former are always about something (have intentionality).

1875: Henry Sumner Maine publishes The Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought.

1876: Alexander Bain and associates found the journal Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. It soon became and still is one of the world's leading philosophical journals. Its original goal, however, was to record advances in empirical and scientific psychology, as well as in a priori philosophy. F. H. Bradley publishes Ethical Studies, a founding document of British Idealism, and a famous challenge to the doctrines of utilitarianism and empiricism. Opening of the Johns Hopkins University, the first university in the English-speaking world to follow the German model of offering PhDs and a curriculum of doctoral education based on graduate seminars with leading researchers. Within a decade, Harvard would be following Johns Hopkins's lead, offering many doctoral programs and, to undergraduates, a wide range of electives and majors.

1877: Francis Ysidro Edgeworth publishes New and Old Methods of Ethics. W. K. Clifford publishes in The Contemporary Review his essay on "The Ethics of Belief," famously arguing that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

1878: Friedrich Nietzsche, having broken with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Wagner, publishes Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Engels publishes Anti-Duehring [Herr Eugen Duehring's Revolution in Science], which lays down Marxism's metaphysical materialism and epistemological views.

1879: Henry George publishes Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. Argues that social and technological progress increase the value of land and thus leads speculators to increase its price so that there is less wealth left over, that people should have property in what they have made, that land should be seen as essentially common property, and that the only thing that should ideally be taxed is the value of land. Wilhelm Wundt founds the first laboratory devoted to psychology, at the University of Leipzig. In an encyclical, Pope Leo XIII declares Thomas Aquinas "the prince of scholastic philosophers" and urges Catholic thinkers to develop Thomist philosophy in order to combat what the Pope claimed were the day's false philosophies that were damaging society and religion; Aquinas's system becomes the more-or-less official philosophy of Catholicism. The Marxist August Bebel, leader of Germany's Socialist Workers' Party, publishes Woman and Socialism. Henrik Ibsen publishes and premieres his play A Doll's House, which portrays the fate of married women in a male-dominated world in which the wife was expected to have all important decisions made for her by the husband.

1880: Dostoyevski publishes The Brothers Karamazov. Founding at London of the Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy, today the leading philosophical association in Britain.

1881: Edgeworth publishes Mathematical Psychics: An essay on the application of mathematics to the moral sciences. Nietzsche publishes Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices. T. H. Green gives his famous "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract," arguing that the state should create those settings and social structures in which individuals had the best chance of successfully doing what their consciences tell them to. This became, along with some parts of Mill's Political Economy, a founding document of the "New Liberalism" of the incipient British welfare state. Ibsen publishes Ghosts, an examination of how the patriarchal morality of the time allowed husbands to carry out elaborate schemes of marital infidelity, deception, and betrayal; how wives could feel pressured to cover up these misdeeds; and how the revelation of these deceptions could have devastating consequences for others.

1882: Nietzsche publishes The Gay Science, offering his first formulation of the claim that "God is dead," and exploring the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Victor D'Hondt publishes A Practical and Reasoned System for Proportional Representation, outlining and defending the method of party-list proportional representation which is used today in at least 40 countries. Ibsen, stung by the reaction to Ghosts by professed liberals, publishes An Enemy of the People, a play examining how majorities can belittle and ostracize those individuals and minorities who voice unpopular truths; and how self-professed liberals and democrats are often complicit in this. Death of T. H. Green.

1883: Nietzsche publishes Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, a philosophical novel he considered his magnum opus. Sidgwick publishes Principles of Political Economy, offering a hybrid of classical economics and the marginal utility theory of value. T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics and Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation posthumously published. Death of Karl Marx.

1884: Engels publishes The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, an application of historical materialism to anthropology, arguing that women had been at least socially and politically equal to men until the introduction of farming and pastoralism. William James publishes in Mind his famous article, "What Is an Emotion?", presenting the James-Lange theory of emotions. The British economic historian and social reformer Arnold Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England are posthumously published and immediately recognized as a great contribution to the Historical School of economics; the settlement house Toynbee Hall is named in his honor that year. Ibsen publishes The Wild Duck, a play examining how people's happiness is often built around a lie or self-delusion, how the revelation of that lie can destroy their happiness, and how discovering the truth can have consequences so devastating that we might prefer believing a falsehood.

1885: Antenor Firmin publishes On the Equality of Human Races, refuting the claims of Gobineau and other scientific racists that some races are morally superior. Engels publishes Volume II of Marx's Capital: The Process of Circulation of Capital. A. V. Dicey publishes An Introduction to the Study of the Laws of the Constitution, outlining the principles of the unwritten British constitution and famously specifying its principles of parliamentary sovereignty, rule of law, and coexistence of law and constitutional conventions; and distinguishing political from legal sovereignty. Henry Sumner Maine publishes Popular Government,

criticizing demands for universal male suffrage and welfare-state measures, as well as the social-contract theories which he saw as justifying such demands. Founding of the American Economic Association, which is today the leading association of professional economists in North America.

1886: Nietzsche publishes Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. The Quarterly Journal of Economics begins publication: it is today one of the world's leading economics journals.

1887: Nietzsche publishes On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic.

1888: Founding of The American Anthropologist, today one of the world's leading journals of anthropology.

1889: Beginnings of the intellectual-political movement of the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, who desired a parliamentary constitutional regime for the Empire, based on positivism and science. Henri Bergson publishes An Essay on the Immediate Givens in Consciousness (Time and Free Will). George Bernard Shaw edits and publishes Fabian Essays on Socialism. Nietzsche loses his mental faculties.

1890: Alfred Marshall publishes Principles of Economics, his great synthesis of neo-classical economics and the marginal utility theory of value. Popularizes the visual explanation of prices by use of supply and demand curves; the distinction between fixed costs of production and variable costs of production; the doctrine that short-run price changes are driven chiefly by demand, while long-run price changes are shaped by changes in production costs; and the use of partial equilibrium models that could explain how an economy's entire price system might tend toward equilibrium. William James publishes the monumental Principles of Psychology, challenging the leading theories of mind of the day, including Mill and Bain's associationism, by using conceptual, introspective, empirical, and experimental evidence and argument. James George Frazer publishes The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, illustrating the similarities among religious and magical beliefs around the world. Founding of what would become the Royal Economic Society, today Britain's leading economics association.

1891: Sidgwick publishes The Elements of Politics, his comprehensive Utilitarian analysis of political principles and institutions, which defended a New Liberal position sympathetic to the welfare state. The Economic Journal begins publication, with F. Y. Edgeworth as the editor. Premiere of Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler, which examines how we are often led by unconscious impulses which are quite contrary to our conscious and morally acceptable desires and wishes.

1892: Anna Julia Cooper publishes A Voice from the South: By a Woman of the South: arguing that the education of black women would substantially improve the situation of black Americans, it is one of the first works of black feminism. Cooper also publishes "What Are We Worth?" arguing that a person's worth is in part the difference between what she produces and what is invested in her, and that by that measure, blacks did very well, since they had produced so much with so little invested in them. The anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin publishes The Conquest of Bread, his critique of the injustices and maldistribution of capitalism, and his proposal to replace it with a decentralized economic system based on mutual aid. The Philosophical Review, edited by the philosophers at Cornell University, publishes its first issue, with articles by William James and John Dewey. It is today one of the world's leading philosophy journals.

1893: Emile Durkheim publishes The Division of Labor in Society, examining the social function of the division of labor and how social order is maintained in societies with little division of labor and societies with a highly complex division of labor. Leon Brunschvicg, Elie Halevy, and other young French philosophers found Revue de la metaphysique et de morale, which soon becomes one of Europe's leading philosophy journals.

1894: Engels publishes Volume III of Marx's Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Tolstoy publishes The Kingdom of God Is within You, his famous presentation of the methods of non-violent resistance and the goal of anarchism, along with arguments for anarchism and why the state is oppressive.

1895: Ida Wells-Barnett publishes The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, exposing the severity of the phenomenon of racist lynchings in the United States, and the twisted excuses offered for them. Gustave Le Bon publishes The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Its pessimism about the people's capacity for self-rule catches the mood of the decade, and it becomes an immediate best-seller. Founding of the London School of Economics and Political Science by the Fabian Socialists, including Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and Graham Wallas. Death of Friedrich Engels.

1896: W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. Theodor Herzl publishes The Jewish State: A Proposal for a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question, arguing that the best and perhaps only way for the oppression of the Jews to be ended is the establishment of a Jewish sovereign state. William James lectures to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown on "The Will to Believe," arguing that since it is rational for me to believe that--for instance--you like me without my having prior evidence of that, then it is rational to hold religious belief without having prior evidence of it. This is his famous attempt at refuting W. K. Clifford's view that it is always wrong to believe anything without sufficient evidence. Henri Bergson publishes Matter and Memory. Gaetano Mosca publishes The Ruling Class, arguing that in all societies there is a class (a minority of the population) that rules and a class (a majority) that is ruled, that society does whatever the ruling class wants, and that therefore the notion of majority rule is an illusion. This was the founding text of the theory of elites in political science. Antonio Labriola publishes some of his Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, becoming perhaps the first university professor in the world to publicly declare himself a Marxist.

1897: Founding of the American Negro Academy, an institute devoted to equal rights for blacks. W. E. B. Du Bois presents to the Academy his famous paper, "The Conservation of Races," arguing that American blacks should preserve their racial identity and aid blacks worldwide. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., publishes "The Path of the Law," famously arguing that to understand law, we need to look at it as a (morally) "bad man" would look at it, caring only about the material consequences that applications of it will bring, and that we should see legal rules as just predictions of what judges and other legal officials will do. Durkheim publishes Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, leading Fabian Socialists, publish Industrial Democracy, a study of the possibilities of democracy in the workplace. Sigmund Freud hits upon the idea of unconscious desires as the causes of much pathological emotion and conduct. J. J. Thomson makes the first discovery of a subatomic particle (the electron).

1898: Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, arguing that women in her time were economically exploited by their menfolk, and that they had to become men's economic equals in order to obtain self respect and equal dignity. Durkheim and his associates found L'Annee Sociologique, the main organ of the Durkheimian school of sociology.

1899: Houston Stewart Chamberlain publishes The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a leading text of scientific and historical racism, arguing that the Nordic-Teutonic peoples were the most advanced and the saviors and defenders of Western civilization, while the Jews and Semitic peoples were the greatest threat to that civilization, and had always been trying to infiltrate and subvert it. The work was soon a great success and was one of the key texts of 20th-century anti-semitism and racism. Thorstein Veblen publishes The Theory of the Leisure Class, one of the first studies of the folkways of the rich; it soon causes an uproar among U. S. economists and was widely read by the public. The Marxist and socialist Eduard Bernstein publishes The Preconditions of Socialism (Evolutionary Socialism), arguing against the Marxist doctrines that the development of capitalism progressively makes the workers poorer, that the capitalists will make no concessions to workers, that the workers will never gain political power through peaceful means, that historical materialism is the true theory of history, that the labor theory of value is true, and that the workers will never end their oppression and achieve socialism unless they take control of the state through violent means. This revisionism soon causes a furious controversy among socialists across Europe. Lenin publishes The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. Franz Boas becomes Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, from which post he would become the founder of academic anthropology in the United States, the champion of four-field anthropology, and a leading critic of scientific racism.

1900: John Dewey publishes The School and Society, the founding document of Deweyan education, and his most widely influential book among the general public. Founding of the American Philosophical Association, which soon became and remains the leading philosophical association in North America. The great British legal historian F. W. Maitland publishes "The Corporation Sole," and an Introduction to Gierke's Political Theories of the Middle Ages, a transation of part of Die Genossenschaftsrecht. In these works, Maitland defends Gierke's doctrine of the reality and state-independence of corporate personality. These ideas will be immensely influential for the British pluralists. Publication by Benedetto Croce of Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx. Death of Nietzsche. Death of Henry Sidgwick.

1900-1905: Edmund Husserl publishes Logical Investigations, G. E. Moore publishes Principia Ethica, and Bertrand Russell publishes "On Denoting." With these three founding works, philosophical modernism is born, rejecting the psychologism and evolutionism of late-19th century philosophy in favor of modelling philosophical objects as a priori abstract entities; generally emphasizing form and structure over content, context, or causes; sharply distinguishing philosophy from all other fields of inquiry; and viewing with suspicion any request that the results of philosophical investigation be turnable to immediate practical use. The two main schools of this modernism are analytical philosophy and phenomenology.

1901: Freud publishes The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which soon becomes widely read. Seebohm Rowntree publishes Poverty, a Study of Town Life, in which the poverty line was for the first time used prominently in social scientific research.

1902: Founding of the American Anthropological Association. Jane Addams publishes Democracy and Social Ethics. John A. Hobson publishes Imperialism: A Study, arguing (i) that imperial conquest is driven by capitalism's insatiable need for new markets, given a falling rate of profit and increasing productive power in the metropole, and (ii) that the pursuit of empire is a major driver of war. Lenin publishes What Is to Be Done? Kropotkin publishes Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, arguing that cooperation is essential to the survival of species. Croce publishes Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistics, the first installment in his philosophical quadrilogy, The Philosophy of the Spirit (1902-1915). The Rhodes Trust begins offering Rhodes Scholarships for study at Oxford to students from the British Empire, Germany, and the United States.

1903: W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, which soon brings him international acclaim. Then publishes "The Talented Tenth," his great study of black leadership. G. E. Moore publishes Principia Ethica, in which he claimed to do for ethics what Newton's Principia Mathematica had done for physics: establish a firm theoretical foundation upon which all sensible ethical discussion could afterward take place: this foundation included the claims that ethical norms cannot be reduced to natural or psychological facts; that they are known by intuition, not by empirical reasoning; that they are real, not ultimately grounded in our thoughts or attitudes or conventions; that the central moral concept is good, not ought or right; that what is good is friendship and the appreciation of the beautiful; that what is right is the promotion of that good for everyone;

and that the method for discovering and justifying these doctrines is the analysis of moral concepts like good and right. This was the first work of analytical philosophy to be a widespread success in professional philosophy. Founding of the American Political Science Association. Founding by Croce of the journal La Critica (Critique), which would be a leading journal of ideas in Italy until its dissolution in 1944. Death of Herbert Spencer.

1904: Elie Halevy publishes La formation du radicalisme philosophique (The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism), his great history and retrospective of the moral, political, and economic theories of the Philosophic Radicals.

1904-5: Max Weber publishes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

1905: Founding of the American Sociological Association. Freud publishes Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Croce publishes Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, the second installment in his Philosophy of the Spirit. A. C. Pigou, who would soon succeed Alfred Marshall as Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, publishes Principles and Methods of Industrial Peace. A. V. Dicey publishes Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, his famous account of how English law and public policy had moved from supporting laissez-faire individualism to welfare-state measure and government regulation of business.

1906: Vilfredo Pareto publishes Manual of Political Economy, publicizing the idea of pareto-superiority and an ordinalist approach to welfare economics. Benedetto Croce publishes What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel.

1906-1908: Edward Westermarck publishes The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, a monumental study of the different moral ideas of different cultures, and a challenge to the doctrine that moral judgments can be objectively and universally true.

1907: Henri Bergson publishes Creative Evolution, which soon brings him world fame. The Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer publishes The Question of Nationality and Social Democracy, one of the few Marxist works to squarely tackle the problems of nationalism and national identity. Alain Locke, a Harvard graduate, becomes the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, and the only one until the 1960s.

1908: The anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel publishes Reflections on Violence, arguing that workers need the myth of a general strike in order to keep up the struggle against capitalist exploitation. Also publishes The Illusions of Progress, arguing that Marxist theories of progress supported a statist approach to socialism, and that workers should abandon the desire to capture the state, and instead seek reform and improvement through strikes and agitation at work.

1909: Mohandas K. Gandhi publishes Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) in Gujarati, with an English translation appearing the following year. Lenin publishes Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which challenges the emerging doctrine of Marxist positivism, and defends metaphysical materialism. Croce publishes The Philosophy of the Practical: Economics and Ethics, the third volume in his quadrilogy The Philosophy of the Spirit. Freud and his associates in the psychoanalytic movement make a triumphant visit to the United States, receiving the praise of William James, among others. After which, psychoanalysis acquires many converts in North America.

1910: Philip Wicksteed publishes The Common Sense of Political Economy: Including a Study of the Human Basis of Economic Law, popularizing neoclassical economics and its foundation in the marginal utility theory of value. Emma Goldman publishes Anarchism and Other Essays. Publication by Rudolf Hilferding of the great Marxist treatment of the new imperialist world-economy, Finance Capital. Dewey publishes How We Think. Death of Tolstoy.

1911: Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Our Androcentric Culture; or, the Man-Made World. Croce publishes The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Robert Michels publishes Political Parties, arguing that Mosca's elite theory applies not only to society in general, but also in every organization. In all societies and organizations, Michels argues, there is always an oligarchical elite that rules. This is his "iron law of oligarchy," which applies even to organizations publicly dedicated to internally democratic rule. Franz Boas publishes The Mind of Primitive Man, a refutation of scientific racism and of claims that some races are naturally more intelligent than others.

1912: Hilaire Belloc publishes The Servile State, arguing that industrial capitalism and socialism both lead to the many working as servants for a few, and that the remedy is small independent communities of producers, which he claimed had arisen in the late Middle Ages, before they were done in by the rise of capitalism. Pigou publishes Wealth and Welfare, investigating the national income: how to measure it, the effects of different distributions of it, and what affects its variability. Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher and novelist, publishes The Tragic Sense of Life.

1913: The Marxist philosopher and economist Rosa Luxemburg publishes her great work, The Accumulation of Capital, which tackles the question of how exactly in free-market capitalism the means for future production (capital) are created, distributed, and then employed in future production. The British pluralist J. N. Figgis publishes Churches in the Modern State, arguing that sub-state associations have a corporate life independent of the state, that the state should not invade the proper sphere of these associations, and that associations are just as important a political category as are the state and the individual. Charles A. Beard publishes An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, famously arguing that the U. S. Framers were capitalists who designed the Constitution so as to protect the special interests of capitalists and merchants against the interests of farmers and planters. The Fabian Socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw found the review of ideas The New Statesman to promote Fabian, non-Marxist, socialist ideas. They hoped it would be an organ for the new class of civic- and socialistically-minded meritocratic professionals that they had done much to create.

1914: S. G. Hobson publishes National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out, a book which identified the wage system under capitalism as the cause of the subordination of labor, and proposed as a remedy guild socialism: a system of national guilds working in partnership with the state. Emma Goldman publishes The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, which examined the political messages of the new socially-conscious drama of Shaw, Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, and many others. Bertrand Russell delivers the Lowell Lectures in Boston, On Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, introducing philosophical modernism to the United States. The Westminster Review ceases publication, after 90 years of service to the world of ideas.

1915: Croce concludes The Philosophy of the Spirit by publishing its final installment, Theory and History of Historiography.