René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou was…

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.

King Taksin in 1770 attacks and vanquishes Chao Phra Fang's group (Ruan) which had taken control of Phitsanulok and Uttaradit.

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.

The System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World (Système de la Nature ou Des Loix du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral) is a work of philosophy by Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789).

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.

A new ministry under Lord North comes to power in 1770, and Parliament withdraw all taxes except the tax on tea, giving up its efforts to raise revenue while maintaining the right to tax.

This temporarily resolves the crisis, and the boycott of British goods largely ceases, with only the more radical patriots such as Samuel Adams continuing to agitate.