The British had been indifferent to the fate of British Columbia until the Alaska Purchase and the new Dominion status (which were almost simultaneous).

London now pays attention, and realizes British Columbia's value as a base for its imperial trade opportunities in the Pacific and the need of the Royal Navy for a station in the region.

Governor Anthony Musgrave proposes an attractive plan for joining Canada, with the Dominion paying off British Columbia's debt and building a new Canadian transcontinental railway that would eliminate the reliance on the American transcontinental.

Meanwhile, the United States is so focused on issues of Reconstruction that few Americans pick up on Secretary of State William Seward's grand dream to expand Manifest Destiny to the Pacific.

Edweard Muybridge travels to the newly acquired Alaska to photograph the native Tlingit, occasional Russian inhabitants, and dramatic landscapes for the U.S. government in 1868.

The local Māori are weakened and intimidated, fighting had comes to an end in November, and an uneasy peace prevails on the west coast until June 1868, with the outbreak of the third Taranaki War, generally known as Titokowaru's War, between the Ngāti Ruanui Māori tribe and the New Zealand Government.

The British government recalls Sir George Grey, who had again been appointed Governor in 1861, following the granting of a degree of self-governance to New Zealand, in February 1868.; he is replaced by Sir George Bowen.

His second term as Governor has been greatly different from the first, as he has had to deal with the demands of an elected parliament.

Grey had invaded the Waikato in 1863 to take control of the rich Māori agricultural region.

At this time, the Maori chiefs Te Kooti and Titokowaru have the colonial government and settlers extremely alarmed with a series of military successes.

The war had brought many British troops to New Zealand.

The British government had determined to withdraw Imperial troops from New Zealand ion the later 1860s, but Grey, supported by the Premier Edward Stafford, had evaded instructions from the Colonial Office to finalize the return of the regiments, which had commenced in 1865 and 1866.

Penal transportation from Britain to Australia ends on January 9, 1868, with the arrival of the convict ship Hougoumont in Western Australia after an eighty-nine-day voyage from England.

There are sixty-two members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood among the transportees.

Siam signs treaties with Belgium, Italy and Sweden-Norway in 1868.

King Rama IV dies on October 1 of this year and is succeeded by his eldest son, the fifteen-year-old Chulalongkorn, who will expand upon his father’s modernization policies, despite mounting aggression from Western nations.

Mongkut had come to the Siamese throne as Rama IV in 1851, determined to save his country from colonial domination by forcing modernization on his reluctant subjects.

An absolute monarch in theory, his power was limited.

Having been a monk for twenty-seven years, he lacked a base among the powerful royal princes, and did not have a modern state apparatus to carry out his wishes.

His first attempts at reform, to establish a modern system of administration and to improve the status of debt-slaves and women, had been frustrated.

Rama IV had thus come to welcome western intrusion in Siam.

Indeed, the king and his entourages were actively pro-British.

British influence had begun in 1855 in the form of a mission led by the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, who had arrived in Bangkok with demands for immediate changes, backed by the threat of force.

The King had readily agreed to his demand for a new treaty, called the Bowring Treaty, which had restricted import duties to three percent, abolished royal trade monopolies, and granted extraterritoriality to British subjects.

Other western powers had soon demanded and received similar concessions.

The king had shortly come to consider that the real threat to Siam comes from the French, not the British.

The British are interested in commercial advantage, the French in building a colonial empire.

In light of the French occupation of Saigon in 1859, and the establishment of a French protectorate over southern Vietnam and eastern Cambodia, in 1867, Rama IV had hoped that the British would defend Siam if he gave them the economic concessions they demanded.

This will prove to be an illusion in the next reign, but it is true that the British see Siam as a useful buffer state between British Burma and French Indochina.

Li Hongzhang finally destroys the Nien revolts by means of the encirclement lines he has established, and the Qing emperor's forces are again in command of their area in 1868.

Russian conquests in Central Asia in the 1860s and 1870s bring a number of Tajiks in the Zeravshan and ...

...Fergana valleys under the direct government of Russia, while ...

...the emirate of Bukhara in effect becomes a Russian protectorate in 1868, with the Uzbek khans remaining as figurehead rulers.