The worldwide economic depression that followed the financial panic of 1873 is called the Long Depression.
The downturn began with financial crises in Europe and North America, including the collapse of the Vienna stock exchange and the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in the United States. Railroad overbuilding, falling prices, and banking instability then spread economic weakness across several industrial economies.
The term Long Depression is especially associated with the prolonged period from the 1870s into the 1890s, although its exact start and end dates vary by country. Industrial output and trade did not fall continuously everywhere, so some historians describe it as a long period of deflation and uneven growth rather than one uninterrupted depression.
It is often confused with the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Long Depression occurred roughly half a century earlier and developed under the gold standard during a period of rapid industrialization and expanding global trade.