1757
Clive Wins the Battle of Plassey
In a mango grove north of Calcutta, Clive's 3,000 men defeated 50,000 Bengalis - because he had already bribed the nawab's chief general to stand still. A thunderstorm ruined the Bengali powder; the Company's held dry under tarpaulins. Bengal, richest province of Asia, became a British asset. The revenue from Bengal would finance the Company's wars across the rest of India for the next century.
Frederick's Victory at Rossbach
A combined Franco-Imperial army twice Prussia's size blundered at Rossbach. Frederick struck their flank with cavalry at a trot and routed them in ninety minutes, losing 548 men. The French suffered 10,000 casualties and a prestige wound that took decades to heal. Prussia had found its myth. A month later Frederick won again at Leuthen, cementing his reputation as the century's supreme battlefield commander.
Tokugawa Edo at One Million
Mid-century Edo had become perhaps the world's largest city, a sprawl of daimyo mansions, merchant neighborhoods, and Yoshiwara pleasure quarters. Its population - around a million - relied on canal-borne rice and a complex money economy. Sealed off from most of the outside world, it was developing an urban popular culture entirely its own.
Leuthen - Frederick's Tactical Masterpiece
A month after Rossbach, Frederick faced a larger Austrian army in Silesian snow. Using a screen of hussars, he marched his line diagonally across the Austrian front - the famous 'oblique order' - and crushed their flank. Napoleon would later call Leuthen the greatest battle of maneuver of the age.
Damiens's Attack on Louis XV
A half-mad footman named Robert-Francois Damiens slipped a penknife into the king's ribs at Versailles. Louis survived; Damiens was sentenced to be drawn and quartered in the Place de Greve, a medieval execution that took hours. Foucault would open Discipline and Punish with the scene two centuries later. The attack was the last regicide attempt punished with the full medieval apparatus of public torture in France.
Encyclopédie Volume VII and D'Alembert's Withdrawal
D'Alembert's article 'Geneva' offended both Calvinists and Rousseau (who thought it celebrated theatres at Geneva's expense). Under pressure, D'Alembert resigned as co-editor. Diderot carried the Encyclopedie alone through the crisis - and the ban of 1759 - into the largest and most dangerous intellectual project of the century. He would discover, to his fury, that his own publisher had been secretly censoring articles behind his back.