At the time of Cook’s claim of…
September 1770 CE
At the time of Cook’s claim of British sovereignty over Australia, the continent’s five hundred to one thousand tribes of approximately three hundred thousand aborigines live along the eastern and southern coasts and in Tasmania.
The Tasmanian languages belong (according to most linguists) to the Indo-Pacific family to which the Papuan New Guinean languages belong; the three hundred or so Australian languages are in a family of their own (to which no clear links to the Indo-Pacific family have yet been established).
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Captain James Cook encounters another Polynesian population, the Maori of New Zealand, when he circumnavigates the two major islands in 1769-70. (Abel Tasman, the first European contact, had arrived off the coast of New Zealand in December 1642, had battled with a group of Maori on the South Island, and had left the area largely unexplored.)
Cook, in reporting on the suitability of New Zealand for colonization, also writes about the intelligence of the Maori.
Their traditional history describes their origins in terms of waves of migration beginning about CE 1150 and culminating in the arrival of a “great fleet” in the fourteenth century from Hawaiki, a mythical land usually identified as Tahiti.
There are supposedly ancient Maori traditions of a race who were in New Zealand when the Maoris arrived.
They were fair-skinned with blonde or red hair, and constructed stone circles and other monuments.
The Maoris would have killed and eaten them, of course, as was generally their custom until well into the nineteenth century.
Still, there were early reports of red-haired Maoris, so perhaps they didn't eat all the aboriginal inhabitants, or maybe there were natural redheads among the Maori.
The most current reliable evidence strongly indicates that initial settlement of New Zealand, by Polynesians from Eastern Polynesia, occurred around 1280 CE, the date of the earliest archaeological sites and the beginning of sustained, anthropogenic deforestation.
Catherine II, after her victories in the Russo-Turkish War, is depicted in portraits dressed in the military uniforms of Great Britain, which had at first been a willing ally to Russia because of the trade between the two countries.
Great Britain needs bar iron to fuel its nascent Industrial Revolution as well as other products, such as sailcloth, hemp, and timber, for the construction and maintenance of its Navy, all of which Russia can provide.
When the tide of the conflict turns in Russia's favor, Britain sees fit to limit its support, seeing Russia as a rising competitor in far eastern trade rather than merely a counterbalance to France’s Navy in the Mediterranean.
The withdrawal of British support leaves Russia in a superior position in the Black Sea but unable to do anything more than cut down its own supply lines and disrupt Turkish trade in the area.
Robert Boyle, an Irish chemist, had been the first to use phosphorus to ignite sulfur-tipped wooden splints, forerunners of our modern matches, in 1680, but the element remains a chemical curiosity until 1770, when the Swedish apothecary and chemist Carl Scheele and his associate, Johan Gottlieb Gahn, show that calcium phosphate (Ca3(PO4)2) is found in bones and obtain phosphorus from bone ash.
The Berlin Mining Academy, founded in 1770, is the nucleus of today’s Technical University of Berlin.
Ali Bey Al-Kabir, born in 1728, in western Georgia (present Abkhazia) to a Georgian monk and his wife, had been kidnapped by Turkish soldiers in 1741, sold two years later in Cairo, and had gradually risen in influence, winning the top office of sheikh al-balad (chief of the country) in 1760.
Ali Bey had deposed the Ottoman governor in 1768 and assumed the post of acting governor.
He had stopped the annual tribute to Istanbul and in an unprecedented usurpation of the Ottoman Sultan's privileges, had had his name struck on local coins in 1769 (alongside the sultan's emblem), effectively declaring Egypt's independence from Ottoman rule.
He gains control of the Hejaz in 1770.
The Comte de Marbeuf in 1770 publicly announces the French annexation of Corsica and appoints a governor.
René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou was born in Montpellier to a family ennobled in the sixteenth century as noblesse de robe, the eldest son of René Charles de Maupeou (1688–1775), who had been president of the parlement of Paris from 1743 to 1757.
In 1744 he had married a rich heiress, Anne de Roncherolles (1725–1752), a cousin of Madame d'Épinay, the friend of Rousseau who moved in the circles of the Philosophes.
Entering public life, he had been his father's right hand in the conflicts between the parlement and Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, who was supported by the court.
Between 1763 and 1768, dates that cover the revision of the Calas case that Voltaire had championed and the trial of the comte de Lally, Maupeou had himself been president of the parlement.
In 1768, he became chancellor in succession to his father, who had held the office for twenty four hours only, largely in order to permit him to retire with the prestigious title.
With the disgrace of Choiseul on December 24, 1770, Maupeou is the chief minister.
He determines to support the royal authority against the parlement, the perennial block to reforms of the tax farming system or the privileges of the propertied classes, which in league with the provincial magistratures is seeking to arrogate to itself the functions of the states-general.
He allies himself with the duc d'Aiguillon and the king's mistress Madame du Barry, and secures for a creature of his own, the Abbé Terray, the office of comptroller-general.
The struggle erupts over the trial of the case of the duc d'Aiguillon, ex-governor of Brittany, and of La Chalotais, procureur-général of the province, who had been imprisoned by the governor for accusations against his administration.
When the parlement showed signs of hostility against Aiguillon, Maupeou had read letters patent from Louis XV annulling the proceedings.
Louis had replied to remonstrances from the parlement by a lit de justice, in which he demanded the surrender of the procedural minutes.
On November 27, 1770, had appeared the Édit de règlement et de discipline, which had been promulgated by the chancellor, forbidding the union of the various branches of the parlement and correspondence with the provincial magistratures.
It also made a strike on the part of the parlement punishable by confiscation of goods, and forbade further obstruction to the registration of royal decrees after the royal reply had been given to a first remonstrance.
This edict the magistrates had refused to register, and it was registered in a lit de justice held at Versailles on December 7, whereupon the parlement had been suspended in its functions.
It is originally published under the name of Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud, a deceased member of the French Academy of Science.
D'Holbach writes and publishes this book—possibly with the assistance of Denis Diderot but with the support of Jacques-André Naigeon—anonymously in 1770, describing the universe in terms of the principles of philosophical materialism: The mind is identified with brain, there is no "soul" without a living body, the world is governed by strict deterministic laws, free will is an illusion, there are no final causes, and whatever happens takes place because it inexorably must.
Most notoriously, the work explicitly denies the existence of God, arguing that belief in a higher being is the product of fear, lack of understanding, and anthropomorphism.
Though not a scientist himself, d'Holbach is scientifically literate and he tries to develop his philosophy in accordance with the known facts of nature and the scientific knowledge of the day, citing, for example, the experiments of John Needham as proof that life could develop autonomously without the intervention of a deity.
It makes a critical distinction between mythology as a more or less benign way of bringing law ordered thought on society, nature and their powers to the masses and theology.
Theology which, when it separates from mythology raises the power of nature above nature itself and thus alienates the two (i.e. "nature", all that actually exists, from its power, now personified in a being outside nature), is by contrast a pernicious force in human affairs without parallel.
Its principles are summed up in a more popular form in d'Holbach's Bon Sens, ou idées naturelles opposees aux idées surnaturelles.
Sugar has become enormously popular during the eighteenth century.
Britain, for example, consumes five times as much sugar in 1770 as in 1710.