1761 1762 1763 1764 1765 1766 1767 1768 1769 1770
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French and Spanish forces invade Portugal; the Portuguese summon British aid to help repel the invaders, but British admiral Edward Boscawen (known as "Old Dreadnought") has died at Hatchlands Park, Surrey, January 10 at age 49.
France, Spain, and the Bourbon states of Italy join in a pacte de famille against Britain August 15; Britain's Lord Pitt resigns October 5 when George III and Parliament refuse to declare war on Spain (see 1762).
Britain's new king George III marries Charlotte Sophia, 16, niece of the duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who will bear him 15 children. He threatens to withdraw the subsidies that have enabled Prussia's Friedrich II (the Great) to withstand coalition forces in the Seven Years' War (see 1762).
The Battle of Panipat in India January 14 ends in a crushing defeat of the Maratha forces at the hands of the Afghan chief Ahmad Shah Durrani, who withdraws soon afterward following a mutiny of his troops (see 1760). The dissension left behind plays into the hands of the British, and while the Mughal Empire that began in 1526 will continue until 1857, it is the British who will rule India from now until 1947 (see 1764).
Pondicherry falls to British forces January 16 after a long siege (see 1760). General Thomas-Arthur, comte de Lally, surrenders to Lieut. Colonel Eyre Coote and returns voluntarily to France to stand trial on charges that he was derelict in his duty; he will be convicted and imprisoned for nearly 5 years before being executed. The East India Company takes over the former French enclave on India's northeast coast with help from London-born merchant George Pigot, 41, who has been governor and commander in chief of Madras since 1755, will return to England in 1763 with a fortune of £400,000, and will be awarded a baronetcy in 1764 (see 1777).
Portugal abolishes slavery at home but continues to enslave Africans for work in her colonial African and Brazilian sugar plantations (see 1858; Madeira, 1775).
American Quakers exclude slave traders from the Society of Friends despite the fact that many Quakers own slaves. Slave labor has helped South Carolina rice planters to move production from inland swamps to tidal flood plains that are even more productive (see 1724). Africans with knowledge of rice cultivation in standing water fetch higher prices than slaves imported from parts of Africa where rice is not grown; slave women play a vital role in selecting and sowing seed, hoeing, and processing the rice; men build floodgates, canals, and ditches based on those back in Africa, and planters reward them by letting them till their own garden when their work on the rice fields is finished.
Britain takes £600,000 worth of exports from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, most of it in sugar, while Canada yields only £14,000 (see 1759; 1763).
France's Louis XV appoints Paris-born economist (Ann Robert) Jacques Turgot, 34, intendant of the généralité (district) of Limoges. Having trained for a career in the church (his two older brothers had civil and military positions), Turgot gave up that idea just before ordination 10 years ago, claiming that he could not live under false pretenses. He has met the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, developed a distrust of government, served as a counselor magistrate in the Parlement (supreme court) at Paris, visited last year with the exiled Voltaire, and will spend the next 13 years trying to effect widespread reforms in the poor and backward region he serves, bringing tax lists up to date, introducing a more equitable means of collecting taxes, and instituting a tax in place of the corvée (forced labor by peasants to maintain the roads), despite local opposition and only grudging support from the government at Paris. Turgot will open workshops to provide occupation for the unemployed, financing them in part with funds exacted from landowners, and he will encourage improvements in agriculture (see 1774; Nonfiction, 1766).
Philadelphia's Corporation for the Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers and of the Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of Presbyterian Ministers issues the first American life insurance policy May 22 (see 1759).
New England spermaceti candle makers organize the United Company of Spermaceti Candlers and arrange agreements to maintain high prices. Prominent among them is Newport, Rhode Island, merchant Aaron Lopez, 29, who came to Newport from his native Portugal after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and will build up a fleet of 27 square-rigged whalers and other ships, becoming Newport's richest citizen as he develops a trade with the West Indies, the other American colonies, Newfoundland, Europe, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Africa, sometimes trading in slaves but mostly in staple commodities.
England's Bridgewater Canal opens after 3 years' work to link Liverpool with Leeds.
The ruin of France's merchant marine and Navy frees French mariners to become privateers. Provided by the government with letters of marque that protect them from punishment in the event of their capture, they seize as much as one tenth of all British merchant shipping, but France is no longer a major commercial rival to Britain.
John Harrison's chronometer of 1736 undergoes its first real sea trial, having been improved to create what is essentially a pocket watch five inches in diameter with a gridiron pendulum made of two metals that expand and contract in opposition. H.M.S. Deptford leaves Portsmouth for Jamaica in November, carrying Harrison's son William and the fourth version of the chronometer; made of oak and lignum vitae, it is kept by order of the Board of Longitude in a locked box with four keys (William is responsible for winding the chronometer each day and has one key, the others being held by the ship's captain, his first lieutenant, and Britain's governor-designate of Jamaica, William Lyttleton; see 1762).
French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, 25, publishes a complete calculus of variations that incorporates both old and new results in a treatment both systematic and elegant. Lagrange has been a professor at an artillery school in Turin since age 19 and has corresponded with the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (see 1748; asteroids, 1772).
Botanist-physiologist Stephen Hales dies at Teddington, outside London, January 4 at age 83, having pioneered quantitative experimentation in plant and animal physiology. In addition to his findings about physiology and human hematology, the clergyman has modified an organ bellows to create an artifical ventilator that can convey fresh air into granaries, prisons, and ships' holds.
German botanist Josef Gottlieb Kölreuter, 28, begins publishing papers on sex in plants, developing a scientific application of the ideas published by the late Rudolph Camerarius in 1694. Kölreuter will gain appointment in 1764 as professor of natural history and curator at the Botanical Gardens of Karlsruhe and cultivate plants, notably tobacco plants (Nicotiana) for the purpose of studying their fertilization and development, conducting experiments that will include artificial fertilization and the production of fertile hybrids that have characteristics of different species (see Weismann, 1864).
Nottinghamshire-born Litchfield physician Erasmus Darwin, 29, wins election to the Royal Society on the strength of his research into physical properties of gases and steam. He will soon be the center of the "Lunar Society," a Birmingham circle of inventors and philosophers that meets on the evening of the full moon and whose members will include manufacturer Matthew Boulton, inventor James Watt, and potter Josiah Wedgwood.
Theologian-mathematician Thomas Bayes dies at Tumbridge Wells, Kent, April 17 at age 58, having established a mathematical basis for inferring probability.
London physician John Hill makes the first association between tobacco and cancer, reporting six cases of "polypusses" related to excessive use of snuff in his "Cautions Against the Immoderate Use of Snuff."
Viennese physician Leopold Auenbrugger von Auenbrügg, 39, discovers the percussion method of diagnosing lung disease (see Laënnec, 1819).
German carpenter Kaspar Faber begins production of pencils at Stein, near Nuremberg, to launch a family company that will continue into the 21st century.
Nonfiction: Christianity Unveiled (Le Christianisme dévoilé) by German-born French philosopher Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d'Holbach, is published under the name of a deceased friend. Now 37 and a naturalized French citizen since he was 25, Holbach owes his wealth to his uncle, whose surname he has adopted, and his inherited wealth allows him to get away with attacking belief in Christianity as contrary to reason and nature.
Fiction: Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse by Jean Jacques Rousseau is about a man of low position who marries a young woman of higher station. Now 49, Rousseau himself took a fancy in his early 30s to one Thérèse Levassour, a servant at the inn where he lived, seduced her, told her that while he would not marry her he would not desert her. She was not pretty, clever, or charming; she was barely literate, could not tell time, count money, or name the months of the year in proper order, but she bore him five children, who were turned over to a foundling home. He will marry her in 1768. Like Voltaire and many other French intellectuals and artists, Rousseau has received support from the king's mistress, Mme. de Pompadour, and others.
Novelist Samuel Richardson dies at Parson's Green outside London July 4 at age 72.
Poetry: The Rosciad by London parson-poet Charles Churchill, 30, is published anonymously and cleverly satirizes London actors and actresses, naming everyone of prominence except David Garrick and having nothing good to say about any of them. Churchill is a member of Sir Francis Dashwood's "Hell-Fire Club," also known as the "Mad Monks of Medmenham"; he has been bankrupt, but his verses bring him money as well as recognition, and he will soon resign his position as curate of a Westminister parish and separate from his wife as he abandons himself to profligacy.
Painting: L'Accordée du Village by Jean Baptiste Greuze.
Theater: The Father of the Family (Le Père de Famille) by Denis Diderot 2/18 at the Comédie-Française, Paris; The Rage for Country Life (Le Manie della Villeggiatura) by Carlo Goldoni in October at Venice's Teatra San Luca.
First performances: Symphony No. 7 in C minor (Le Midi) by Joseph Haydn, who signs a contract in May to become vice-capellmeister to the court of Hungary's Prince Miklós József Esterházy at Eisenstadt.
France's first veterinary school opens at Lyons.
British grain prices will rise in this decade, and fewer Britons will grow their own food as public lands are enclosed and turned into pastures for sheep and more of the peasantry driven off the land. A special act of Parliament must be obtained for each enclosure, a system that favors large landowners who need only to have the wherewithal for lawyers' and surveyors' fees and enough to pay for fences, hedges, roads, and drainage following passage of an enclosure act. Between 2 million and 3 million acres of open fields and waste lands will be enclosed between now and 1799, and by 1840 there will have been 3,500 enclosure acts, up from just 200 in the past 60 years. This change will create distress among villagers who cannot afford the cost of enclosure and will thus be forced to sell out, often at cheap prices, or accept inferior land. Enclosure deprives the peasant of land for pasturage and fields for his crops, but while it will make even poultry an expensive luxury it will make agriculture more efficient and lead to a great increase in food production.
1761 1762 1763 1764 1765 1766 1767 1768 1769 1770
