1720
South Sea Bubble Bursts
The stock of the South Sea Company, having risen from one hundred and twenty-eight pounds to over a thousand in eight months on promises of Pacific trade, collapsed in weeks. Aristocrats, clergymen, and Isaac Newton himself were ruined. Parliament investigated. Walpole took power on a promise of stability. Britain learned the shape of its first financial crash.
Qing Conquest of Tibet
Kangxi's armies drove the Dzungar Mongols out of Lhasa and installed a Qing-approved Dalai Lama. An amban, or imperial resident, was stationed in the Potala. Tibet became a protectorate under Beijing that would outlast the Manchus themselves. The great Qing expansion into Inner Asia was nearly complete. Kangxi's successors would maintain this arrangement for nearly two centuries, claiming sovereignty that Tibetans would endlessly contest.
Rackham and the Pirate Women
Captain Calico Jack Rackham was taken by a Royal Navy sloop off Jamaica. When his crew proved too drunk to fight, two figures kept swinging: Anne Bonny and Mary Read, his female shipmates in men's clothing. At trial, both pleaded their bellies, claiming pregnancy, to escape the gallows. Rackham hanged.
Mississippi Bubble Collapses
John Law's Banque Royale in Paris, having printed paper money against dreams of Louisiana gold, saw its scheme unravel. Shares that had sold for twenty thousand livres fell to five hundred. Law fled France in disguise. The monarchy lost credit it would not recover before 1789. Enlightenment Paris learned the word speculation.
Plague of Marseille
The merchant ship Grand-Saint-Antoine, carrying silk and cotton from Syria, unloaded at Marseille despite quarantine. Within weeks a hundred thousand Provencals would die. Bishop Belsunce walked the corpse-strewn streets administering last rites. It was the last major plague epidemic in western Europe, though no one yet knew that. The city lost half its population before the contagion burned itself out over the following two years.