British and American ships had first sighted Kiribati in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A Russian admiral, Adam von Krusenstern, and French captain, Louis Duperrey, had named the main island chain the Gilbert Islands in 1820, after a British captain named Thomas Gilbert, who had crossed the archipelago in 1788 when sailing from Australia to China.

From the early nineteenth century, Western whalers, merchant vessels, and slave traders have visited the islands, introducing diseases and firearms.

The first British settlers arrive in 1837.

After many years of conflict, known as the Black War, between British colonists and the Aboriginal Tasmanians, Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur of Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land as it is known at this time, calls upon every able-bodied male colonist, convict or free, to form a human chain, which now sweeps across the settled districts.

The human chain moves south and east for several weeks in an attempt to corral the Aborigines on the Tasman Peninsula by closing off Eaglehawk Neck (the isthmus connecting the Tasman peninsula to the rest of the island).

As few Aboriginal Tasmanians are captured, the incident is commonly seen as a costly fiasco.

However, it is also generally accepted that the incident has shaken the Aboriginal population so much that they were willing to accept the mediation of George Augustus Robinson, a builder and untrained preacher, and allow themselves to be removed to the Flinders Island settlement, where the population will dwindle until repatriation to Tasmania in 1847.

Marginalization to Flinders Island completes the Black Line’s objective of ethnically cleansing the local Aboriginal population.

As a direct result, and in contrast to the other Australian regions, Tasmania today has very few aborigines or preserved native culture of note.

Nils Gabriel Sefström, a student of Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius who is studying the brittleness of steel in 1830, rediscovers the element that Mexican mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río had in 1801 named erythronium, dismissed at the time as impure chromium.

Sefström calls the element vanadium, after Vanadis, the Scandinavian goddess of beauty and youth, because of the beautiful colors of the element's compounds in solution.

Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich had had no intention of observing the constitution, one of the most progressive in Europe at that time.

Appointed by Tsar Alexander II of Russia as governor-general of Poland despite numerous protests by various Polish politicians who had actively supported the personal union of the Congress Kingdom of Poland with the Russian Empire, Pavlovich has persecuted Polish social and patriotic organizations, the liberal opposition of the Kaliszanie faction, and replaced Poles with Russians in important administrative positions.

Although he is married to a Pole (Joanna Grudzinska), he is commonly viewed as an enemy of the Polish nation.

In addition, his command over the Polish Army has led to serious conflicts within the officer corps.

These frictions have led to various conspiracies throughout the country, most notably within the army.

Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, a German naturalist, zoologist, comparative anatomist, and geologist who had been appointed professor of medicine at Berlin University in 1827, had accompanied Humboldt through eastern Russia to the Chinese frontier in 1829.

After his return, he begins to concentrate his studies on microscopic organisms, which until then had not been systematically studied, and establishes the genus Bacterium, employing a term formed from the Greek word “bacterion,” signifying a rod.

The quest for Serbian independence had begun during the Serbian national revolution (1804-1817), the easternmost bourgeois revolutions in the nineteenth-century world, and is to last for several decades.

During the First Serbian Uprising led by Karadjordje Petrovic, Serbia had been independent for almost a decade before the Ottoman army was able to reoccupy the country.

Shortly after this, the Second Serbian Uprising had begun.

Led by Milos Obrenovic, it had ended in 1815 with a compromise between the Serbian revolutionary army and the Ottoman authorities.

The famous German historian Leopold von Ranke had published his book The Serbian revolution in 1829).

Following the Convention of Ackerman (1828), the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) and finally, the Hatt-i Sharif of 1830, the Sublime Porte recognizes Serbia as a principality under Turkish control, with Milos Obrenovic as hereditary prince.

Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II also grants the Serbian Church autonomy and reaffirms the Russian right to protect Serbia.

The Banu Khalid had again been installed as rulers of al-Hasa, a traditional oasis region in eastern Saudi Arabia, after the invasion of 1818, but by 1830, Al-Hasa and ...

...Ha'il have fallen again to the Sa'udis, as the town militias of central Arabia, which comprise the basis of the Sa'udi army, overcome the nomadic tribes.

The Mamluks in Iraq are mostly Christian slaves converted to Islam, trained in a special school, then assigned to military and administrative duties.

From 1747, they have presided, with short intermissions, over several decades in the history of Ottoman Iraq.

The Mamluk ruling elite, composed principally of officers from Georgia, had succeeded in asserting autonomy from their Ottoman overlords, and restored order and some degree of economic prosperity in the region.

Daud Pasha, the current Mamluk ruler of Iraq, has initiated important modernization programs that include clearing canals, establishing industries, reforming the army with the help of European instructors, and founding a printing press.

The existence of the autonomous Iraqi regime, a long-time source of anxiety at Istanbul, becomes even more threatening to the Porte when Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt begins to claim Syria.

In 1830, the Sultan decrees Daud Pasha’s dismissal, but the emissary carrying the order is arrested at Baghdad and executed.