The 1873 financial crisis that triggered a long global depression was the Panic of 1873.
The panic began in the United States after the failure of Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873. The bank had heavily promoted financing for railroads, and confidence collapsed when investors questioned the profitability and debt behind railway expansion. The New York Stock Exchange temporarily closed for the first time in its history, for ten days.
The crisis spread internationally and was followed by a prolonged period of deflation, falling investment, business failures, and unemployment often called the Long Depression. The depression’s timing and severity varied by country, so historians do not always define its boundaries identically.
The Panic of 1873 is not the same as the Panic of 1893, another severe U.S. financial crisis. It is also sometimes called the Great Depression of the nineteenth century, but that label should not be confused with the 1930s Great Depression.