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A motion by the British ministry for the expulsion of John Wilkes from the House of Commons carries January 20 (see 1763); he is tried in absentia and found guilty in February of having published a seditious libel and an obscene and impious libel. Sentence is deferred, pending his return, and when he remains abroad he is proclaimed an outlaw (see 1768).
Former British prime minister William Cavendish, 4th duke of Devonshire, dies at Spa, near Liège, in the Austrian Netherlands October 3 at age 44.
Mme. de Pompadour falls ill with bronchial pneumonia at Choisy in late February and dies April 15 at age 42 after a career in which she has wielded enormous influence over the nation's foreign and domestic affairs. She has remained maitresse-en-titre to France's Louis XV (although he has had many casual liaisons since 1749).
His French allies desert the Ottawa chief Pontiac in his siege of the British at Fort Detroit and Fort Pitt in North America (see 1763). Colonel Bouquet defeats the tribesmen, forcing them to sue for peace, and although Pontiac and a small number of his followers refuse to accept the surrender terms the Pontiac Rebellion will sputter out next year (see 1766).
The Pennsylvania colony sends Benjamin Franklin back to London to petition the crown for a royal charter that will supersede the charter of the original proprietors (see 1760; Stamp Act, 1765).
The Muslim soldier Haidar Ali, 39, usurps the throne of Mysore (he will assume the title maharaja in 1766).
The Battle of Buxar (Baksar) October 22 ends in victory for British East India Company forces under Sir Hector Munro over the Mughal army of the emperor Shah Alam, his nabob Shuja ud-Dawlah of Oudh, and the dispossessed nabob of Bengal Mir Qasim (see 1761). The British make themselves masters of Bengal, India's richest province, and of Bihar (see 1765).
Rhode Island colony merchant John Brown, 28, of the firm Nicholas Brown & Company fits out the brig Sally and enters the slave trade. Commanded by Esek Hopkins, 46, her first voyage ends in disaster, with 88 Africans dying on the Atlantic crossing; other members of the Brown family will soon quit slave trading (the firm will remain active in other trade and amass a fortune; see commerce, 1787), but John will persevere in the triangular slave trade, bringing Africans to the West Indies and to New England along with molasses for rum distillers (see 1797; politics, 1772; [Hopkins], 1775).
Fur trader Pierre Laclède puts his 14-year-old stepson (René) Auguste Chouteau in command of a company of 30 men and sends him to build a village on the west bank of the Mississippi where it joins with the Missouri, giving it the name St. Louis (see 1763).
The Sugar Act passed by Parliament April 5 cuts in half the sixpence per gallon duty on molasses imported into British colonies from non-British islands in the West Indies. London sends customs officials to America, and they investigate the books of Boston-born Harvard graduate Samuel Adams, 41, who has served as the city's tax collector since 1756 but made such a hash of the job that an audit turns up a shortage of £7,000. Local shipowner and smuggler John Hancock, 27, persuades the authorities to forgive most of Adams's debt, but the colonial office orders colonial governors to enforce the new law and apprehend smugglers (see 1763). Boston lawyer James Otis denounces "taxation without representation" May 24; chosen to chair a committee of correspondence established by the General Court, Otis writes pamphlets ("Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists, in a Letter to a Noble Land," "A Vindication of the British Colonies Against the Aspersions of the Halifax Gentleman," etc.) and urges the colonies to unite in opposition to any new British tax laws, but he opposes use of violence and entertains no thoughts of any separation from Britain. Otis has worked closely with Samuel Adams; James Bowdoin, 37; and John Hancock as a member of the colony's ruling council. Boston merchants organize to ban imports of British luxury goods in August, initiating a policy of nonimportation (see 1768).
The Currency Act passed by Parliament April 19 forbids Britain's colonies from printing paper money.
The British pay taxes at higher rates than any other Europeans and have received little tax support from their colonists. They begin to take a harder line with the colonists.
The Rothschild banking empire has its beginnings in a coin and antique dealership opened at Frankfurt-am-Main by local entrepreneur Meyer (or Mayer) Amschel Rothschild, 21, whose father, Moses Amschel Bauer, was an itinerant money lender before 1750, when he opened a counting house in Frankfurt's Judenstrasse and placed a large red shield above its door; young Rothschild has purchased the business and will ingratiate himself with the prince by selling him rare coins. He lives with his family at 188 Jüdenstrasse, a run-down tenement on a narrow lane that extends in a half-circle from the Bornheimer gate in the north to the Jewish cemetery in the south. The lane is shut off from the rest of the city by three heavy gates that are guarded by soldiers, locked at night, and kept locked all day on Sundays, on Christian holidays, and from Good Friday until after Easter (see human rights, 1726). Despite anti-Semitic ordinances that favor the city's predominantly Lutheran merchants and bankers, Rothschild will prosper, as will his sons (see 1769).
Mme. de Pompadour is possessed of only 37 gold louis in cash at her death, having spent nearly 37 million livres on châteaux, estates (she has owned 17 at various times, some purchased as investments), houses, trees, flowers, furnishings, lavish gifts, and the like. Much of her income was derived from investments in industrial enterprises, gambling, and shares in the prize money of privateers that she helped fit out to prey upon British shipping.
H.M.S. Tartar arrives in Barbados May 15 carrying William Harrison and his friend Thomas Wyatt with the ship's chronometer that went out with H.M.S. Deptford in 1761 (see 1762). Ship's captain Sir John Lindsay has supervised the second sea trial of the chronometer, but the astronomers who have arrived earlier at the Barbados observatory include Nevil Maskelyne, who claims that his method of determining longitude is superior and that he is entitled to the Board of Longitude's prize. Harrison and Capt. Lindsay question the claim, and Maskelyne is so upset that he makes a mess of his astronomical observations. The Board of Longitude's commissioners concede later in the year that the Harrison chronometer has determined the longitude accurately to within 10 miles—three times what the Longitude Act of 1714 demanded; they announce that they are "unanimously of the opinion that the said timekeeper has kept its time with sufficient correctness." The commissioners offer to give John Harrison half the prize money on condition that he turn over all his sea clocks and disclose the inner workings of his latest version. If he is to receive the full £20,000 he must supervise production of two duplicate copies as evidence that the design and performance are replicable (see 1765).
Mathematician Christian Goldbach dies at Moscow November 20 at age 74, having made significant contributions to the theory of curves, to infinite series, and to the integration of differential equilibrium. Other mathematicians will try for centuries to prove Goldbach's conjecture of 1742 that every even natural number greater than 2 is equal to the sum of two prime numbers.
Naples has a violent epidemic of typhus (see 1762).
Russia confiscates Church lands.
Presbyterian preacher Gilbert Tennent dies at Philadelphia July 23 at age 61.
Brown University has its beginnings in the Rhode Island College chartered October 24 by the colony's assembly and governor at the persuasion of New Jersey-born Baptist clergyman James Manning, 26, who graduated from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) 2 years ago and begins classes at Warren with help from Connecticut-born Newport scholar Ezra Stiles, 36, who will later be elected president of Yale. Manning will be elected president of the Rhode Island College in September of next year. The school for men will move to Providence in 1770, maintain strict nonsectarian principles despite the fact that its founders are Baptists, and adopt the name Brown in 1804 after receiving gifts from merchant Nicholas Brown, now 35, whose 2-year-old Nicholas Brown & Company has been joined by brothers Joseph, 31, John, 28, and Moses, 26. The Browns are the leading colonial candlemakers.
The Connecticut Courant begins weekly publication at Hartford October 29 (see 1866).
Manuel typographique by French engraver-type founder Pierre Simon Fournier, 52, is published in two volumes at Paris. Fournier has devised the first system for measuring and naming sizes of type.
Nonfiction: An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense by Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, 54, challenges many of the notions advanced by skeptic David Hume in 1739. Reid has been teaching at King's College, Aberdeen, since 1751, and his work amplifies four graduation addresses that he has delivered. He can find no fault with Hume's argumentation, but common sense, he says, supports the idea that a material world exists and that people retain their personal identities even in a world of continuous change. Like his fellow "intuitionist" Richard Price, Reid gives up any notion that moral truths can be demonstrated by some kind of mathematical reasoning, arguing rather that people know what is right and wrong through simple perceptions that are not further analyzable; The New Organon (Neues Organon) by mathematician-astronomer Johann H. Lambert subjects formal logic, probability, the principles of science, and other questions to philosophical analysis, using the term phenomenology (phenomonologie) as part of his theory of knowledge distinguishing truth from illusion and error. Now 34, Lambert moves from Augsburg to Berlin, where he receives the patronage of Friederich the Great; History of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums) by Johann Winckelmann cites cultural and technical factors such as freedom, climate, and craftsmanship to define for the first time in ancient art an organic development of growth, maturity, and decline in an effort to define an ideal of beauty. Winckelmann made his first visit to Naples in 1755 and has been critical of the amateurish excavations at Pompeii while at the same time publicizing the wonders to be seen there, thus making the digs an obligatory part of any Briton's Grand Tour of the Continent.
Chinese author Cao Xueqin (Tsao Hisieh-chin) dies at age 48, leaving his Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng, or Hung Lou Meng) incomplete. The only great novel of manners in Chinese literature, its final third will be written by novelist Gao E (Kao Eh).
Poetry: The Traveler by Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith, 35; "The Duellist" and "The Candidate" by Charles Churchill, who defends the outlawed John Wilkes, travels to Boulogne to join him, but falls ill and dies there November 4 at age 33.
Painting: Bacchus and Chloë by neoclassicist Swiss painter and graphic artist Angelica Kauffmann, 23, a protégée of Sir Joshua Reynolds. William Hogarth dies at London October 26 at age 66 in the Leicester Fields house that he and his wife have occupied since 1736.
Sculpture: St. Bruno by French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon, 23, at Rome.
St. Petersburg's Hermitage art museum has its beginning in a court museum adjoining the Winter Palace established by Catherine the Great to house the artworks that she has amassed (see 1852).
Theater: La Jeune Indienne by French playwright (Sebastien Roch) Nicolas Chamfort, 23.
First performances: Symphony No. 22 in E flat major (The Philosopher) by Joseph Haydn at the Esterházy court in Eisenstadt.
Composer Jean Philippe Rameau dies of typhoid fever at Paris September 12 at age 80.
"On Crimes and Punishment" ("Tratto dei delitti delle pene") by Italian economist Cesare Bo'nesana, 26, marchese di Beccaria, condemns capital punishment, torture, and confiscation: "If, by supporting the rights of mankind, and of invincible truth, I shall contribute to save from the agonies of death one unfortunate victim of tyranny, or of ignorance, equally fatal, his blessings and years of transport will be sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of mankind." The brief work will be translated into 22 European languages and have wide influence.
Madrid's Royal Palace is completed for Spain's Carlos III after 28 years of construction.
The Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalato by Scottish architect Robert Adam, 36, establishes Adam's reputation. He designs Kenwood House in Middlesex.
Bath's Circus is completed by architect-city planner John Wood, the Younger, to designs by his late father.
London begins the practice of numbering houses.
Prussia's Friedrich II (the Great) moves to improve his country's agriculture after studying the intensive farming methods employed in the Lowlands. Friedrich institutes a modified rotation system that employs clover to enrich the soil, turnips whose green tops help smother weeds, wheat, and barley (the turnips and clover both make good animal fodder; see Townshend, 1730). Friedrich also drains the marshes along the Oder, Werthe, and Netze Rivers.
Baccarat glass has its beginnings in a petition to France's Louis XV from the monseigneur de Montmorency-Laval, bishop of Metz, who asks permission to establish a glassware factory across the Meurthe River from Baccarat, a town of 600. A nearby salt factory that has used the bishop's vast woodlands as a fuel source has closed, the bishop's Compagnie des Cristalliers de Baccarat will be established next year, and by 1789 it will have 400 employees.
Baker Chocolate has its beginnings in a business set up by Irish-born chocolate maker John Hannon with help from Massachusetts colony physician James Baker, who leases a small mill on the Neponset River at Dorchester, obtains millstones and kettles, and supplies Hannon, who is penniless, with the necessary capital (see 1777).
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