1710
Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge
A twenty-five-year-old Irish clergyman published a book arguing that material substance did not exist; only minds and their perceptions. Samuel Johnson later kicked a stone to refute him. But Berkeley's argument, refined by Hume and wrestled with by Kant, helped shape how modern philosophy understood what the mind was doing when it looked around.
British Capture Port Royal, Acadia
After a brief siege, Colonel Francis Nicholson's New England forces took Port Royal and renamed it Annapolis Royal for the queen. French Acadia became British Nova Scotia. The Acadians themselves, promised toleration, would remain on their dyked marshlands until expulsion came for them forty-five years later. Their removal in 1755 would scatter a people across the Atlantic world and seed Louisiana's Cajun culture.
Great Plague of the Baltic
Bubonic plague, carried by armies of the Great Northern War, swept through Stockholm, Copenhagen, and the Baltic ports. Riga lost a third of its population; Stockholm buried eight thousand in a single summer. Sweden's already strained war economy buckled under the weight of corpses and quarantine. The plague chose sides in the war.
Royal Meissen Porcelain Manufactory
Augustus the Strong of Saxony, obsessed with what he called his porcelain sickness, locked an alchemist named Bottger in a laboratory until he produced the first true European porcelain. The Meissen factory opened its gates at Albrechtsburg. The secret of China's white gold had finally crossed the Alps. Within decades, Meissen's crossed-swords mark became Europe's most coveted hallmark of refinement and royal taste.