title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: Fertility goddesses, named "Bactrian princesses", made from limestone, chlorite and clay reflect agrarian Bronze Age society, while the extensive corpus of metal objects point to a sophisticated tradition of metalworking. Wearing large stylised dresses, as well as headdresses that merge with the hair, "Bactrian princesses" embody the ranking goddess, character of the central Asian mythology that plays a regulatory role, pacifying the untamed forces.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: Sarianidi regards Gonur as the "capital" of the complex in Margiana throughout the Bronze Age. The palace of north Gonur measures 150 metres by 140 metres, the temple at Togolok 140 metres by 100 metres, the fort at Kelleli 3 125 metres by 125 metres, and the house of a local ruler at Adji Kui 25 metres by 25 metres. Each of these formidable structures has been extensively excavated. While they all have impressive fortification walls, gates, and buttresses, it is not always clear why one structure is identified as a temple and another as a palace. Mallory points out that the BMAC fortified settlements such as Gonur and Togolok resemble the qila, the type of fort known in this region in the historical period. They may be circular or rectangular and have up to three encircling walls. Within the forts are residential quarters, workshops and temples.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: The people of the BMAC culture were very proficient at working in a variety of metals including bronze, copper, silver, and gold. This is attested through the many metal artefacts found throughout the sites.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: The discovery of a single tiny stone seal (known as the "Anau seal") with geometric markings from the BMAC site at Anau in Turkmenistan in 2000 led some to claim that the Bactria-Margiana complex had also developed writing, and thus may indeed be considered a literate civilisation. It bears five markings which are similar to Chinese "small seal" characters. The only match to the Anau seal is a small jet seal of almost identical shape from Niyä (near modern Minfeng) along the southern Silk Road in Xinjiang, originally thought to be from the Western Han dynasty but now thought to date to 700 BC.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: BMAC materials have been found in the Indus Valley civilisation, on the Iranian Plateau, and in the Persian Gulf. Finds within BMAC sites provide further evidence of trade and cultural contacts. They include an Elamite-type cylinder seal and a Harappan seal stamped with an elephant and Indus script found at Gonur-depe. The relationship between Altyn-Depe and the Indus Valley seems to have been particularly strong. Among the finds there were two Harappan seals and ivory objects. The Harappan settlement of Shortugai in Northern Afghanistan on the banks of the Amu Darya probably served as a trading station.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: There is evidence of sustained contact between the BMAC and the Eurasian steppes to the north, intensifying c. 2000 BC. In the delta of the Amu Darya where it reaches the Aral Sea, its waters were channelled for irrigation agriculture by people whose remains resemble those of the nomads of the Andronovo culture. This is interpreted as nomads settling down to agriculture, after contact with the BMAC, known as the Tazabagyab culture. About 1900 BC, the walled BMAC centres decreased sharply in size. Each oasis developed its own types of pottery and other objects. Also pottery of the Tazabagyab-Andronovo culture to the north appeared widely in the Bactrian and Margian countryside. Many BMAC strongholds continued to be occupied and Tazabagyab-Andronovo coarse incised pottery occurs within them (along with the previous BMAC pottery) as well as in pastoral camps outside the mudbrick walls. In the highlands above the Bactrian oases in Tajikistan, kurgan cemeteries of the Vaksh and Bishkent type appeared with pottery that mixed elements of the late BMAC and Tazabagyab-Andronovo traditions. In southern Bactrian sites like Sappali Tepe too, increasing links with the Andronovo culture are seen. During the period 1700 - 1500 BCE, metal artifacts from Sappali Tepe derive from the Tazabagyab-Andronovo culture.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: New research in the Murghab region, in excavations at defensive walls of Adji Kui 1, showed pastoralists present, and living on the edge of the town, as early as the second half of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2210-1960 BC), coexisting with the BMAC population that lived in the 'citadel.'


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: The Bactria–Margiana complex has attracted attention as a candidate for those looking for the material counterparts to the Indo-Iranians (Aryans), a major linguistic branch that split off from the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Sarianidi himself advocates identifying the complex as Indo-Iranian, describing it as the result of a migration from southwestern Iran. Bactria–Margiana material has been found at Susa, Shahdad, and Tepe Yahya in Iran, but Lamberg-Karlovsky does not see this as evidence that the complex originated in southeastern Iran. "The limited materials of this complex are intrusive in each of the sites on the Iranian Plateau as they are in sites of the Arabian peninsula."


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: A significant section of the archaeologists are more inclined to see the culture as begun by farmers in the Near Eastern Neolithic tradition, but infiltrated by Indo-Iranian speakers from the Andronovo culture in its late phase, creating a hybrid. In this perspective, Proto-Indo-Aryan developed within the composite culture before moving south into the Indian subcontinent.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: The Andronovo, BMAC and Yaz cultures have often been associated with Indo-Iranian migrations. As James P. Mallory phrased it:


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: According to Narasimshan et a. (2018) BMAC was not a primary contributor to later South-Asian genetics.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: As argued by Michael Witzel and Alexander Lubotsky, there is a proposed substratum in Proto-Indo-Iranian which can be plausibly identified with the original language of the BMAC. Moreover, Lubotsky points out a larger number of words apparently borrowed from the same language, which are only attested in Indo-Aryan and therefore evidence of a substratum in Vedic Sanskrit. He explains this by proposing that Indo-Aryan speakers probably formed the vanguard of the movement into south-central Asia and many of the BMAC loanwords which entered Iranian may have been mediated through Indo-Aryan. Michael Witzel points out that the borrowed vocabulary includes words from agriculture, village and town life, flora and fauna, ritual and religion, so providing evidence for the acculturation of Indo-Iranian speakers into the world of urban civilisation.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: In excavations at Gonur Depe, at a brick-lined burial pit, grave number 3200 of the Royal necropolis, a horse skeleton was found in period I, dated around 2200 BCE along with a four-wheeled wooden wagon with bronze rims. Archaeologist Julio Bendezu-Sarmiento, mentioning N. A. Dubova's (2015) article, comments that this was an "almost complete skeleton of a foal" resting on the wagon with "wheels circled by bronze bands" and radiocarbon-dated to 2250 BCE. So he considers this horse and the wagon are "one and a half century prior" to similar burials of Sintashta culture. A stone statuette that seems to be a horse with saddle was found in burial number 3210 also in the Royal necropolis and was reported by Sarianidi in 2005, and in burial 3310 parts of a stallion's body were found, the stallion lacked its head, rump, and tail, and was considered as a cult burial of a domestic horse by archaeologist Sarianidi in his 2008 publication.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: In 2018, Narasimhan and co-authors analyzed BMAC skeletons from the Bronze Age sites of Bustan, Dzharkutan, Gonur Tepe, and Sapalli Tepe. The male specimens belonged to haplogroup E1b1a (1/18), E1b1b (1/18), G (2/18), J* (2/18), J1 (1/18), J2 (4/18), L (2/18), R* (1/18), R1b (1/18), R2 (2/18), and T (1/18).


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: A follow-up study by Narasimhan and co-authors (2019) suggested the primary BMAC population largely derived from preceding local Copper Age peoples who were in turn related to prehistoric farmers from the Iranian plateau and to a lesser extent early Anatolian farmers and hunter-gatherers from Western Siberia, and they did not contribute substantially to later populations further south in the Indus Valley. They found no evidence that the samples extracted from the BMAC sites derived any part of their ancestry from Yamnaya culture people, who are seen as Proto-Indo-Europeans in the Kurgan hypothesis, the most influential theory on the Proto-Indo-European homeland.


title: Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

text: A recent genetic study authored by Perle Guarino-Vignon et al., published in 2022, confirms the admixture between local BMAC groups and Andronovo-related populations, at the end of Oxus Civilization. This paper considers current Yaghnobi people, who live near Zeravshan river, Tajikistan, are descendants from Andronovo-like people which took over BMAC around 1800 to 1500 BC.


title: 19th-century London

text: During the 19th century, London grew enormously to become a global city of immense importance. It was the largest city in the world from about 1825, the world's largest port, and the heart of international finance and trade. Railways connecting London to the rest of Britain, as well as the London Underground, were built, as were roads, a modern sewer system and many famous sites.


title: 19th-century London

text: During the 19th century, London was transformed into the world's largest city and capital of the British Empire. The population rose from over 1 million in 1801 to 5.567 million in 1891. In 1897, the population of Greater London was estimated at 6.292 million people. By the 1860s it was larger by one quarter than the world's second most populous city, Beijing, two-thirds larger than Paris, and five times larger than New York City.


title: 19th-century London

text: At the beginning of the 19th century, the urban core of London was contained to the west by Park Lane and Hyde Park, by Marylebone Road to the north, along the south bank of the Thames at Southwark, and to the east as far as Bethnal Green and Spitalfields. At the beginning of the century, Hyde Park Corner was considered the western entrance to London; a turnpike gate was in operation there until 1825. With the population growing at an exponential rate, so too did the territory of London expand significantly: the city encompassed 122 square miles in 1851 and had grown to 693 square miles by 1896.


title: 19th-century London

text: During this period, London became a global political, financial, and trading capital. While the city grew wealthy as Britain's holdings expanded, 19th century London was also a city of poverty, where millions lived in overcrowded and unsanitary slums. Life for the poor was immortalized by Charles Dickens in such novels as "Oliver Twist".


title: 19th-century London

text: One of the most famous events of 19th century London was the Great Exhibition of 1851. Held at The Crystal Palace, the fair attracted visitors from across the world and displayed Britain at the height of its imperial dominance.


title: 19th-century London

text: As the capital of a massive empire, London became a draw for immigrants from the colonies and poorer parts of Europe. A large Irish population settled in the city during the Victorian era, with many of the newcomers refugees from the Great Famine (1845–1849). At one point, Irish immigrants made up about 20% of London's population. In 1853 the number of Irish in London was estimated at 200,000, so large a population in itself that if it were a city it would have ranked as the third largest in England, and was about equal to the combined populations of Limerick, Belfast, and Cork.


title: 19th-century London

text: London also became home to a sizable Jewish community, estimated to be around 46,000 in 1882 and a very small Indian population consisting largely of transitory sailors known as lascars. In the 1880s and 1890s tens of thousands of Jews escaping persecution and poverty in Eastern Europe came to London and settled largely in the East End around Houndsditch, Whitechapel, Aldgate, and parts of Spitalfields. Many came to be work in the sweatshops and markets of the rag trade, refashioning and re-selling clothing, which itself was centered around Petticoat Lane Market and the "Rag Fair" in Houndsditch, London's largest second-hand clothing market. As members of the Jewish community prospered in the latter part of the century, many would leave the East End and settle in the immediate suburbs of Dalston, Hackney, Stoke Newington, Stamford Hill, and parts of Islington.


title: 19th-century London

text: An Italian community coalesced in Soho and in Clerkenwell, centered along Saffron Hill, Farringdon Road, Rosebery Avenue, and Clerkenwell Road. Out of the 11,500 Italians living in London in 1900, Soho accounted for 6,000, and Clerkenwell 4,000. Most of these were young men, engaged in occupations like organ grinding or selling street food (2,000 Italians were classed as "ice cream, salt, and walnut vendors" in 1900).


title: 19th-century London

text: After the Strangers' Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders opened on West India Dock Road in 1856, a small population of Chinese sailors began to settle in Limehouse, around Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields. These men married and opened shops and boarding houses which catered to the transient population of "Chinese firemen, seamen, stewards, cooks and carpenters who serve on board the steamers plying between Germany and the port of London". London's first Chinatown, as this area of Limehouse became known, was depicted in novels like Charles Dickens's "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" and Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" as a sinister quarter of crime and opium dens. Racist stereotypes of the Chinese which abounded in the 19th and early 20th centuries exaggerated both the criminality and the population of Chinatown.


title: 19th-century London

text: London was both the world's largest port, and a major shipbuilding center in itself, for the entire 19th century. At the beginning of the century, this role was far from secure after the strong growth in world commerce during the later decades of the 18th century rendered the overcrowded Pool of London incapable of handling shipping levels efficiently. Sailors could wait a week or more to offload their cargoes, which left the ships vulnerable to theft and enabled widespread evasion of import duties. Losses on imports alone from theft were estimated at £500,000 per year in the 1790s – estimates for the losses on exports have never been made. Anxious West Indian traders combined to fund a private police force to patrol Thames shipping in 1798, under the direction of magistrate Patrick Colquhoun and Master Mariner John Harriott. This Marine Police Force, regarded as the first modern police force in England, was a success at apprehending would-be thieves, and in 1800 it was made a public force via the Depredations on the Thames Act 1800. In 1839 the force would be absorbed into and become the Thames Division of the Metropolitan Police.


title: 19th-century London

text: In addition to theft, at the turn of the century commercial interests feared the competition from rising English ports like Liverpool and Plymouth. This spurred Parliament in 1799 to authorize the first major dock construction work of the 19th century, the West India Docks, on the Isle of Dogs. Situated 6 miles east of London Bridge, shipping could avoid the dangerous and congested upper reaches of the Thames. The three West India Docks were self-contained and accessed from the river via a system of locks and basins, offering an unprecedented level of security. The new warehouses surrounding the docks could accommodate close to a million tons of storage, with the Import and Export basins able to moor almost 400 ships at a time.


title: 19th-century London

text: The Commercial Road was built in 1803 as a conduit for newly arrived goods from the Isle of Dogs straight into the City of London, and in 1812 an Act of Parliament provided for the docks to be integrated into the national canal system via the extension of the Grand Union Canal to Limehouse. The Regent's Canal, as this new branch between Paddington and Limehouse became known, was the only canal link to the Thames, connecting a vital shipping outlet with the great industrial cities of The Midlands. The Regent's Canal became a huge success, but on a local rather than a national level because it facilitated the localized transport of goods like coal, timber, and other building materials around London. Easy access to coal shipments from northeast England via the Port of London meant that a profusion of industries proliferated along the Regent's Canal, especially gasworks, and later electricity plants.


title: 19th-century London

text: Within a few years, the West India Docks were joined by the smaller East India Docks just northeast in Blackwall, as well as the London Docks in Wapping. The St Katharine Docks built just east of the Tower of London were completed in 1828, and later joined with the London Docks (in 1869). In Rotherhithe, where the Greenland Dock was operating at the beginning of the century, new docks, ponds and the Grand Surrey Canal were added in the early 19th century by several small companies. The area became known for specializing in commerce from the Baltic, Scandinavia, and North America, especially for its large timber ponds and grain imports from North America. In 1864 the various companies amalgamated to form the Surrey Commercial Docks Company, which by 1878 constituted 13 docks and ponds.


title: 19th-century London

text: With the eclipse of the sailing ship by the steamship in mid-century, tonnages grew larger and the shallow docks nearer the city were too small for mooring them. In response, new commercial docks were built beyond the Isle of Dogs: the Royal Victoria Dock (1855), the Millwall Dock (1868), the Royal Albert Dock (1880), and finally, the Port of Tilbury (1886), 26 miles east of London Bridge. The Victoria was unprecedented in size: 1.5 miles in total length, encompassing over 100 acres. Hydraulic locks and purpose-built railway connections to the national transport network made the Victoria as technologically advanced as it was large. It was a great commercial success, but within two decades it was becoming too shallow, and the lock entrance too narrow, for newer ships. The St. Katharine and London Dock Company built the Royal Albert Dock adjoining the Victoria; this new quay was 1.75 miles long, with 16,500 feet of deep water quayage. It was the largest dock in the world, the first to be electrically lit, featured hydraulically operated cranes, and like its sister the Victoria, was connected to the national railways. This feverish building obtained clear results: by 1880, the Port of London was receiving 8 million tons of goods a year, a 10-fold increase over the 800,000 being received in 1800.


title: 19th-century London

text: Shipping in the Port of London supported a vast army of transport and warehouse workers, who characteristically attended the "call-on" each morning at the entrances to the docks to be assigned work for the day. This type of work was low-paid and highly unstable, drying up depending on the season and the vagaries of world trade. The poverty of the dock workers and growing trade union activism coalesced into the Great Strike of 1889, when an estimated 130,000 workers went on strike between 14 August and 16 September. The strike paralysed the port and led the dock owners to concede all of the demands of the strike committee, including a number of fairer working arrangements, the reduction of the "call-on", and higher hourly and overtime wages.


title: 19th-century London

text: During the first half of the 19th century, the shipbuilding industry on the Thames was highly innovative and produced some of the most technologically advanced vessels in the world. The firm of Wigram and Green constructed Blackwall frigates from the early 1830s, a faster version of the East Indiaman sailing ship, while the naval engineer John Scott Russell designed more refined hulls for the ships constructed in his Millwall Iron Works. London shipyards had supplied about 60% of the Admiralty's warships in service in 1866. The largest shipbuilder on the Thames, the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, produced the revolutionary broadside ironclad "HMS Warrior" (1860), the largest warship in the world and the first iron-hulled, armor plated vessel, alongside its sister "HMS Black Prince" (1861). Over the next few years, five out of the nine armored ironclads commissioned by the Navy to follow the example of the "Warrior" would be constructed in London. The Thames Ironworks was employed not just in shipbuilding, but in civil engineering works around London like Blackfriars Railway Bridge, Hammersmith Bridge, and the construction of the iron-girded roofs of Alexandra Palace and the 1862 International Exhibition building.


title: 19th-century London

text: London engineering firms like Maudslay, Sons and Field and John Penn and Sons were early developers and suppliers of marine steam engines for merchant and naval ships, fueling the transition from sail to steam powered locomotion. This was aided by the 1834 invention by Samuel Hall of Bow of a condenser for cooling boilers which used fresh water rather than corrosive salt water. In 1838 the first screw-propelled steamer in the world, "SS Archimedes", was launched at Ratcliff Cross Dock, an alternative to the less efficient paddle steamer. By 1845 the Admiralty had settled upon screw propellers as the optimal form of propulsion, and a slew of new battleships were built in London dockyards equipped with the new technology. The largest and most famous ship of its day, the "SS Great Eastern", a collaboration between John Scott Russell and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was constructed at the Millwall Iron Works and launched in 1858. It still holds the record as the largest ship to have been launched on the Thames, and held the record as the largest ship in the world by tonnage until 1901.


title: 19th-century London

text: Despite the astonishing successes of the shipbuilding industry in the first half of the century, in the last decades of the 19th century the industry experienced a precipitous decline that would leave only one large firm, the Thames Ironworks, in existence by the mid-1890s. London shipyards lacked the capacity, and the ability to expand, for building the large vessels in demand by the later 19th century, losing business to newer shipyards in Scotland and the North of England, where labor and overhead costs were lower, and iron and coal deposits much closer. The ancient Royal Dockyards at Woolwich and Deptford, founded by Henry VIII in the 16th century, were too far upriver and too shallow due to the silting up of the Thames, forcing their closure in 1869.


title: 19th-century London

text: The City of London's importance as a financial centre increased substantially over the course of the 19th century. The city's strengths in banking, stock brokerage, and shipping insurance made it the natural channel for the huge rise in capital investment which occurred after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The city was also the headquarters of most of Britain's shipping firms, trading houses, exchanges and commercial firms like railway companies and import houses. As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, an insatiable demand for capital investment in railroads, shipping, industry and agriculture fueled the growth of financial services in the city. The end of the Napoleonic Wars also freed up British capital to flow overseas; there was some £100 million invested abroad between 1815 and 1830, and as much as £550 million by 1854. At the end of the century, the net total of British foreign investment stood at £2.394 billion. The 1862 "Bradshaw's Guide" to London listed 83 banks, 336 stockbroking firms, 37 currency brokers, 248 ship and insurance brokerages, and 1500 different merchants in the city, selling wares of every conceivable variety. At the centre of this nexus of private capital and commerce lay the Bank of England, which by the end of the century contained £20 million worth of gold reserves tied to the British Pound Sterling. It employed over 900 people and printed 15,000 new banknotes each day by 1896, doing some £2 million worth of business each day.


title: 19th-century London

text: The result of the shift to financial services in the city was that, even while its residential population was ebbing in favor of the suburbs (there was a net loss of 100,000 people between 1840 and 1900), it retained its traditional role as the center of English commerce. The working population swelled from some 200,000 in 1871 to 364,000 by 1911.


title: 19th-century London

text: London's great expansion in the 19th century was driven by housing growth to accommodate the rapidly expanding population of the city. The growth of Transport in London in this period fueled the outward expansion of suburbs, as did a cultural impetus to escape the inner city, allowing the worlds of 'work' and 'life' to be separate. Suburbs varied enormously in character and in the relative wealth of their inhabitants, with some being for the very wealthy, and others being for the lower-middle classes. They frequently imitated the success of earlier periods of speculative housing development from the Georgian era, although the Victorian era saw a much wider array of suburban housing built in London. Terraced, semi-detached and detached housing all developed in a multitude of styles and typologies, with an almost endless variation in the layout of streets, gardens, homes, and decorative elements.


title: 19th-century London

text: Suburbs were aspirational for many, but also came to be lampooned and satirised in the press for the conservative and conventional tastes they represented (for example in Punch's Pooter). While the Georgian terrace has been described as "England's greatest contribution to the urban form", the increasing rigour with which Building Act regulations were applied after 1774 led to increasingly simple, standardised designs, which by the end of the 19th century were accommodating households at the lower-end of the socio-economic scale in some cases. Indeed, more grandly designed examples became less common by this period, as the very wealthy tended to prefer detached homes, and it was in this period in which terraces in particular became associated first with the aspirational middle classes; and later, with the lower middle classes in more industrial areas of London such as the East End.


title: 19th-century London

text: While many areas of Georgian and Victorian suburbs were damaged heavily in The Blitz and/or then redeveloped through slum clearance, much of Inner London's character remains dominated by the suburbs built successively during Georgian and Victorian times, and such houses remain enormously popular. No view of London, either in the 19th century or today, would be without the terraced house.


title: 19th-century London

text: In contrast to the conspicuous wealth of the City of London and Westminster, there was a huge underclass of desperately poor Londoners within a short range of the more affluent areas. The author George W. M. Reynolds commented on the vast wealth disparities and misery of London's poorest in 1844:


title: 19th-century London

text: In Central London, the single most notorious slum was St. Giles, a name which by the 19th century had passed into common parlance as a byword for extreme poverty. Infamous since the mid 18th century, St. Giles was defined by its prostitutes, gin shops, secret alleyways where criminals could hide, and horribly overcrowded tenements. Lord Byron excoriated the state of St. Giles during a speech to the House of Lords in 1812, stating that "I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country." At the heart of this area, now occupied by New Oxford Street and Centre Point, was "The Rookery", a particularly dense warren of houses along George Street and Church Lane, the latter of which in 1852 was reckoned to contain over 1,100 lodgers in overpacked, squalid buildings with open sewers. The poverty worsened with the massive influx of poor Irish immigrants during the Great Famine of 1848, giving the area the name "Little Ireland", or "The Holy Land". Government intervention beginning in the 1830s reduced the area of St. Giles through mass evictions, demolitions, and public works projects. New Oxford Street was built right through the heart of "The Rookery" in 1847, eliminating the worst part of the area, but many of the evicted inhabitants simply moved to neighboring streets, which remained stubbornly mired in poverty.


title: 19th-century London

text: Mass demolition of slums like St. Giles was the usual method of removing problematic pockets of the city; for the most part this just displaced existing residents because the new dwellings built by private developers were often far too expensive for the previous inhabitants to afford. In the mid to late 19th century, philanthropists like Octavia Hill and charities like the Peabody Trust focused on building adequate housing for the working classes at affordable rates (George Peabody built his first improved housing for the "artisans and laboring poor" on Commercial Street in 1864). The Metropolitan Board of Works (the dominant authority before the LCC), was empowered to undertake clearances and to enforce overcrowding and other such standards on landlords by a stream of legislation including the Labouring Classes Dwelling Houses Acts of 1866 and 1867. Overcrowding was also defined as a public health 'nuisance' beginning in 1855, which allowed Medical Officers to report landlords in violation to the Board of Health. In 1890 the shortcomings of the existing legislation were refined and condensed into one comprehensive piece of legislation, the Houses of the Working Classes Act. This empowered the LCC to construct its own housing on cleared land, which it had been prohibited from doing before; thus began a social housing building program in targeted areas like Bethnal Green and Millbank that would accelerate in the next century.


title: 19th-century London

text: The East End of London, with an economy oriented around the Docklands and the polluting industries clustered along the Thames and the River Lea, had long been an area of working poor. By the late 19th century it was developing an increasingly sinister reputation for crime, overcrowding, desperate poverty, and debauchery. The 1881 census counted over 1 million inhabitants in the East End, a third of whom lived in poverty. The Cheap Trains Act 1883, while it enabled many working class Londoners to move away from the inner-city, had the effect of accentuating the poverty in areas like the East End, where the most destitute were left behind. Prostitution was rife, with one official report in 1888 recording 62 brothels and 1,200 prostitutes in Whitechapel (the real number was likely much higher).


title: 19th-century London

text: The American author Jack London, in his 1903 account "The People of the Abyss", described the bewilderment he was met with by Londoners when he mentioned that he planned to visit the East End, many of whom had never been there despite living in the same city. He was refused a guide when he visited the travel agency of Thomas Cook & Son, which told him to consult the police. When he finally found a reluctant cabbie to take him into Stepney, he described his impression as follows:


title: 19th-century London

text: By the time of Jack London's visit in 1903, the reputation of the East End was at its lowest ebb after decades of unfavourable attention from journalists, authors, and social reformers. The 1888 Whitechapel murders perpetrated by Jack the Ripper brought international attention to the squalor and criminality of the East End, while penny dreadfuls and a slew of sensational novels like George Gissing's "The Nether World" and the works of Charles Dickens painted grim pictures of London's deprived areas for middle and upper class readers. The single most influential work on London poverty was Charles Booth's "Life and Labour of the People in London", a 17-volume work published between 1889 and 1903. Booth painstakingly charted levels of deprivation throughout the city, painting a bleak but also sympathetic picture of the wide variety of experiences lived by London's poor.


title: 19th-century London

text: The extreme population density in areas like the East End made for unsanitary conditions and resulting epidemics of disease. The child mortality rate in the East End stood at 20%, while the estimated life expectancy of an East End labourer was only 19 years. In Bethnal Green, one of London's poorest districts, the mortality rate stood at 1 in 41 in 1847. The average for Bethnal Green between the years 1885 and 1893 remained virtually the same as that of 1847. Meanwhile, the mortality average for those same eight years in the wealthy boroughs of Kensington and Paddington stood at roughly 1 in 53. London's overall mortality rate was tracked at a ratio of roughly 1 in 43 between the years 1869–1879; overall life expectancy in the city stood at just 37 years in midcentury.


title: 19th-century London

text: The most serious disease in the poor quarters was tuberculosis, until the 1860s cholera, as well as rickets, scarlet fever, and typhoid. Between 1850 and 1860 the mortality rate from typhoid was 116 per 100,000 people. Smallpox was a dreaded disease across London: there were epidemics in 1816–19, 1825–26, 1837–40, 1871 and 1881. A speckling of workhouse hospitals and the London Smallpox Hospital in St Pancras (moved to Highgate Hill in 1848–50), were all that existed to treat smallpox victims until the latter part of the century. This changed with the creation of the Metropolitan Asylums Board in 1867, which embarked on the building of five planned smallpox and fever hospitals in Stockwell, Deptford, Hampstead, Fulham and Homerton to serve the different regions of London. Fearful residents succeeded in blocking the building of the Hampstead hospital, and residents in Fulham obtained an injunction preventing all but local cases of smallpox from being treated in their hospital. Thus, with only three hospitals in operation when the epidemic of 1881 began, the MAB was overwhelmed. and were leased as hospital ships and entered service in July 1881, moored at Greenwich. The following year the two ships were purchased along with another, "Castalia", and the fleet was moved to Long Reach at Gravesend, where it served 20,000 patients between 1884 and 1902. The floating hospitals were equipped with their own river ferry service to transport patients in isolation from the inner city. The ships enabled three permanent isolation hospitals to be built at Dartford, effectively ending the threat of smallpox epidemics.


title: 19th-century London

text: With the great railway terminal developing to connect London with its suburbs and beyond, mass transport was becoming ever more important within the city as its population increased. The first horse-drawn omnibuses entered service in London in 1829. By 1854 there were 3,000 of them in service, painted in bright reds, greens, and blues, and each carrying an average of 300 passengers per day. The two-wheeled hansom cab, first seen in 1834, was the most common type of cab on London's roads throughout the Victorian era, but there were many types, like the four-wheeled Hackney carriage, in addition to the coaches, private carriages, coal-wagons, and tradesman's vehicles which crowded the roads. There were 3,593 licensed cabs in London in 1852; by the end of the century there were estimated to be some 10,000 in all.


title: 19th-century London

text: From the 1870s onwards, Londoners also had access to a developing tram network which accessed Central London and provided local transport in the suburbs. The first horse-drawn tramways were installed in 1860 along the Bayswater Road at the northern edge of Hyde Park, Victoria Street in Westminster, and Kennington Street in South London. The trams were a success with passengers, but the raised rails were jolting and inconvenient for horse-drawn vehicles to cross, causing traffic bottlenecks at crossroads. Within a year the outcry was so great that the lines were pulled up, and trams were not reintroduced until the Tramways Act 1870 permitted them to be built again. Trams were restricted to operating in the suburbs of London, but they accessed the major transport hubs of the City and the West End, conveying passengers into and away from the suburbs. By 1893 there were about 1,000 tram cars across 135 miles worth of track. Trams could be accessed in Central London from Aldgate, Blackfriars Bridge, Borough, Moorgate, King's Cross, Euston Road, Holborn, Shepherd's Bush, Victoria, and Westminster Bridge.


title: 19th-century London

text: 19th-century London was transformed by the coming of the railways. A new network of metropolitan railways allowed the development of suburbs in neighboring counties from which middle-class and wealthy people could commute to the centre. While this spurred the massive outward growth of the city, London's growth also exacerbated the class divide, as the wealthier classes emigrated to the suburbs, leaving the poor to inhabit the inner city areas. The new railway lines were generally built through working class areas, where land was cheaper and compensation costs lower. In the 1860s, the railway companies were required to rehouse the tenants they evicted for construction, but these rules were widely evaded until the 1880s. The displaced generally stayed in the same area as before, but under more crowded conditions due to the loss of housing.


title: 19th-century London

text: The first railway to be built in London was the London & Greenwich Railway, a short line from London Bridge to Greenwich, which opened in 1836. This was soon followed by great rail termini which linked London to every corner of Britain. These included Euston (1837), Paddington (1838), Fenchurch Street (1841), Waterloo (1848), King's Cross (1852), and St Pancras (1868). By 1865 there were 12 principal railway termini; the stations built along the lines in exurban villages surrounding London allowed commuter towns to be developed for the middle classes. The Cheap Trains Act 1883 helped poorer Londoners to relocate, by guaranteeing cheap fares and removing a duty imposed on fares since 1844. The new working class suburbs created as a result included West Ham, Walthamstow, Kilburn, and Willesden.


title: 19th-century London

text: With traffic congestion on London's roads becoming more and more serious, proposals for underground railways to ease the pressure on street traffic were first mooted in the 1840s, after the opening of the Thames Tunnel in 1843 proved such engineering work could be done successfully. However, reservations over the stability of underground tunneling persisted into the 1860s and were finally overcome when Parliament approved the construction of London's first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway. Begun in 1860 and completed in 1863, the Metropolitan inaugurated the world's oldest mass transit system, the London Underground; it was created by the cut-and-cover method of excavating a trench from above, then building reinforced brick walls and vaults to form the tunnel, and filling in the trench with earth. The Metropolitan initially ran from Farringdon in the east to Paddington in the west. The open wooden passenger cars were propelled by a coke-fueled steam locomotive and lit with gas lamps to provide illumination in the tunnels. The line was such a success, carrying 9.5 million passengers in its first year of operation. An extension to the western suburb of Hammersmith was built and opened in 1868. In 1884 the Metropolitan was linked with the Metropolitan District Line at Aldgate to form an inner circle encompassing Central London (the modern Circle Line), with a short stretch running from Aldgate to Whitechapel. In 1880 an extension line to the north-west was opened from Baker Street tube station to the village of Harrow, via Swiss Cottage and St. John's Wood, expanding further over the coming decades and allowing prosperous suburbs to be developed around formerly rural villages.


title: 19th-century London

text: A succession of private enterprises were formed to build new routes after the success of the Metropolitan, the first being the Metropolitan District Line, opened in 1865. This line extended along the Thames from Westminster to South Kensington at first, but by 1889 it had been extended eastwards to Blackfriars, and south-west all the way to Wimbledon.


title: 19th-century London

text: The next line to be built, and the first true "tube", dug with a tunnelling shield designed by J.H. Greathead rather than by cut-and-cover excavation, was the City and South London Railway, opened in 1890. It was London's first underground line with electric locomotives, and the first to extend south of the river. Electrification allowed the tunnels to be dug deep below ground level, as ventilation for smoke and steam was no longer necessary. In the year 1894, an estimated 228,605,000 passengers used the three underground railways then in operation, compared to 11,720,000 passengers in 1864 using the lone Metropolitan Railway. Before the century came to a close, a second deep-level tube was opened in 1898: the Waterloo & City Line. The shortest of the London tube lines, it was built to convey commuters between the City of London and Waterloo station.


title: 19th-century London

text: Many new roads were built after the formation of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855. They included the Embankment from 1864, Northumberland Avenue, Clerkenwell and Theobalds Roads all from 1874. The MBW was authorized to create Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue in the Metropolitan Streets Improvements Act of 1877, the intention being to improve communication between Charing Cross, Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Street, and Tottenham Court Road. This required extensive demolition in the slums of Soho and St. Giles, with the MBW responsible for rehousing over 3,000 laborers in new-built tenements over the ten-year period it took to construct the roads.


title: 19th-century London

text: One of the most ambitious urban redesign initiatives was the building of Regent Street at the behest of the Prince Regent, who wished to build a grand boulevard linking his Carlton House in the south with Regent's Park in the north, the latter of which had reverted to Crown ownership in 1811. The new road had myriad benefits: it cleared a warren of narrow streets in Westminster in favor of a symmetrical, aesthetically pleasing street which not only relieved traffic congestion but, by providing a direct north–south route, allowed the rural area around Regent's Park to be profitably developed for residential use. Regent Street was also meant to provide a clear separation between the fashionable new development of Mayfair to the west, and the by-then undesirable area of Soho to the east. The plans, designed by John Nash, were approved by Act of Parliament in 1813, and by 1819 Nash's grand colonnaded, stucco-covered buildings were largely open for business. The street stretches from Pall Mall at its southern terminus (built closer to the Haymarket to avoid St. James's Square), crosses Piccadilly (creating Piccadilly Circus in the process), from where it curves west via the Quadrant and then runs due north, joining with Langham Place and Portland Place to create the link to Regent's Park. The area achieved its intended purpose of becoming a thriving commercial district, lined with shops of every variety to rival the quality of nearby St. James's.


title: 19th-century London

text: 1890 London had 5,728 street accidents, resulting in 144 deaths. London was the site of the world's first traffic lights, installed at the crossroads of Bridge, Great George, and Parliament Streets outside the Houses of Parliament. The 20 ft (6-metre) high column was topped by a large gas lamp, and opened in December 1868. It was designed by the railway engineer J.P. Knight after a railway semaphore signal, with multi-coloured arms coming down to regulate traffic.


title: 19th-century London

text: 19th century London was the site of unprecedented engineering marvels. One of these was the Thames Tunnel, declared the "Eighth Wonder of the World" when it opened in 1843. Designed by Marc Isambard Brunel, it was the first tunnel in the world to be successfully built under a navigable river and took 18 grueling years to complete. Laborers employed to dig the tunnel, with the protection of Brunel's tunneling shield, endured five serious floods and multiple gas and sewage leaks, which caused numerous casualties and long delays. Although it was intended as an underground artery for the movement of goods between Rotherhithe and Wapping, it opened as a pedestrian tunnel during its early decades (there were 1 million visitors to the tunnel in its first 3 months of opening). Only in 1865 was it purchased by the East London Railway and converted for railway use.


title: 19th-century London

text: The Thames Embankment was one of the most ambitious public works projects in 19th century London. It transformed the appearance of the riverside between Chelsea and Blackfriars. There were three different sections: the Victoria Embankment, built between 1864 and 1870; the Albert Embankment (1866–70); and the Chelsea Embankment (1871–74). The embankments protected low-lying areas along the Thames from flooding, provided a more attractive prospect of the river compared to the mudflats and boatyards which abounded previously, and created prime reclaimed land for development.


title: 19th-century London

text: The Victoria Embankment was the most ambitious: it concealed a massive interceptor sewage tunnel, which channelled waste from a network of smaller tunnels away from the River Thames and out of Central London, towards the Northern Outfall Sewer at Beckton in East London. The Victoria Embankment also allowed an extension of the Metropolitan District Line underground to be built, from Westminster east to Blackfriars. In total, the Victoria Embankment reclaimed over 37 acres (15 hectares) of land from the Thames, allowing a broad east–west boulevard to be built and a series of public gardens.


title: 19th-century London

text: All three sections of the Thames Embankment are faced in grey granite, mounted with handsome cast iron lamps, and lined with London plane trees. In 1878, the lamps of the Victoria Embankment were converted from gas to electric light, making it the first street in Britain to be electrically illuminated. Walter Thornbury praised the new construction in his "Old and New London" of 1878: "not only has the [Victoria] Embankment added a handsome frontage to the side of the Thames, which previously had been a public eyesore, but it has also been the means of getting rid of the unequal deposits of mud in its bed, assisting the removal of the scour of the river, and consequently improving the health of the inhabitants of London."


title: 19th-century London

text: There was a flurry of bridge-building along the Thames from the City of London westwards during the 19th century, improving overland communication to Southwark. In 1800 there were only three bridges connecting Westminster and the city to the south bank: Westminster Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, and the ancient London Bridge. West of Westminster, the closest bridge was Battersea Bridge, three miles upstream. The four stone bridges grew progressively more decrepit as traffic increased: Westminster Bridge was badly subsiding by the 1830s, and several piers collapsed in 1846. Blackfriars was structurally unsound, requiring substantial repairs between 1833 and 1840. Old London Bridge, whose 20 piers dated back to the 13th century, so impeded the flow of the river that it formed dangerous rapids for boats, and its narrow width of 26 ft could not accommodate modern traffic levels. It was the first to be replaced, by a 49-foot (15-metre) wide granite bridge with five supporting arches. "New" London Bridge was built from 1824 to 1831, with the adjacent "Old" London Bridge fully dismantled by 1832. New Westminster Bridge, made of cast iron and resting on seven arches, was opened in 1862, replacing its unstable predecessor, and Blackfriars Bridge was demolished and rebuilt in cast iron beginning in 1864.


title: 19th-century London

text: In addition, several new bridges for road, pedestrian, and railway traffic were built: Southwark Bridge (1819), Waterloo Bridge (1817), Hungerford Bridge (opened in 1845 as a footbridge, and converted in 1859 into a combination footbridge/railway bridge for Charing Cross Station), and Tower Bridge (1894). Further upriver, the new bridges included Lambeth Bridge (1862), which replaced a centuries-old cross-river ferry service, Vauxhall Bridge (opened 1816), Victoria Bridge (opened in 1858 and later renamed Chelsea Bridge), and Wandsworth Bridge (1873).


title: 19th-century London

text: The impetus for this building was London's massive population growth, which put a constant strain on existing communications between the north and south banks. The want of overland bridges was one of the issues cited by the "Illustrated London News" in an editorial of 1854 enumerating the most urgent needs of the city. London Bridge remained the city's busiest artery for the entire century, averaging 22,242 vehicle and 110,525 pedestrian crossings per day in 1882. More than 30 petitions were submitted to various authorities between 1874 and 1885 requesting that the bridge either be widened or rebuilt to relieve congestion. This resulted in the commission of Tower Bridge by Act of Parliament in 1885. This was a bascule bridge designed by Sir Horace Jones, completed in 1895. It was an engineering marvel which solved the conundrum of how to bridge the Thames downriver from London Bridge without inhibiting shipping in the Pool of London. Using a 200 ft (60-metre) wide central bay, the bascules, or drawbridge, could be raised on either side by massive hydraulic accumulators, allowing clearance for ships up to 140 ft (43 metres) in height. It rests on two piers sunk deep into the river bed, constituting some 70,000 tons of concrete and stone, while the towers and bridge itself are framed in 11,000 tons of steel clad in Cornish granite and Portland Stone.


title: 19th-century London

text: The development of gas lighting at the beginning of the 19th century provided London with comprehensive street illumination for the first time in its history. Before this, oil lamps were used along the main thoroughfares, but they were only required to be lit during the darkest time of the year (between Michaelmas on 29 September and Lady Day on 25 March), and then only as late as midnight. The first gaslight in London was installed in the Lyceum Theatre in 1804, by the German-born entrepreneur F.A. Winsor. "Winsor patent Gas", supplied by Winsor's New Light and Heat Company, would be installed along the north side of Pall Mall to celebrate George III's birthday in 1805. In 1810, the Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company was incorporated by Act of Parliament, and the first gas works in the U.K. were established by the company at Peter Street and Horseferry Road to provide gas to Westminster. In 1813, Westminster Bridge was lit by gaslight, and the London theatres installed gas between 1817 and 1818. Gaslight was quickly adopted for shop window displays because it enabled owners to better display their wares, but it was slower to be adopted in private homes, not gaining ground until the 1840s. Gas light made streets safer, allowed shops to stay open well after dark, and even improved literacy because of the brighter interiors gas facilitated.


title: 19th-century London

text: By 1823 there were some 40,000 gas street lamps, across 215 miles of streets. By 1880 there were one million gas street lamps in London, and the gas works were consuming 6.5 million tons of coal annually. The city became noteworthy for the brightness of its streets, shopfronts, and interiors at night compared to other European cities. The last precinct to resist gas lighting was Grosvenor Square, which did not install it until 1842. There were 12 gas companies in operation in London in the 1840s, with gas works and gas holders becoming an increasingly recognizable feature of the city. The largest of the gas works were those of the London Gas Company at Vauxhall, which piped gas as far away as Highgate and Hampstead, 7 miles from Vauxhall. The Metropolitan Gas Act 1860 granted monopolies to the various companies in allotted districts, intended to end the fierce competition for territory which had prevailed in the 1850s. This had the unintended effect of raising prices, as the companies exploited their newly secure monopolies. Parliamentary select committees were set up between 1866 and 1868 to look into the matter, which found that gas in London was more expensive and of lower quality than in other English cities. The committees recommended various improvements including price reductions, better regulation, and consolidation. These recommendations were enacted first in the city with the City of London Gas Act of 1868, and within a few years the provisions were expanded across most of London. By the end of the 1870s, there were just 6 gas companies in operation in London, compared to 13 in the 1860s.


title: 19th-century London

text: In the last decades of the 19th century, electric lighting was introduced sporadically, but was slow to supersede gas. In November and December 1848, two competing inventors (M. Le Mott and William Staite) gave demonstrations of their respective electric lamps to astonished crowds at the National Gallery, atop the Duke of York Column, and aboard a train departing from Paddington station. It would take another three decades for this novelty to be installed on any permanent basis, delayed by the expense of electricity and the lack of generating facilities. In 1879, electric arc lamps were installed along the Victoria Embankment as an experiment to gauge the respective brightness of gas vs. electricity, and the latter was judged superior by the Board of Works. The same year, Siemens installed electric light in the Royal Albert Hall and along Waterloo Bridge, while the first large power station in the metropolis opened at Deptford. Another major advancement was the construction of the Edison Electric Light Station at Holborn Viaduct in 1882, the world's first coal-fueled power station for public use. The station, opened by Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Light Company, powered 968 lamps (later expanded to 3,000) stretching from Holborn Viaduct to St. Martin's Le Grand, using Edison carbon-filament incandescent light bulbs.


title: 19th-century London

text: Several of modern London's major museums were founded or constructed during the 19th century, including the British Museum (built 1823–1852), The National Gallery (built 1832–8), the National Portrait Gallery (founded 1856), and the Tate Britain, which opened in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art. The British Museum had been established by Act of Parliament in 1753, and housed since that time in the 17th century Montagu House in Bloomsbury. With the donation of the King's Library in 1822, which comprised some 120,000 manuscripts, pamphlets, and drawings assembled by the late George III, a major extension of the museum was needed. Montagu House was demolished and the quadrangular current building, with its imposing Greek Revival façade designed by Sir Robert Smirke, rose gradually through 1857, with the East Wing the first to be completed in 1828. The Round Reading Room, which was built to occupy the vacant courtyard behind the main building, featured the second largest dome in the world when it was finished (140 feet in diameter). By 1878 the Reading Room contained 1.5 million printed volumes across some 25 miles of shelves.


title: 19th-century London

text: The great complex of museums at South Kensington began with the purchase of a vast tract of land (known as Albertopolis) at the instigation of the Prince Consort and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. The profits from the Exhibition were put toward the purchase of the land, which was intended to host a complex of cultural, scientific and educational institutions. The first of these was the South Kensington Museum (now known as the Victoria & Albert Museum), which opened to the public in 1856. The South Kensington Museum at that time inhabited the 'Brompton Boilers' building designed by William Cubitt, and consisted of the collections of manufactures and decorative art from the Crystal Palace Exhibition and the collections from the Museum of Ornamental Art, previously held in Marlborough House. In 1899 Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone for the current building, designed by Sir Aston Webb, and christened the official change of name to the "Victoria & Albert" Museum.


title: 19th-century London

text: The rest of the land belonging to 'Albertopolis', on the site currently occupied by the Natural History and Science Museums, was used to host the 1862 International Exhibition. A substantial portion was given over to the headquarters and gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society, which was based on the site of the modern Science Museum between 1861 and 1888. The exhibition buildings were afterwards repurposed to hold the scientific objects from the South Kensington Museum, a collection which gradually expanded through acquisitions of scientific instruments in 1874, as well as acquisitions of patent models and machinery like the original cotton mills from Arkwright Mill. By 1893 the first director was appointed to oversee these developing science collections, which would become the core of the Science Museum upon its founding as a separate entity in 1909. In the meantime, the decision was made to relocate the natural history specimen collections of the British Museum to a separate and dedicated facility, the Natural History Museum, the building of which lasted between 1873 and 1884. Other enterprises were granted parcels of land on the active patronage of the commission, which aimed to fulfill Prince Albert's vision. By the end of the century the museums were complemented by the Royal Albert Hall (opened in 1871), the Royal College of Music (opened 1894), and the Imperial Institute (opened 1893).


title: 19th-century London

text: In addition to the museums, popular entertainment proliferated throughout the city. At the beginning of the century, there were only three theatres in operation in London: the "winter" theatres of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and the "summer" theatre of Haymarket. The duopoly granting exclusive rights to the "winter theatres", dating back to the 17th century, forbade rival theatres from operating despite the huge growth in London's population and in theatre attendance. A loosening of these restrictions in the early years of the 19th century allowed small theatres to open which could only put on plays interspersed with musical numbers. To skirt the strict regulations, theatres like the Old Vic were established outside the boundaries of London to produce new plays. In 1843, Parliament repealed the Licensing Act 1737, ending the duopoly of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres, while the Theatres Act 1843 allowed straight plays to be produced in all licensed theatres. Aided by the promotion of theatre as a respectable medium, and new technologies which made staging plays more sophisticated, 19 theatres were in operation by 1851. By 1899 there were 61 theatres across London, 38 of which were in the West End.


title: 19th-century London

text: The music hall was a form of live entertainment which developed gradually during the first half of the 19th century. By the 1830s many hybrid pub/performance venues, known as "Free and Easies", existed where customers could enjoy live entertainment from amateur singers. These were disreputable establishments, which led some public houses to offer Song and supper rooms as a respectable middle-class alternative. Song and Supper Rooms of the 1830s and 40s offered patrons, for a surcharge, the opportunity to dine and drink while enjoying live musical acts of a higher caliber than the "Free and Easies". The 700-person capacity Canterbury Music Hall, which opened in 1852 in Lambeth, was the first purpose-built music hall, establishing the model with its large auditorium packed with tables for dining, generally offering bawdy musical revues or individual acts. By 1875 there were 375 music halls across the city, with the greatest number concentrated in the East End (around 150 had been established in Tower Hamlets by midcentury). Music halls became an integral part of cockney popular culture, with performers like George Robey and George Leybourne famous for their comic characters and songs. Two of the largest and most famous music halls were in Leicester Square – the Alhambra and the Empire – both of which were also notorious for the prostitutes who plied their trade in the galleries.


title: 19th-century London

text: In 1829, Home Secretary Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police as a police force covering the entire urban area, with the exception of the City of London, which formed its own police force under a separate jurisdiction in 1839. In 1839, the two small forces which pre-dated the Met – the Bow Street Runners and the Marine Police Force – were absorbed into it once and for all. The force gained the nicknames of "bobbies" or "peelers" named after Robert Peel, and initially numbered 1,000 officers. Corruption was rife among this early batch of recruits, so much so that five-sixths of the original force had been dismissed within four years.


title: 19th-century London

text: London's urban area grew rapidly, spreading into Islington, Paddington, Belgravia, Holborn, Finsbury, Shoreditch, Southwark and Lambeth. With London's rapid growth, towards the middle of the century, an urgent need arose to reform London's system of local government.


title: 19th-century London

text: Outside of the City of London, which resisted any attempts to expand its boundaries to encompass the wider urban area, London had a chaotic local government system consisting of ancient parishes and vestries, working alongside an array of single-purpose boards and authorities, few of which co-operated with each other. Drainage in the city was handled by 7 different Commissions of Sewers, and in a one-hundred square yard area of Central London there were four different bodies responsible for the pavement and upkeep of the streets. In 1855 the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) was created to provide London with adequate infrastructure to cope with its growth. The MBW was London's first metropolitan government body.


title: 19th-century London

text: The Metropolitan Board of Works was not a directly elected body, which made it unpopular with Londoners. In 1888 it was wound up, and replaced with the London County Council (LCC). This was the first elected London-wide administrative body. The LCC covered the same area as the MBW had done, but this area was designated as the County of London. In 1900, the county was subdivided into 28 metropolitan boroughs, which formed a more local tier of administration than the county council.


title: 19th-century London

text: Parliament also took a more proactive role in public health and healthcare during the latter part of the century. In 1867 it passed the London-specific Metropolitan Poor Act, creating the Metropolitan Asylums Board and six new Metropolitan Asylum Districts in London. The Act was intended to move the provision of healthcare for the poor away from the workhouse infirmaries, whose conditions attracted much public scorn, and into six new hospitals. Only two of these, in Central London and the Poplar and Stepney District, were fully realized, with the other four districts using reconstituted facilities from the old infirmaries because of cost overruns.


title: 19th-century London

text: One of the first tasks of the Metropolitan Board of Works was to address London's sanitation problems. Sewers were far from extensive, and the most common form of human waste disposal was cesspools, some 200,000 by mid-century, which were often open and prone to overflowing. An 1847 ordinance of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers requiring all waste to be discharged into sewers meant that the Thames, where all the discharge went, became much more polluted. The combination of cesspools and the raw sewage pumped into the city's main source of drinking water led to repeated outbreaks of cholera in 1832, 1849, 1854, and 1866 and culminated in The Great Stink of 1858. The 1866 cholera epidemic was the fourth in the city's history, but also the last and the least deadly. Further epidemics were forestalled by Bazalgette's improved sanitation system.


title: 19th-century London

text: Following the Great Stink of 1858 Parliament finally gave consent for the MBW to construct a massive system of sewers. The engineer put in charge of building the new system was Joseph Bazalgette. In one of the largest civil engineering projects of the 19th century, he oversaw construction of over 1300 miles or 2100 km of tunnels and pipes under London to take away sewage and provide clean drinking water. When the London sewerage system was completed, the death toll in London dropped dramatically, and epidemics were curtailed. Bazalgette's system is still in use today.


title: 19th-century London

text: While the problems of disposal of sewage and human waste were much improved by the late 19th century, there also remained problems of sanitation on the streets of London. With some 300,000 horses in use in the city by the 1890s, 1,000 tons of dung were being dropped on London's streets each day. Boys between 12 and 14 were employed to collect horse waste from the streets, which remained the main method until cars gradually replaced horse-drawn vehicles in the 20th century.


title: 19th-century London

text: The social reformer Edwin Chadwick condemned the methods of waste removal in British cities, including London, in his 1842 "Report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain". In the poorer areas of London, rotting food, excrement and mud accumulated on the streets, where drains were few and far between and there were no supplies of water to flush them clean. Chadwick attributed the spread of disease to this filth, advocating improved water supplies and drains, and criticising the inefficient system of labourers and street sweepers then employed to maintain cleanliness. The result was the passing of the Public Health Act 1848, which placed the responsibility for street cleansing, paving, sewers, and water supply on the municipal boroughs rather than on property owners. The boroughs had the power to create Boards of Health, charged with initiating the reforms, and also empowered to intervene and remove a broad range of "nuisances" to public health.


title: 19th-century London

text: The weakness of the 1848 Act was that it did not compel the boroughs to act, but merely provided the framework for doing so. More comprehensive and forceful legislation was passed by Parliament with the Public Health Acts of 1872 and 1875. The last Act compelled the boroughs to provide adequate drainage, required all new housing to be built with running water, and required all streets to be equipped with lighting and pavements. The boards of health were replaced by urban sanitary authorities overseeing new urban sanitary districts. These authorities were more comprehensive than their predecessors, equipped with teams of medical officers and health inspectors who ensured food safety standards were met and actively prevented outbreaks of disease.


title: 19th-century London

text: Atmospheric pollution caused by burning cheap soft coal created the city's notorious pea soup fog. Air pollution from burning wood or coal was nothing new to London – complaints about the city's dirty atmosphere exist as far back as the 13th century – but the population explosion and industrialisation of the 19th century aggravated both the severity of the fogs and their lethal effects on Londoners.


title: 19th-century London

text: The fogs were at their worst in the month of November, but occurred frequently throughout the autumn and winter. Sulphur dioxide and soot emitted from chimneys mixed with the natural vapour of the Thames Valley to form a layer of greasy, acrid mist that shrouded the city up to 240 feet (75 metres) above street level. Its most common colour was a greenish-yellow "pea soup", but it could also be brown, black, orange, or grey. At their worst, the poor visibility caused by London fogs could halt traffic and required the street lamps to be lit all day. Conditions for pedestrians were extremely dangerous: in 1873, nineteen deaths were attributed to accidental drowning from victims who fell into the Thames, canals, or docks during foggy weather. There were also increases in crimes like theft, rape, and assault on London streets because of the cover provided by the fog. Charles Dickens Jr. described the "London particular" in his "Dictionary of London" of 1879:


title: 19th-century London

text: There was wide awareness of the deleterious health effects of extended fogs in London, particularly upon those suffering from respiratory illnesses. Mortality rates could rise well above average at times of severe fog: 700 extra deaths, for example, were attributed to a particularly bad fog in 1873. The recurrent fogs of January and February 1880 were especially bad, killing an estimated 2,000 people and raising the death rate to 48.1 per 1,000 people, compared to the average of 26.3 per thousand in other English cities.


title: 19th-century London

text: Pollution and a smoky atmosphere prevailed at all times of year because of industrial activity and the sheer concentration of domestic fires: an estimated 3.5 million tons of coal were being consumed each year in London by 1854. By 1880 coal consumption stood at 10 million tons per year. "The Smoke", or "The Big Smoke", a nickname for London which persists into the modern day, originated during the Victorian period among country dwellers visiting the capital. One observer described it in 1850:


title: 19th-century London

text: The smoky atmosphere meant that skin and clothing were quickly dirtied just by walking on the street. Household upholsteries, artwork, and furniture could become irretrievably dirtied, requiring large contingents of servants in the more prosperous households to maintain cleanliness. The preoccupation with the exorbitant laundry bills which resulted from the smoke was a main factor in legislating to control smoke emissions in London through the Smoke Nuisance Abatement (Metropolis) Act of 1853. In the debates surrounding the passage of this Act, it was estimated that a working class mechanic in London paid five times the cost of purchasing his shirt to launder it.


title: 19th-century London

text: The grass of the Royal Parks took on a permanent soot colour, as did the sheep that were then allowed to graze in Regent's Park and Hyde Park. It was observed that certain varieties of flower refused to bloom in London or its vicinity, and many trees perished due to pollution. One of the trees that was resistant to the smoky environment was the London plane tree, which sheds its bark regularly and thus resisted the accumulation of soot which killed other trees. It became the go-to planting along streets and in gardens throughout the 19th century. Porous brick and stone were quickly blackened with soot, an effect worsened during bad fogs and damp weather, creating a "uniform dinginess" among London's buildings. The acidic nature of soot deposits caused materials like iron and bronze to oxidise faster, while stone, mortar, and brick deteriorated at a noticeably faster rate. In response, terra cotta and other kiln-fired tiles became popular facings for buildings in the 1880s and 1890s, because they resisted soot and damp and also provided welcome colour to buildings that were otherwise drab.


title: 19th-century London

text: Concerns over smoke pollution gave rise to private Smoke Abatement societies in London and throughout Britain, which championed different measures for controlling smoke pollution. One of these measures was smoke-prevention technology – an exhibition of such devices was staged in London over an 11-week period by the Smoke Abatement Committee in 1881. The exhibition attracted 116,000 attendants and displayed all manner of smokeless furnaces, stoves, grates, and alternative industrial equipment. While the passage of the 1853 Smoke Nuisance Abatement Act placed restrictions on industrial smoke emissions, an attempt in 1884 to legislate against domestic smoke pollution failed, leaving a significant contributor to the problem unregulated.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Kazakhstan, the largest country fully within the Eurasian Steppe, has been a historical crossroads and home to numerous different peoples, states and empires throughout history. Throughout history, peoples on the territory of modern Kazakhstan had nomadic lifestyle, which developed and influenced Kazakh culture.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Human activity in the region began with the extinct "Pithecanthropus" and "Sinanthropus" one million–800,000 years ago in the Karatau Mountains and the Caspian and Balkhash areas. Neanderthals were present from 140,000 to 40,000 years ago in the Karatau Mountains and central Kazakhstan. Modern "Homo sapiens" appeared from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago in southern, central and eastern Kazakhstan. After the end of the last glacial period (12,500 to 5,000 years ago) human settlement spread across the country and led to the extinction of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. Hunter-gatherer communes invented bows and boats and used domesticated wolves and traps for hunting.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The Neolithic Revolution was marked by the appearance of animal husbandry and agriculture, giving rise to the Atbasar, Kelteminar, Botai, and Ust-Narym cultures. The Botai culture (3600–3100 BC) is credited with the first domestication of horses, and ceramics and polished-stone tools also appeared during this period. The fourth and third millennia witnessed the beginning of metal production, the manufacture of copper tools and the use of casting molds. In the second millennium BC ore mining developed in central Kazakhstan.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The change in climate forced the massive relocation of populations in and out of the steppe belt. The dry period that lasted from the end of the second millennium to the beginning of the 1st millennium BC caused the depopulation of the arid belts and river-valley oasis areas, the populations moving north to the forest steppe.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: After the end of the arid period at the beginning of the first millennium BC nomadic populations migrated into Kazakhstan from the west and the east, repopulating abandoned areas. They included several Indo-Iranians, often known collectively as the Saka.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: During the fourth century AD the Huns controlled Kazakhstan, absorbing 26 independent territories and uniting a number of steppe and forest peoples into a single state. The Huns migrated west. The future Kazakhstan was absorbed into the First Turkic Khaganate and successor states.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Several independent states flourished in Kazakhstan during the Early Middle Ages; the best-known were the Kangar Union, Western Turkic Khaganate, the Oghuz Yabgu State and the Kara-Khanid Kaganate.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In the 13th century, Kazakhstan was conquered by the Mongol Empire and controlled by the Golden Horde. After the Golden Horde declined, the Uzbek Khanate broke away from it. In 1465, Kazakh Khanate gained its independence from Uzbeks. Portions of the country began to be annexed by the Russian Empire in the 18th century, the remainder gradually being absorbed into Russian Turkestan beginning in 1867. The modern Republic of Kazakhstan became a political entity during the 1930s Soviet subdivision of Russian Turkestan.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Humans have inhabited Kazakhstan since the Lower Paleolithic, generally pursuing the nomadic pastoralism for which the region's climate and terrain are suitable. Prehistoric Bronze Age cultures that extended into the region include the Srubna, the Afanasevo and the Andronovo. Between 500 BC and 500 AD Kazakhstan was home to the Saka and the Huns, early nomadic warrior cultures.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: According to the Journal of Archaeological Science, in July 2020 scientists from South Ural State University studied two Late Bronze Age horses with the aid of radiocarbon dating from Kurgan 5 of the Novoilinovsky 2 cemetery in the Lisakovsk city in the Kostanay region. Researcher Igor Chechushkov indicated that the Andronovites were riding horses several centuries earlier than many researchers had previously assumed. Among the horses investigated, the stallion was nearly 20 years old and the mare was 18 years old. According to scientists, animals were buried with the person they accompanied throughout their lives, and they were used not only for food but also for harnessing vehicles and riding.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: At the beginning of the first millennium the steppes east of the Caspian were inhabited and settled by a variety of peoples, mainly nomads speaking Indo-European and Uralic languages, including the Alans, Aorsi, Budini, Issedones/Wusun, Madjars, Massagetae and Sakas. The names, relations between and constituents of these peoples were sometimes fluid and interchangeable. Some of them formed states, including Yancai (northwest of the Aral Sea) and Kangju in the east. Over the course of several centuries the area became dominated by Turkic and other exogenous languages, which arrived with nomad invaders and settlers from the east.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Following the entry of the Huns many of the previous inhabitants migrated westward into Europe or were absorbed by the Huns. The focus of the Hun Empire gradually moved westward from the steppes into Eastern Europe.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: For a few centuries events in the future Kazakhstan are unclear and frequently the subject of speculation based on mythic or apocryphal folk tales popular among various peoples that migrated westward through the steppes.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: From the middle of the 2nd century the Yueban – an offshoot of the Xiongnu and therefore possibly connected to the Huns – established a state in far-eastern Kazakhstan.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Over the next few centuries peoples such as the Akatziri, Avars (known later as the Pannonian Avars; not to be confused with the Avars of the Caucasus), Sabirs and Bulgars migrated through the area and into the Caucasus and Eastern Europe.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: By the beginning of the 6th century the proto-Mongolian Rouran Khaganate had annexed areas that were later part of east Kazakhstan.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The Göktürks, a Turkic people formerly subject to the Rouran, migrated westward, pushing the remnants of the Huns west and southward. By the mid-6th Century, the First Turkic Khaganate was established.A few decades later, a civil war resulted in the khaganate being split, and establishment of the Eastern Turkic Khaganate and Western Turkic Khaganate. In 630 and 659, the Eastern and Western Turkic Khaganate were invaded and conquered by the Tang China. Towards the end of the 7th century, the two states were reunited in the Second Turkic Khaganate. However, the khaganate began to fragment only a few generations later.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In 766 the Oghuz Yabgu State ("Oguz il") was founded, with its capital in Jankent, and came to occupy most of the later Kazakhstan. It was founded by the Oghuz Turks refugees from the neighbouring Turgesh Kaganate. The Oghuz lost a struggle with the Karluks for control of Turgesh, other Oguz clans migrated from the Turgesh-controlled Zhetysu to the Karatau Mountains and the Chu valley, in the Issyk Kul basin.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In the eighth and ninth centuries, portions of southern Kazakhstan were conquered by Arabs who introduced Islam. The Oghuz Turks controlled western Kazakhstan from the ninth through the 11th centuries; and Turkic peoples of Kipchaks and Kimaks, controlled the east at roughly the same time. In turn the Cumans controlled western Kazakhstan from around the 12th century until the 1220s. Since then, those vast lands are came to be known as Dashti-Kipchak, or the Kipchak Steppe.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: During the ninth century the Qarluq confederation formed the Qarakhanid state, which conquered Transoxiana (the area north and east of the Oxus River, the present-day Amu Darya). Beginning in the early 11th century, the Qarakhanids fought constantly among themselves and with the Seljuk Turks to the south. The Qarakhanids, who had converted to Islam, were conquered in the 1130s by the Kara-Khitan (a Mongol people who moved west from North China). In the mid-12th century an independent state of Khorazm along the Oxus River broke away from the weakening Karakitai, but the bulk of the Kara-Khitan lasted until the Mongol invasion of Genghis Khan from 1219 to 1221.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: During Mongol advancement into Desht-i-Kipchak lands, some Cuman-Kipchak leaders fought the advancing Mongols, but most joined them and came to constitute most of the military force of the Mongol Empire.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: After the partitioning of the empire in the latter 13th century, the western Mongol state called Golden Horde broke away from the unified empire. Kazakhstan was controlled by Golden Horde for more than 200 years.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: According to the latest research of population genetics, mainly of autosomal markers and Y-chromosome polymorphism, it is believed that during the 13th to 15th centuries that the Kazakh ethnicity emerged.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: After the dissolution of Golden Horde, on most of the territory of modern Kazakhstan Uzbek Khanate was formed. Country under Abu'l-Khayr Khan, was weak and the government was corrupt. Two children of Barak Khan, Janibek and Kerei Khan gathered Kazakh people to Jetysu, where they founded Independent Kazakh Khanate.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: During the reign of Kasym Khan (1511–1523), the khanate expanded considerably. Numerous victories in wars against neighbouring countries made the Khanate's reputation and country well known even in Western Europe. The first Kazakh code of laws, "Qasym Khannyn Qasqa Zholy" (Bright Road of Kasym Khan), was also established in 1520.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The khanate is described in historical texts such as the "Tarikh-i-Rashidi" (1541–1545) by Muhammad Haidar Dughlat and "Zhamigi-at-Tavarikh" (1598–1599) by Kadyrgali Kosynuli Zhalayir.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In 1643, the Kazakh-Dzungar wars unfolded and became a disaster for the Kazakhs. The Khanate's population was divided into three tribes, called juzes: senior, middle and junior. During the reign of Ablai Khan (1771–1781), he united all Kazakhs to fight the Dzungars.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In the 19th century, Russian Empire showed interest in Afghanistan and to reach it, Russia invades Kazakh lands. To confront Russian invasion, the last Khan - Kenesary Khan organized riots, starting from 1837 and ending in 1847 due to the execution of Kenesary.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Russian traders and soldiers began to appear on the northwestern edge of Kazakh territory in the 17th century, when Cossacks established forts which later became the cities of Yaitsk (modern Oral) and Guryev (modern Atyrau). The Russians were able to seize Kazakh territory because the khanates were preoccupied by the Zunghar Oirats, who began to move into the region from the east in the late 16th century. Forced westward, the Kazakhs were caught between the Kalmyks and the Russians.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: First half of the 1700s, was marked by the surge of conflicts and wars with Dzungars. In 1730 Abul Khayr, a khan of the Lesser Horde, sought Russian assistance. Although Khayr's intent was to form a temporary alliance against the stronger Kalmyks, the Russians gained control of the Lesser Horde. They conquered the Middle Horde by 1798, but the Great Horde remained independent until the 1820s (when the expanding Kokand khanate to the south forced the Great Horde khans to accept Russian protection, which seemed to them the lesser of two evils).


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The Russian Empire started to integrate the Kazakh steppe. Between 1822 and 1848, the three main Kazakh Khans of the Lesser, Middle and Great Horde were suspended. Russians built many forts to control the conquered territories. Moreover, Russian settlers were provided with land, whereas nomadic tribes had less area available to drive their herds and flocks. Many of the nomadic tribes were forced to adopt poor and sedentary lifestyles. Because of the Russian Empire policy, between 5 and 15 per cent of the population of Kazakh Steppe were immigrants.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Nineteenth-century colonization of Kazakhstan by Russia was slowed by rebellions and wars, such as uprisings led by Isatay Taymanuly and Makhambet Utemisuly from 1836 to 1838 and the war led by Eset Kotibaruli from 1847 to 1858. In 1863, the Russian Empire announced a new policy asserting the right to annex troublesome areas on its borders. This led immediately to the conquest of the remainder of Central Asia and the creation of two administrative districts: the "General-Gubernatorstvo" (Governor-Generalships) of Russian Turkestan and the Steppes. Most of present-day Kazakhstan, including Almaty (Verny), was in the latter district.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: During the nineteenth century, Kazakhs had remarkable numeracy level, which increased from approximately 72% in 1820 to approximately 88% in 1880. In the first part of the century, Kazakhs were even more numerate than Russians were. However, in that century, Russia conquered many countries and experienced a human capital revolution, which led to a higher numeracy afterwards. Nevertheless, the numeracy of Kazakhs was still higher than other Central Asian nations, which are nowadays referred to as Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. There could be several reasons for this striking early numeracy level. First and foremost, the settler share could explain part of this, albeit Russians were a minority in the Kazakh steppe. Secondly, the relatively good nutritional situation in Kazakhstan. Protein malnutrition that plagued many other populations of Central Asian nations was absent in Kazakhstan. Moreover, Russian settlers of the 1870s and 1880s might have simulated so-called contact learning. Kazakhs started to invest more in human capital because they observed that Russians were successful in that area.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: During the early 19th century, the Russian forts began to limit the area over which the nomadic tribes could drive their herds and flocks. The final disruption of nomadism began in the 1890s, when many Russian settlers were introduced into the fertile lands of northern and eastern Kazakhstan.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In 1906 the Trans-Aral Railway between Orenburg and Tashkent was completed, facilitating Russian colonisation of the fertile lands of Zhetysu. Between 1906 and 1912, more than a half-million Russian farms were established as part of reforms by Russian Minister of the Interior Petr Stolypin; the farms pressured the traditional Kazakh way of life, occupying grazing land and using scarce water resources. The administrator for Turkestan (current Kazakhstan), Vasile Balabanov, was responsible for Russian resettlement at this time.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Starving and displaced, many Kazakhs joined in the Basmachi movement against conscription into the Russian imperial army ordered by the tsar in July 1916 as part of the war effort against Germany in World War I. In late 1916, Russian forces suppressed the widespread armed resistance to the taking of land and conscription of Central Asians. Thousands of Kazakhs were killed, and thousands more fled to China and Mongolia. Many Kazakhs and Russians fought the Communist takeover, and resisted its control until 1920.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In the second half of the 20th century, Russia started building schools in Kazakhstan. It led to the formation of elite in Kazakh society. Most educated Kazakhs were members of Constitutional Democratic Party, but after it fractioned, Kazakh elite formed new party named after a legendary founder of the Kazakh people—Alash. The party's goal was to found an independent democratic Kazakh state. The party managed to form same-named Autonomy, which lasted until 1920, when Bolsheviks banned the party.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The territory of Alash Autonomy covered most of modern territories of Kazakhstan excluding southern regions.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The Turkestan Autonomy, or Kokand Autonomy, was an unrecognized state in Central Asia that existed at the beginning of the Russian Civil War. It was formed on 27 November 1917 and existed until 22 February 1918. It was a secular republic, headed by a president.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The Kirghiz Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, established in 1920, was renamed the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic in 1925 when the Kazakhs were officially distinguished from the Kyrgyz by the Soviet government. Although the Russian Empire recognized the ethnic difference between the groups, it called them both "Kirghiz" to avoid confusion between the terms "Kazakhs" and Cossacks (both names originating from the Turkic "free man").


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In 1925 the republic's original capital, Orenburg, was reincorporated into Russian territory and Kyzylorda became the capital until 1929. Almaty (known as Alma-Ata during the Soviet period), a provincial city in the far southeast, became the new capital in 1929. In 1936, the territory was officially separated from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and made a Soviet republic: the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. With an area of , the Kazakh SSR was the second-largest republic in the Soviet Union.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: First Kazakh famine started in 1919 during Russian Civil War. Amount of livestock in Kazakhstan decreased from 30 million to 16 million, which left almost million people starving due to the "Military Communism" politic. Apart from a famine, Kazakhstan suffered from stopping of all factories.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: From 1929 to 1934, when Joseph Stalin was trying to collectivize agriculture, Kazakhstan endured repeated famine called Asharshylyk similar to the Holodomor in Ukraine; in both republics and the Russian SFSR, peasants slaughtered their livestock in protest against Soviet agricultural policy. During that period, over one million residents and 80 percent of the republic's livestock died. Thousands more tried to escape to China, although most starved in the attempt. According to Robert Conquest, "The application of party theory to the Kazakhs, and to a lesser extent to the other nomad peoples, amounted economically to the imposition by force of an untried stereotype on a functioning social order, with disastrous results. And in human terms it meant death and suffering proportionally even greater than in the Ukraine".


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: During the 1930s, the Soviet government built Gulags across the Union. There were 11 concentration camps built in Kazakhstan, the most well known being ALZhIR.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: NKVD Order 00486 of 15 August 1937 marked the beginning of mass repression against "ChSIR: members of the families of traitors to the Motherland" (). The order gave the right to arrest without evidence of guilt, and sent women political-prisoners to the camps for the first time. In a few months, female "traitors" were arrested and sentenced to from five to eight years in prison. More than 18,000 women were arrested, and about 8,000 served time in ALZhIR – the Akmolinsk Camp of Wives of Traitors to the Motherland (). They included the wives of statesmen, politicians and public figures in the then Soviet Union, including the wives of the former members of the Alash movement. After the closure of the prisons in 1953, it was reported that 1,507 of the women gave birth as a result of being raped by the guards.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: During Soviet rule most of former members of Alash started working on translating textbooks for newly building schools, since most Kazakhs still weren't educated. Some of former members joined Communist Party, but still elite protested several politics of Soviet government, like collectivization which led to the artificial famine of 1930–33. Government tried to oppress Kazakh elite and imprisoned most of them. Due to bad treatment and harsh conditions in Camps, former Alash members started aging very soon, which is shown in some photos of them, taken before they were shot.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Many Soviet citizens from the western regions of the USSR and a great deal of Soviet industry relocated to the Kazakh SSR during World War II, when Axis armies captured or threatened to capture western Soviet industrial centres. Groups of Crimean Tatars, Germans, and Muslims from the North Caucasus were deported to the Kazakh SSR during the war because it was feared that they would collaborate or had collaborated with the Germans. Many Poles from eastern Poland were deported to the Kazakh SSR, and local people shared their food with the new arrivals.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Many more non-Kazakhs arrived between 1953 and 1965, during the Virgin Lands Campaign of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (in office 1958–1964). That program saw huge tracts of Kazakh SSR grazing land cultivated for wheat and other cereal grains. More settlement occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the Soviet government paid bonuses to workers participating in a program to relocate Soviet industry closer to Central Asia's coal, gas, and oil deposits. By the 1970s the Kazakh SSR was the only Soviet republic in which those of eponymous nationality was a minority, due to immigration and the decimation of the nomadic Kazakh population.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: The Kazakh SSR played industrial and agricultural roles in the centrally-controlled Soviet economic system, with coal deposits discovered during the 20th century promising to replace depleted fuel-reserves in the European territories of the USSR. The distance between the European industrial centres and the Kazakh coal-fields posed a formidable problem – only partially solved by Soviet efforts to industrialize Central Asia. This left the Republic of Kazakhstan a mixed legacy after 1991: a population of nearly as many Russians as Kazakhs; a class of Russian technocrats necessary to economic progress but ethnically unassimilated, and a coal- and oil-based energy industry whose efficiency is limited by inadequate infrastructure.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: On 16 December 1986, the Soviet Politburo dismissed longtime General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan Dinmukhamed Konayev. His successor was the non-Kazakh Gennady Kolbin from Ulyanovsk, Russia, which triggered demonstrations protesting the move. The protests were violently suppressed by the authorities, and "between two and twenty people lost their lives, and between 763 and 1137 received injuries. Between 2,212 and 2,336 demonstrators were arrested". When Kolbin prepared to purge the Communist Youth League he was halted by Moscow, and in September 1989 he was replaced with the Kazakh Nursultan Nazarbayev.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: In June 1990 Moscow declared the sovereignty of the central government over Kazakhstan, forcing Kazakhstan to make its own statement of sovereignty. The exchange exacerbated tensions between the republic's two largest ethnic groups, who at that point were numerically about equal. In mid-August, Kazakh and Russian nationalists began to demonstrate around Kazakhstan's parliament building in an attempt to influence the final statement of sovereignty being drafted; the statement was adopted in October.


title: History of Kazakhstan

text: Like other Soviet republics at that time, Parliament named Nazarbayev its chairman and converted his chairmanship to the presidency of the republic. Unlike the leaders of the other Soviet republics (especially the independence-minded Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), Nazarbayev remained committed to the Soviet Union during the spring and summer of 1991 largely because he considered parts of USSR too interdependent economically to be able to survive independently. However, he also fought to control Kazakhstan's mineral wealth and industrial potential.