Isambard Kingdom Brunel, following his success in…

The French colonize Wallis and Futuna Islands, located to the northeast of Fiji, in 1853.

The French, expanding from Polynesia into western Oceania acquire New Caledonia and its dependencies in 1853.

Admiral Febvrier Despointes, under orders from Emperor Napoleon III, takes formal possession of New Caledonia on September 24, 1853.

Convict shipments to Tasmania cease in 1853.

Buirma's new king, Mindon Min, requests the dispersal of British forces: the British are unreceptive but are hesitant to advance farther northward; with both sides at an impasse, the fighting simply ceases.

The British now occupy all of Pegu province, which they rename Lower Burma, but without formal recognition of the Burmese court.

British merchants arrive, importing large quantities of opium from India and selling it through a government-controlled opium monopoly.

Opium production increases along the highlands of Southeast Asia.

Motley bands of peasants, army deserters, and salt smugglers have fomented sporadic outbreaks in China since the first decade of the nineteenth century.

These plundering gangs, called Nien, an offshoot of the Buddhist-inspired White Lotus secret societies, have ravaged northern Anhwei, southern Shantung, and southern Honan.

Oppressed by famine resulting from flooding during the 1850s and stimulated by government preoccupation with the Taiping, several Nien bands, having formed a coalition under the leadership of guerilla leader Zhang Lexing in 1852-53, begin to expand rapidly.

The Qing authorities, to combat the Taiping Rebellion, have to rely on local armies, which are financed by the provincial and local gentry class.

To meet this need, a special tax on goods in transit, called the likin, is started in 1853, the proceeds of which remain largely outside the control of the central government.

Japan remains virtually closed to international commerce.

Sakoku (Japanese:, literally "country in chains" or "lock up of country"), the foreign relations policy of Japan under which no foreigner or Japanese can enter or leave the country on penalty of death, had been enacted by the Tokugawa shogunate under Tokugawa Iemitsu through a number of edicts and policies from 1635-1641 and remains in effect.

The shogun Ieyoshi opposes mounting Japanese pressure to trade with the West.

U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, younger brother of War of 1812 naval hero Oliver Perry, had embarked in 1852 from Norfolk, Virginia for Japan, in command of a squadron in search of a Japanese trade treaty.

The Japanese have been forewarned by the Dutch of Perry’s voyage, but are unwilling to change their two hundred and fifty-year-old policy of national seclusion.

There is considerable internal debate in Japan on how best to meet this potential threat to Japan’s economic and political sovereignty.

Leo Tolstoy's debut novel Childhood is published under the initials L. N., in the November 1852 issue of the popular Saint Petersburg literary journal Sovremennik (The  Contemporary).

It will later be published in book form to immediate success, earning notice from other Russian novelists, including Ivan Turgenev, who heralds the twenty-three year old Tolstoy as a major up-and-coming figure in Russian literature.

Childhood is an exploration of the inner life of a young boy, Nikolenka, and one of the books in Russian writing to explore an expressionistic style, mixing fact, fiction and emotions to render the moods and reactions of the narrator.

It is the first in a series of three novels and will be followed by Boyhood and Youth.

The first Hebrew novel, Ahavat Ziyyon (”The Love of Zion”, 1852), by Abraham Mapu, is a florid Romantic idyll set in the days of the prophet Isaiah, in which Mapu, like all Haskala writers, employs phrases culled from the Bible and adapted to the thought the writer wishes to express.

A teacher of religion and German, Mapu is an influential advocate of the Haskala.

The sultan adjudicates in favor of the French in 1853, despite the vehement protestations of the local Orthodox monks.

Russia’s Tsar Nicholas dispatches Prince Aleksandr Sergeyevich Menshikov on a special mission to the Sublime Porte.

Previous treaties have committed the sultan "to protect the Christian religion and its Churches," but Menshikov attempts to negotiate a new treaty, under which Russia would be allowed to interfere whenever it deemed the Sultan's protection inadequate.

At the same time, however, the British government of Prime Minister Aberdeen dispatches Lord Stratford, ambassador to the Porte for the past decade, who learns of Menshikov's demands upon arriving in Istanbul.

Stratford applies his diplomatic skills to convince the Sultan to reject the treaty, which would compromise the independence of the Turks.