1750
Death of Johann Sebastian Bach
Blind from botched eye surgery, the old Leipzig cantor dictated his final chorale and died. Europe barely noticed. For a generation his fugues would be thought stiff and churchy - until Mendelssohn, eighty years later, dusted off the St. Matthew Passion and heard a universe inside it. Today he is considered the supreme architect of Western musical form, his work a cathedral built entirely of sound.
Konbaung Dynasty Stirs in Upper Burma
In the dusty village of Moksobo, a local headman named Alaungpaya refused tribute to the Mon invaders marching up from the south. Within two years he would crown himself king, found the Konbaung dynasty, and launch Burma on its last imperial adventure - a century of conquest ending on British bayonets.
Qianlong's Ten Great Campaigns Begin
The Qianlong Emperor, ruling the wealthiest state on earth from the Forbidden City, turned his attention west. Over four decades his armies would march on the Dzungars, the Miao, the Gurkhas, and Burma - campaigns his grandchildren would brag about and his treasurers would quietly weep over. The campaigns extended Qing territory to its greatest extent but drained a surplus that the dynasty would never recover.
Treaty of Madrid Redraws South America
Spain and Portugal, tired of endlessly arguing over the Tordesillas line, traded colonies on paper - Portugal kept the Amazon interior, Spain gained the Sacramento colony. Jesuit missions of the Guarani, suddenly handed to Lisbon, would rise in rebellion and be crushed within the decade. The treaty tacitly acknowledged that the old papal division of the world no longer matched the facts on the ground.
Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
An unknown Genevan watchmaker's son won the Dijon academy prize with a perverse argument - that civilization had corrupted virtue, that progress was a kind of fall. Rousseau's essay sold in Paris salons like a cold drink in summer and gave Enlightenment Europe its first great interior critic. His later works would push the argument further, inspiring both the French Revolution and the Romantic movement.
Prussian Potato Edicts
Frederick the Great ordered his subjects to grow potatoes - a South American tuber the peasantry refused to eat. He reportedly posted soldiers around royal potato fields, instructing them to guard the plants lazily so peasants would steal and plant them. Whatever the truth, within a generation Prussia was feeding itself with potatoes.