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Poland loses one third her territory and half her population as she is partitioned August 5 among Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Russia acquires White Russia and all the territory to the Dvina and the Dnieper. Austria takes Red Russia, Galicia, and western Podolia with Lemberg and part of Kraków. Prussia acquires Polish Prussia except for Danzig and Thorn (see 1793; 1831).
Danish noblemen conspire against their dictator Johann Friedrich, graf von Struensee, who has held absolute power for 10 months and had an affair with the young queen Caroline Matilda. Former foreign minister Count J. H. E. von Bernstorff has died on his Holstein estates February 18 at age 59; Struensee is overthrown, condemned to death, tortured, and beheaded at Copenhagen April 28 at age 34.
Sweden's Gustav III restores absolute monarchy by an August 19 coup d'état that ends the power of the council and takes away the riksdag's authority to initiate legislation. He will abolish torture, improve Sweden's poor laws, encourage trade, and proclaim religious toleration and liberty of the press, but his enlightened despotism will turn to reaction beginning in the summer of 1789.
Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani dies at Toba Maruf in mid-October at age 50 (approximate) after a 25-year reign in which he has founded the state of Afghanistan and built an empire that extends from the Amu Darya to the Indian Ocean and from Koorasan into Kashmir, the Punjab, and Sind, but he has lost control of the Punjab to the Sikhs.
The young Maratha peshwa (chief minister) Madhav Rao I dies, and the Maratha state becomes a confederacy of five chiefs under the nominal leadership of the peshwa Baji Rao II at Poona, and although the chiefs will unite at times against outsiders, they will generally quarrel among themselves (see 1775).
Oxfordshire-born East India Company official Warren Hastings, 40, begins a 13-year term as governor of Bengal that will be marked by reforms that will include a simplification of Indian coinage and government control of salt and opium production. While en route to the Indian subcontinent he has begun an adulterous relationship with a beautiful 21-year-old German baroness whom he will eventually marry (but not until 1795). Hastings files charges of embezzlement against the country's two chief financial ministers, but the official charged with conducting the case, one Nand Kumar (Nucomar), fails to gain a conviction, will himself be charged with corruption, bring charges of corruption against Hastings, and in 1775 be tried and executed on an earlier charge of forgery (see Regulating Act, 1773).
British forces from India move up into the Himalayan realm of Bhutan, whose affairs are in disorder (see 1720). The British will remain until next year (see 1864).
The Royal Marriage Act passed by Parliament requires the king's consent to the union of any member of Britain's royal family and makes an unsanctioned marriage invalid (see 1785).
Rhode Island colonists set fire July 9 to the armed British revenue ship H.M.S. Gaspée that has been stationed in Narragansett Bay to prevent smuggling. An arrogant Royal Navy lieutenant has been lured close to shore by the Hannah. He has run the Gaspée aground on a sandbar, news of her plight has reached Providence, drummers have gone through the streets to announce the situation and call for volunteers. Slave trader John Brown has supplied eight longboats; prominent Rhode Islanders quickly man the oars; Bristol privateer Simeon Potter, now 52, brings a ninth boat to the scene. Lieutenant William Dudingston commanding the Gaspée opens fire; the colonists return fire and board the ship; Dudingston is slightly wounded in the skirmish that follows; Gaspée's crew is put ashore, and their ship is destroyed.
Boston patriot Samuel Adams, now 50, and local physician Joseph Warren, 31, organize a Committee of Correspondence November 2; similar committees spring up throughout the colonies, relaying the anti-British polemics of Adams and others.
The Massachusetts Spy publishes in two installments The Adulateur, an anonymous drama lampooning the colonial royal governor Thomas Hutchinson. Its author will prove to be Mercy Otis Warren, 43.
Benjamin Franklin at London inveighs against using sugar produced by West Indian slaves: "Can sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar, be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste, compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?"
The Sommersett case marks a turning point in British toleration of slavery. One of 10,000 black slaves in Britain, James Somersett has escaped from his master and been apprehended; Britain's Lord Chief Justice William Murray, 67, Baron Mansfield, rules after some hesitation June 22 that "as soon as any slave sets foot in England he becomes free" (see 1763). The ruling will not be enforced, and British aristocrats will continue for years to import and trade in Africans for use as household slaves (see 1787).
Explorer James Cook sails for the Pacific in July on a second expedition, this time aboard the small ship H.M.S. Resolution with the consort vessel H.M.S. Adventure (see 1771). He is now equipped with a copy of John Harrison's 1761 chronometer to determine his longitude (see 1773).
An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt by moral philosopher Richard Price will help lead to the reestablishment of a sinking fund to wipe out Britain's national debt.
Pioneer canal builder James Brindley dies at Turnhurst September 30 at age 56.
Edinburgh physician Daniel Rutherford, 23, distinguishes nitrogen as a gas separate from carbon dioxide (see Davy, 1800; Wöhler, 1828).
Digressions Académiques by French chemist Baron Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, 35, sets forth original ideas about "phlogiston" (see Stahl, 1700) and crystallization.
The worst epidemic of puerperal (childbed) fever ever seen kills women all over Europe (see White, 1773).
The Society of the Hospital of the City of New York and its board of governors are created under terms of a charter granted June 13 by George III. The Society's board of governors holds its first meeting July 24, opts to acquire a five-acre site on the west side of Broadway, opposite Pearl Street, and will build its first facility in Pearl Street, where a cornerstone will be laid September 3, 1773 (see 1776).
Theologian-philosopher-mystic-scientist Emanuel Swedenborg dies at London March 29 at age 84.
The brilliant gaon of Vilna Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, 52, issues the first herem against hasidic Jewry and has its books publicly burnt (see 1760; 1781).
The French Encyclopédie appears in its 22nd and final folio volume (a supplement to Bougainville's Voyages). Editor-in-chief Denis Diderot is sick and exhausted, having written more than 2,000 articles and employed hundreds of other contributors plus 1,000 draftsmen, etchers, printers, and bookbinders. Six more supplements will appear in 1776 and 1777.
Poetry: The Rising Glory of America by College of New Jersey (Princeton) seniors Philip (Morin) Freneau, 20, and Hugh (Henry) Breckinridge, whose work is published as a commencement poem; "The Progress of Dulness" by Connecticut-born Yale graduate John Trumbull, 22, satirizes college education.
Painting: The Adoration of the Name of God by Spanish painter Francisco (José) Goya (y Lucientes), 26; The Members of the Royal Academy by Johann Zoffany; Rachel Weeping by Philadelphia painter Charles Willson Peale, 31.
Theater: Emilia Calotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 3/13 at Brunswick's Hoftheater; The Fashionable Lover by Richard Cumberland at London.
First performances: Symphony No. 48 in C major (Maria Theresa) by Joseph Haydn at Vienna; Symphony No. 21 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at Salzburg; Divertimento for Strings in D major and two other divertimenti by W. A. Mozart at Salzburg.
Venice's Palazzo Grassi is completed for the Grassi family of Bologna. Designed by the late Giorgio Massari, who died 6 years ago at age 80, the trapeze-shaped palace was begun in 1748, has an inner court, and is the last of the great pieces of secular architecture in the Venetian Republic that is now approaching its end.
Fire destroys Japan's capital of Edo as it did in 1657 (see 1923).
English agriculturist Thomas William Coke, 20, begins a reform of agriculture and animal husbandry in northwest Norfolk. He will help persuade farmers there to switch from rye to wheat; he will breed Southdown sheep, Devon cattle, and improved Suffolk pigs, but farmers in Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, and some other counties will not be persuaded to change their ways (see 1760; 1780).
Virginia colony lawyer Thomas Jefferson, now 29, notes July 31 that he has eaten Irish potatoes from his garden.
The brandy and sherry firm Osborne y Compania founded by English export agent Thomas Osborne Mann at Cadiz will continue into the 21st century (the British consul has permitted Mann to store his wines in the cellar of his home).
Joseph Priestley demonstrates a small carbonating apparatus to the College of Physicians at London (see 1767; Torbern, 1770). He suggests that the pump can be used to impregnate water with what he calls "fixed air," a proposal that will be made next year by Antoine Lavoisier at Paris. Manchester apothecary Thomas Henry will use an apparatus based on Priestley's to produce carbonated water, a product he will sell in 12-gallon barrels (see Schweppe, 1790; Silliman, 1807).
Prussia's Friedrich II (the Great) issues a manifesto September 13: "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects . . . My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer and so were his ancestors and his officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended on to endure hardship or to beat his enemies in case of the occurrence of another war" (see 1775).
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