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.

Qing emperor Daoguang, having ascended the throne in 1820 with the Imperial treasury having greatly depleted during previous reigns, has attempted to restore the nation's finances by personal austerity.

His attempts to stop the opium trade carried on by Western merchants results in the first Opium War between Britain and China.

The cost of the war and the large indemnity paid under terms of the peace treaty further increases discontent.

The need to repair the dikes along the Yellow River to prevent flooding and further famine becomes urgent, as does repair of the Grand Canal, which brings rice from South China to the capital at Peking.

Yet corrupt officials embezzle money for repairs, and the Daoguang emperor fears to reduce the size of the labor force lest repair problems increase.

By 1849, the Grand Canal is impassable, and the rice shipments have to be made by sea, where pirates endanger them.

The thousands of unemployed canal boatmen help fan the flames of unrest.

China's problems are compounded by natural calamities of unprecedented proportions, including droughts, famines, and floods.

Government neglect of public works is in part responsible for this and other disasters, and the Qing administration does little to relieve the widespread misery caused by them.

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.

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.