Sepoys mutiny at Meerut, sparking a widespread uprising against East India Company rule across northern and central India.
Britain and France fight Qing China, occupy Beijing and burn the Old Summer Palace in 1860, forcing further unequal treaties.
After the 1857 rebellion, the Government of India Act transfers rule from the East India Company to the British Crown; the Mughal Empire formally ends.
Charles Darwin sets out the theory of evolution by natural selection.
The physician John Snow links a London cholera outbreak to a public water pump, a founding moment of modern epidemiology.
An alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and Sardinia defeats Russia, with fighting centred on the siege of Sevastopol in Crimea.
James Clerk Maxwell publishes "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field", unifying electricity, magnetism and light.