February 16 – On orders from head of statePasquale Paoli of the newly independentRepublic of Corsica, a contingent of about 200 Corsican soldiers begins an invasion of the small island ofCapraia off of the coast of northern Italy and territory of theRepublic of Genoa. By May 31, the island is conquered as its defenders surrender.[2]
March 13 – BritishChancellor of the ExchequerCharles Townshend, having already pushed through the unpopularTownshend Acts to recoup war expenses from Britain's American colonies, presents a comprehensive plan for more taxes in a closed door session of the House of Commons, with most proposals passed within a month.[5]
March 24 –Spain acquires control of what are now called theFalkland Islands fromFrance, compensating French AdmiralLouis Antoine de Bougainville for the money spent on the construction of the settlement atFort Saint Louis.[7] The islands, namedles Îles Malouines by the French, are renamedlas Islas Malvinas by the Spanish, and Fort Saint Louis is renamed asPuerto Soledad. In 1816,Argentina declares independence from Spain and takes the Malvinas; and in 1833, Britain'sRoyal Navy captures the islands from the Argentines and renames them the Falklands, and renames Puerto Soledad as Port Louis.
March 31 – Enforcement begins of the February 27 decree by King Carlos III of Spain, ordering thesuppression of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in the colonies in Spanish America. Over the next few months approximately 2,200 Jesuit priests and missionaries are deported.[8]
May 3 – A fleet of ships from theRepublic of Genoa arrives at Capraia and sends 150 men ashore to drive out the Corsicans, but the outnumbered Genoese marines are "quickly cut to pieces".[2]
May 16 –Ahmed al-Ghazzal, the emissary from SultanMohammed ben Abdallah ofMorocco to theSpanish Empire, makes a triumphant return toMarrakesh with almost 300 Muslims who had been held captive in Spain, as well as sacred Islamic manuscripts that had been seized by the Spanish in 1612. The negotiation of the release had started with al-Ghazzal's meeting with Spain's King Carlos III on August 21, 1766.[11]
May 31 – The Genoese island ofCapraia is conquered by the Corsican Army after a ten-week campaign.[2]
August 26 – Construction begins onTryon Palace inNew Bern, North Carolina. The construction proves more expensive than initially expected, leading the government to increase local taxes. This stirs resentment among some North Carolinians, and helps prolong theWar of the Regulation.
October 9 – Surveying of the "Mason–Dixon line", which will later become the traditional division between the northern and southern states of the United States, is completed byCharles Mason andJeremiah Dixon after four years, initially to settle a boundary dispute between the colonies ofDelaware,Pennsylvania andMaryland. The survey party is halted atDunkard Creek when a chief of theMohawk Indians tells them that they are in Native American territory and that the Mohawks guiding the property "would not proceed one step further Westward"; the line, slightly west the80th meridian west, is now part of the boundary between Pennsylvania and West Virginia.[16]
October 12 – At theFoundling Hospital inLondon,Dr. William Watson becomes the first physician to conduct a controlledclinical trial, selecting 32 boys and girls of similar age who have not yet hadsmallpox. He divides them into three groups in order to test treatments before inoculation for smallpox, with one group receiving a mixture ofmercury andjalap, anothersenna glycoside, and the third getting no pre-treatment at all.[17]
October 17 –Šćepan Mali, nicknamed "Stephen the Little", is selected as the legislature atPodgorica to be the Tsar ofMontenegro, representing "a short but an important break in the succession of the Petrovic dynasty".[18]
October 24 – In France, several anti-Jewish regulations in place since October 12,1661, are repealed by the King's Council that advisesLouis XV. While Jewish merchants are still prohibited from owning their own retail stores, they are allowed to sell merchandise on credit to gentile merchants at legal interest rates, to legally enforce debts, and to sell jewelry.[19]
October 28 – A boycott, of 38 types of goods[20] imported from England, is resolved byBoston merchants meeting atFaneuil Hall as a response to the taxes imposed by Great Britain, and one of the first "Buy American" campaigns is started in order to encourage the purchase of items manufactured and produced in the 13 colonies.[21] Copies of the agreement, to be signed by participating merchants, are circulated beyond theProvince of Massachusetts Bay to other colonial provinces in New England.[22]
November 4 – Francisco de Paula Bucareli, theGovernor of Buenos Aires (at the time, a province within the Spanish Empire'sViceroyalty of Peru), hosts the caciques who are theGuarani chiefs of the 30mission towns established by Jesuit missionaries, in an effort to gain Guarani peoples' support in the expulsion of the Jesuits.[25]
November 14 – TheTimucua Indian tribe, native to central Florida, becomes extinct with the death of the last speaker of theTimucuan language, Juan Alonso Cabale. Eight years earlier, the last 95 surviving Timucuan people had been forcibly relocated by the Spanish colonial government toGuanabacoa, a township in westernCuba.[27]
November 19 – Under the coercion of Russian occupation armies, the legislature of Poland follows the wishes of Russian MinisterNicholas Repnin and agrees to allow the kingdom to become a Russianprotectorate.[28]
November 20 – The newAmerican Colonies Act 1766, commonly called the "Declaratory Act", goes into effect, virtually providing for Great Britain's Parliament to govern lawmaking in 13 colonies and exacerbating tensions there.[29]
November 29 – The ArchduchessMaria Theresa of Austria, in her capacity asQueen of Hungary, issues an edict against theRomani people (commonly called thegypsies), prohibiting them from marrying and calling for gypsy children to be taken away by the government so that they can be brought up by Christian families, a proclamation that "produced little or no effect in comparison with the trouble involved".[31]
December 28 –PhrayaTaksin, a minor provincial official inSiam (now Thailand), crowns himself asKing of Siam, establishing the SiameseThonburi Kingdom, taking the regnal name of Borommaracha IV and begins a 14-year reign of liberation and conquest; historically, he is known as "Taksin the Great".[33]
December 29 – Oconostota and Attakullakulla arrive atJohnstown, New York where they, along with leaders of the Six Nations of theIroquois Confederacy (the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora tribal nations) meet with Sir William Johnson to begin peace negotiations with the British Empire.[30]
^Fred Anderson,Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (Vintage Books, 2000) p770
^Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien,The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) p267
^Ernest Rhys, ed.,Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin (J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1916) p240
^A. P. Nasatir, ed.,Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785-1804 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1952) p65
^G. Barnett Smith,The Romance of the South Pole: Antarctic Voyages and Explorations (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1900) p16
^Enrique Dussel,A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1981) p60
^"Legacy or Overhang: Historical Memory in Myanmar–Thai Relations", by Maung Aung Myoe, inBilateral Legacies in East and Southeast Asia (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015) p113
^The Papers of Sir William Johnson, ed. by James Sullivan (University of the State of New York, 1921) p xxx
^Abdulrahman al-Ruwaishan translator and Travis Landry, editor,The Fruits of the Struggle in Diplomacy and War: Moroccan Ambassador al-Ghazzal and His Diplomatic Retinue in Eighteenth-Century Andalusia (Bucknell University Press, 2016) pp9-10
^Laneyrie-Dagen, Nadeije, ed. (1996).Les Grands Explorateurs. Larousse. p. 181.ISBN2-03-505305-6.
^Collingridge, Geo. (1903)."Who Discovered Tahiti?".Journal of the Polynesian Society.12:184–186. Archived fromthe original on December 28, 2016. RetrievedFebruary 25, 2011.
^Miguel de Asúa,Science in the Vanished Arcadia: Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and Río de la Plata (BRILL, 2014) p259
^Samuel B. Griffith,The War for American Independence: From 1760 to the Surrender at Yorktown in 1781 (University of Illinois Press, 1976) p50
^Sally M. Walker,Boundaries: How the Mason-Dixon Line Settled a Family Feud and Divided a Nation (Candlewick Press, 2014) pp146-147
^Shein-Chung Chow and Jen-Pei Liu,Design and Analysis of Clinical Trials: Concepts and Methodologies (John Wiley & Sons, 2008) p108
^Marija Krivokapić and Neil Diamond,Images of Montenegro in Anglo-American Creative Writing and Film (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) p10
^Zosa Szajkowski,Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 (Ktav Publishing House, 1970) p302
^Edmund S. Morgan,Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press, 2002) p167
^Ann Fairfax Withington,Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics (Oxford University Press, 1996) p99
^John C. Redmond,Three To Ride: A Ride That Defied An Empire and Spawned A New Nation (Hamilton Books, 2012) p137
^"Gosport Navy Yard", inThe Encyclopedia of the Wars of the Early American Republic, 1783–1812: A Political, Social, and Military History, by Spencer C. Tucker (ABC-CLIO, 2014) p274
^Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme,Italy and the Mediterranean: Words, Sounds, and Images of the Post-Cold War Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) p49
^Barbara Ganson,The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (Stanford University Press, 2005) p121
^A Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences, Volume VIII, ed. by Thomas Lathrop Stedmon (William Wood and Co., 1917) p46
^Maurice J. Robinson,Ponte Vedra Beach: A History (Arcadia Publishing, 2008)
^Albert Sorel,The Eastern Question in the Eighteenth Century (Methuen & Company, 1898) pp22-23
^Edward G. Lengel,First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His--and the Nation's--Prosperity (Da Capo Press, 2016) p76
^abJace Weaver,The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (University of North Carolina Press Books, 2014) p164
^The World's History: A Survey of Man's Record, Volume V: South-Eastern and Eastern Europe edited by H. F. Helmolt (William Heinemann, 1907) p423
^"Dickinson, John", by Joseph Palencik, inDictionary of Early American Philosophers, ed. by John R. Shook (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012) p303
^Antonio L. Rappa,The King and the Making of Modern Thailand (Taylor & Francis, 2017) p224
