The Duke of York had found himself…
May 1688 CE
The Duke of York had found himself not only proprietor of New York in February 1685 but also king of England, a fact that had changed the status of New York from that of a proprietary to a royal colony.
The process of royal consolidation is accelerated when on May 7, 1688, the Province of New York, together with the Province of East Jersey, and the Province of West Jersey, is made part of the ill-fated Dominion of New England.
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Most of the residents of Batavia are of Asian descent.
Thousands of slaves have been brought from India and Arakan, and, later, from Bali and Sulawesi.
To avoid uprisings, it had been decided by the Directors of the VOC that the Javanese should not be kept as slaves.
Chinese people, who make up the largest group in Batavia, most of them merchants and laborers, are the most decisive group in the development of the city.
There is also a large group of freed slaves, usually Portuguese-speaking Asian Christians who were formerly slaves to the Portuguese, made prisoners by the VOC in the many conflicts with the Portuguese.
Portuguese will remain the dominant language in Batavia until late eighteenth century, when the language will slowly be replaced with Dutch and Malay.
Additionally, there are also Muslim and Hindu merchants from India and Malays.
Initially, these different ethnic groups had lived side by side, but in 1688 complete segregation is enacted upon the indigenous population: each ethnic group has to live in their own established village outside the city wall.
There are Javanese villages for Javanese people, Moluccan villages for the Moluccans, and so on.
Each people is tagged with a lead identity tag to identify them with their own ethnic group.
This identity tag will later be replaced with a parchment.
Intermarriage between different ethnic groups has to be reported.
The Siamese king falls ill, and Naria’s foster brother Phra Phetracha, sometime referred to as "the Elephant Prince", orders the arrest of Phaulkon, who is beheaded on charges of treason.
When Narai dies of his illness, Phetracha seizes the throne, expels the French, calls off the war against the English, and signs a new treaty with the Company along the lines of the 1617 Dutch-Thai model.
The effect of the Phaulkon affair has been to reverse a policy of openness to foreigners encouraged by previous Thai kings.
Phetracha takes steps to discourage European settlers.
Determined to drastically reduce foreign power and influence, he persecutes Christians and harasses Western traders, while encouraging more easily controlled Asian traders.
The Khalkha Mongols pay tribute to the Qing Empire but have preserved their independence.
A conflict between the Houses of Jasaghtu Khan and Tösheetü Khan escalates into a dispute between the Khalkha and the Dzungar Mongols over influence over Tibetan Buddhism.
Choros Erdeniin Galdan, a Choros-Oirat Khan of the Dzungar Khanate, is the fourth son of Erdeni Baatur Hongtaiji, founder of the Dzungar Khanate, and the grandson of Güshi Khan, the first Khoshut-Oirat King of Tibet.
Galdan invades and occupies the Khalkha homeland to oppose the expansion of the Manchu.
Famine and the plague have further reduced the Pomeranian population to the extent that only one hundred and fifteen thousand people live in Pomerania proper by 1688.
The German Empire’s remarkable victories against the Ottomans have a profound effect on Europe.
In contrast to Louis, who had refused to help, both Protestant and Catholic princes extol Leopold as a champion of Christendom; the French king’s support in Germany disintegrates almost overnight and Louis is branded as the ‘Christian Turk’.
The community at Table Bay has grown larger and more diverse throughout the late 1600s, particularly after the VOC decided in 1679 that European settlement should be boosted in order to expand agricultural production.
German and Dutch settlers are offered free farms if they will come to the Cape.
Individual Huguenots had settled at the Cape of Good Hope from as early as 1671 with the arrival of Francois Villion (Viljoen).
After a commissioner was sent out from the Cape Colony in 1685 to attract more settlers, a more dedicated group of French refugees began to arrive in the Cape after after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The first band of Huguenot immigrants to southern Africa had set sail from France on December 31, 1687, arriving at the recently established Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope in 1688.
The majority of the Cape’s burghers have Dutch ancestry and belong to the Calvinist Reformed Church of the Netherlands, but there a also numerous Germans as well as some Scandinavians.
The earliest colonists are, for the most part, from the lower, working class and display an indifferent attitude towards developing the colony, but after a commissioner is sent out in 1685 to attract more settlers, a more dedicated group of immigrants begins to arrive.
The Dutch and the Germans are joined in 1688 by French Huguenots, also Calvinists, who are fleeing religious persecution in France under King Louis XIV after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Venetians, despite their control of most of the Peloponnesus in 1688, are forced by the Turks to abandon Athens.
French scientist and man of letters Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle, educated at the Jesuit college in Rouen, did not settle in Paris until he had passed the age of thirty and had become famous as the writer of operatic librettos.
His literary activity during the years 1683–88 has won him a great reputation.
The Lettres galantes (1683, “Gallant Letters”; expanded edition, 1685) have contributed to this, but the Nouveaux Dialogues des morts (1683, “New Dialogues of the Dead”; 2nd part, 1684) enjoy a greater success (and is more interesting to a modern reader).
The Dialogues, conversations modeled on the dialogues of Lucian, between such figures as Socrates and Montaigne, Seneca and Scarron, have served to disseminate new philosophical ideas.
Fontenelle’s popularization of philosophy is carried further by the Histoire des oracles (1687; “History of the Oracles”), based on a Latin treatise by the Dutch writer Anton van Dale (1683).
Here Fontenelle subjects pagan religions to criticisms that the reader would inevitably see as applicable to Christianity as well.
The same anti-religious bias is seen in his amusing satire Relation de l'île de Bornéo (1686; “Account of the Island of Borneo”), in which a civil war in Borneo is used to symbolize the dissensions between Catholics (Rome) and Calvinists (Geneva).
Fontenelle's most famous work is the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; A Plurality of Worlds, 1688).
These charming and sophisticated dialogues are more influential than any other work in securing acceptance of the Copernican system, still far from commanding universal support in 1686.
Fontenelle's basis of scientific documentation is meager, and some of his figures are wildly erroneous even for his own day.
He was unfortunate in the moment of his publication: the Cartesian theory of vortices, on which his work was based, had been refuted the next year in Isaac Newton's Principia.
Described by Voltaire as the most universal mind produced by the era of Louis XIV, many of the characteristic ideas of the Enlightenment are found in embryonic form in his works.
Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, the seventh of fourteen children of Jean-Baptiste and Cathérine Fatio in Basel, Switzerland, had moved with his family in 1672 to Duillier.
Fatio, at the age of eighteen, had traveled to Paris in 1682 to perform astronomical studies under the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini at the Parisian observatory.
His greatest scientific success is the explanation of the nature of the zodiacal light in 1684, which he attributed to particles reflecting the light of the sun.
Fatio had in 1686 by chance become a witness to a conspiracy aimed at William of Orange, which he helped to foil.
In the same year he had made the acquaintance of Jacob Bernoulli and Christiaan Huygens, with whom he developed a particularly close cooperation.
The main contents of their work were the calculus.
He had traveled to London in 1687 and made the acquaintance of John Wallis and Edward Bernard (1638-1697) and worked out a solution of the inverse tangent problem.
He is also connected by friendship to Gilbert Burnet, John Locke, Richard Hampden and his son John Hampden.
Becoming a fellow of the Royal Society in 1688 on the recommendation of founding member Sir John Hoskyns, he gives an account on the mechanical explanation of gravitation of Huygens before the Society, whereby he tries to connect Huygens' theory with that of Newton.