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Sweden's Adolf Frederik dies at Stockholm February 12 at age 60 after a 20-year reign in which the riksdag has deprived him of all his powers of state. He is succeeded by his 25-year-old son, who will regain absolute monarchical power next year by rousing fears of Russia and Prussia and will reign until 1792 as Gustav III.
Russian Cossacks conquer the Crimean peninsula of the Ukraine for Catherine II (the Great) in a triumph assisted indirectly by the British (see 1770). The Russian success alarms Prussia's Friedrich II (the Great) (see Poland, 1772; Crimean annexation, 1783).
Damascus falls to the Mameluke forces of Egypt's ruler Ali Bey, 43 (see 1524; 1773).
Maratha forces from the Deccan Plateau drive the Afghans out of Delhi February 10, install the son of the exiled Mughal emperor Shah Alam II as temporary ruler, and in April install Shah Alam himself as their puppet emperor, raising anxiety among the British, who have kept Shah Alam in custody in Allahabad (see 1780).
Vietnamese rebel Nguyen Hue and his older, less capable brother Nguyen Nhac lead an insurrection that will be remembered as the Tay Son Rebellion (both 19, the Nguyens are from the village of Tay Son and are known as the Tay Son Brothers) (see 1630; 1777).
Former Massachusetts colonial governor William Shirley dies at Roxbury March 24 at age 76.
The Battle of Alamance May 16 ends in a rout of back-country North Carolina farmers known as Regulators who have attacked the courts in a protest against taxes (see 1770). The colonial governor William Tryon has called for volunteers March 19, and when response was slow he offered 40 shillings per man as an incentive. Artillery, muskets, ammunition, and other requested supplies have come in from Fort Johnston on the Cape Fear River. Tryon's 1,068-man militia force includes 151 officers. He has the support of another 284 officers and men, and although the Regulators have an estimated 2,000 men they lack leadership and weapons; the militia puts them to flight. About nine men are killed on each side, 61 militiamen are wounded, a larger number of Regulators are wounded, Tryon takes 15 prisoners, and he has some executed on the spot to discourage further insurgencies. Tryon leaves in July to succeed John Murray, 4th earl of Dunmore, as governor of the New York colony, Dunmore having been promoted to governor of the Virginia colony (see 1774).
Savoy abolishes serfdom as Charles Emmanuel III nears the end of a 43-year reign.
English traveler Arthur Young, 30, writes, "Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious . . . they must like all mankind be in poverty or they will not work" (see Mandeville, 1714).
Samuel Hearne of the Hudson's Bay Company pauses in July on the shore of the Arctic Ocean during a 19-month walk from Hudson Bay (see 1767). Now 26 and accompanied only by one native guide, he catches just a brief glimpse of an ice-choked sea, encounters nothing that can be construed as a "Northwest Passage" from the Atlantic to the Pacific (see Knight, 1719), and will say later that he "left the print of my feet in blood almost every step that I took." By scouting long-prevalent rumors, Hearne's findings will divert further explorations north to Baffin Bay (see Baffin, 1616).
Explorer James Cook returns to England by way of Batavia, where the Endeavour has stopped for supplies (see 1770). Many of her crew have come down with fever and dysentery on her 42,000-mile voyage (30 men have died from diseases contracted ashore but none from scurvy); Cook is promoted to commander, presented to George III, and asked to organize another expedition (see 1772).
The Society of Lloyd's is established at London by 79 marine insurance underwriters who subscribe £100 each (see Lloyd's List, 1696). The Members (they will come to be known as "Names") comprise an unincorporated, self-regulated group of individual entrepreneurs who commit all their worldly possessions and financial capital to secure their promise to make good on their customers' losses (see 1870).
"At Birmingham, I could not gain any intelligence even of the most common nature," writes Arthur Young. "It seems the French have carried off several of their fabricks, and thereby injured the town not a little. This makes them so cautious that they will shew strangers scarce anything."
Voyage autour du monde by explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville suggests one concept of evolution (see 1767). Describing the Straits of Magellan, Bougainville says, "This cape, which rises to more than 150 feet above sea-level, is entirely composed of horizontal beds of petrified shellfish. I took soundings at the foot of this monument which testifies to the great changes that have happened to our globe" (see Maupertuis, 1741; Darwin, 1840).
Botanist Joseph Banks and his assistants return from their voyage to the Pacific on Captain Cook's ship Endeavour with so many exotic plants that they expand the number of flora known in the West by fully 25 percent.
Anatomist Giovanni B. Morgagni dies at Padua December 6 at age 89, having founded the science of pathological anatomy.
Parliament orders that speeches made in Britain's House of Commons be published despite protests by some members (see Hansard, 1774).
Nonfiction: Observations on Reversionary Payments by philosopher and mathematician Richard Price.
Philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius dies at Voré, Collines des Perches, December 26 at age 56.
Fiction: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, whose poor health has obliged him to settle in Italy. Smollett dies at Leghorn (Livorno) September 17 at age 50.
Poet Thomas Gray dies at Cambridge July 30 at age 54.
Painting: Penn's Treaty with the Indians by Pennsylvania-born London painter Benjamin West, 32, who has been the first American to study art in Italy and breaks away from the standard portraiture that has characterized American painting until now (Penn's son Thomas, now 69, has commissioned the work); Death of Wolfe by Benjamin West shocks London's Royal Academy by placing the hero of the 1759 Battle of Quebec and other contemporary figures in a classical composition. The work gives impetus to the growing movement toward realism in art and wins West an appointment as painter to George III; The Alchymist by Joseph Wright; The White Soup Bowl by Anne Vallayer-Coster.
Sculpture: Diderot by Jean Antoine Houdon, now 30, who has been making portrait busts since his return 2 years ago from 8 years in Italy.
Theater: The West Indian by Richard Cumberland 1/19 at London's Theatre Royal in Drury Lane; The Natural Son, or The Proofs of Virtue (Le Fils Natural, ou les Epreuves de la Vertu) by Denis Diderot 9/26 at the Comédie-Française, Paris; The Beneficent Bear (Le Bourru Bienfaisant) by Carlo Goldoni 11/4 at the Comédie- Française.
John Russell, 4th duke of Bedford and marquess of Tavistock, dies at Bedford House January 14 at age 60, having begun a restoration of the family's 90-room Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. His 5-year-old grandson Francis inherits the title and will hold it until his death in 1802.
Bath's Assembly Rooms (initally called the Upper Rooms) open September 30 with a splendid ballroom that accommodates 1,000 dancers and spectators, card room (for gamblers), and tea room, connected by two octagonal rooms and graced with crystal chandeliers. Architect-city planner John Wood, the Younger, now 43, has designed the structure for the Georgian social figures who frequent the spa city.
French agriculturist-botanist Antoine-Auguste Parmentier lists potatoes among vegetables that may be used in times of famine (he was taken prisoner five times by the Prussians during the Seven Years' War and obliged to survive on a diet of potatoes). In a thesis that receives praise from the Besançon Academy, he includes also acorns, horse-chestnuts, and the roots of bryony vine, couch-grass, gladioli, and iris, but he campaigns for acceptance of the potato (see 1785).
Tobias Smollett describes adulteration of British foods in his novel Humphry Clinker. His hero Matthew Bramble writes to a friend that "the bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone-ashes, insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution. The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn: thus they sacrifice their taste and their health, and the lives of their tender infants, to a most absurd gratification of a mis-judging eye" (see Accum, 1820).
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