1690
Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John Locke published a long meditation arguing that the human mind begins as a blank slate and derives all knowledge from experience. Innate ideas, Locke insisted, did not exist. The book became the founding text of British empiricism and shaped Enlightenment education, psychology, and political theory, giving philosophers a new framework for understanding how humans come to know the world.
Job Charnock Founds Calcutta
An East India Company agent named Job Charnock, after years of diplomatic humiliations, re-established the Company's Bengal trading post at three villages on the Hooghly River. The settlement would grow into Fort William and then Calcutta, eventually the capital of British India. The third of the great Company presidencies had begun.
Battle of the Boyne
William III defeated his father-in-law the deposed James II at a river crossing in eastern Ireland. The victory secured Williamite rule in Ireland and the Protestant ascendancy that would dominate the island for two centuries. The battle is still commemorated annually by Ulster Protestants with drums and bonfires, a reminder that seventeenth-century wounds can remain raw for a very long time.
Denis Papin Builds a Piston Engine
The French physicist Denis Papin, working in Germany, built a small atmospheric engine in which steam condensed beneath a piston and pulled it down. It was the first true piston engine, decades before Newcomen's commercial version. Papin had sketched the principle of steam power; others would make it move the world.