Over twelve thousand settlers, mostly in the Willamette valley, have occupied Oregon country by 1849.

Squatters in Australia have established huge sheep runs in the 1830s and 40s, paying only £10 a year for a license to claim as much land as they want.

The Australian economy, in popular parlance, “rides the sheep’s back”.

Seven of the "best known" opium clippers go missing in 1849: Sylph, Coquette, Kelpie, Greyhound, Don Juan, Mischief, and Anna Eliza.

Sylph was a clipper ship built at Sulkea, opposite Calcutta, in 1831 for the Parsi merchant Rustomjee Cowasjee.

After her purchase by the Hong Kong-based merchant house Jardine Matheson, in 1833 Sylph went on to set an unbroken speed record by sailing from Calcutta to Macao in seventeen days, seventeen hours.

Her primary role was to transport opium between various ports in the Far East.

She disappears en route to Singapore, possibly captured and burned by pirates based on Hainan Island.

Other sources believe that she was shipwrecked on the rocks of Pedra Branca off the coast of Singapore while carrying a cargo of opium to the value of five hundred and fifty seven thousand two hundred Spanish dollars.

The Frankfurt Parliament has decided to exclude Austria’s German-speaking provinces from the German Empire.

The assembly offers an Imperial crown of a constitutional Germany to King Frederick William IV of Prussia, whose refusal to wear it effectively destroys the brief moment of German unity.

Frederick William, now dissolves the constituent assembly in Prussia and imposes his own constitution, favoring the moneyed classes but bestowing upon Prussia a limited parliamentary government.

Austria now pressures the King to agree that the German Confederation, and not the powerful Zollverein, will be the only legitimate pan-German organization.

Some circles in revolutionary Vienna appear to consider the possibility of giving up Galicia to a revived Poland.

The Austrian governor of Galicia is interested mainly in assuring control over the province.

Forestalling Polish plans, he abolishes serfdom and uses the nascent Ruthenian-Ukrainian movement in eastern Galicia to oppose national aspirations.

A limited Polish resistance is broken by bombardments of Kraków and Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine).

After the Revolutions of 1848, which reveal the sharpness of national conflicts, the Poles begin to realize that a Poland within the pre-partitions borders—a smaller Polish state is out of the question not only for Poles but also for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—might have to be a federation of distinct nationalities and no longer a unitary country.

Ignaz Semmelweis, reasoning that physicians in certain wards of Vienna hospitals carry puerperal, or childhood, fever from the autopsy room and transmit it to women in the maternity ward, in 1849 orders all physicians in his service to wash their hands thoroughly in a solution of chlorinated lime before examining patients.

The Hungarian physician's views are challenged by the medical establishment, and he is subsequently removed from his post.

France, the Papacy, and the Kings of Prussia, Piedmont-Sardinia, and Holland, frightened by the events of 1848, each negotiate with liberal factions to expand the constitutional guarantees of their citizenry.

A second Sikh war against the British in 1849 sees the annexation of Punjab, including the present-day North-West Frontier Province, to the company's territories, bringing the Sikh empire to an end.

David Livingstone, fueled by tales of a great river to the north and people never contacted by missionaries, guides the first successful European crossing of the Kalahari Desert to Lake Ngami in 1849.

The revolutions that sweep Europe in 1848 lead immediately to the emancipation of the Jews in Denmark as the country becomes a constitutional monarchy.