Gustav III works towards reform in the same direction as other contemporary sovereigns of the "age of enlightenment".

Criminal justice becomes more lenient, the death penalty is removed for many crimes, and torture is abolished.

He takes an active part in every department of business, but relies far on extra-official councilors of his own choosing than upon the senate.

The effort to remedy the widespread corruption that had flourished under the Hats and Caps engages a considerable share of his time and he even finds it necessary to put on trial the entire Göta Hovrätt, the superior court of justice in Jönköping.

Gustav allows Jews to settle in Stockholm and ...

...Göthborg in 1773.

Joseph II expels Jesuits from the Holy Roman Empire.

A proponent of enlightened absolutism, Joseph, the eldest son of the reigning Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I, and Holy Roman Emperor from 1765, had been described by Frederick II of Prussia, after their first conversation in 1769, as ambitious, and as capable of setting the world on fire.

 

Yusuf al-Shihab entrusts the strengthening of Beirut's defenses to Ahmad al-Jazzar in 1773.

When the latter begins to act independently, Yusuf gets into contact with Zahir al-Umar to remove him.

Zahir suggests they enlist the Russians.

The Russian squadron under Captain Ivan Kozhukov blockades and bombards Beirut while Zahir negotiates Jazzar's withdrawal.

The latter then entered Zahir's service only to rebel against him after a few months.

In consequence, the Russians occupy Beirut for a second time to force Yusuf to pay a ransom.

The occupation lasts four months.

Leopold Mozart and his young son Wolfgang Amadeus had departed for Italy after one year in Salzburg, leaving Wolfgang's mother and sister at home.

This journey occurs from December 1769 to March 1771, and like earlier journeys has the purpose of displaying the now-teenaged Mozart's abilities as a performer and as a rapidly maturing composer.

Mozart had met G.B. Martini in Bologna and been accepted as a member of the famous Accademia Filarmonica.

He had heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere once in performance in the Sistine Chapel and had then written it out in its entirety from memory, only returning to correct minor errors; thus producing the first illegal copy of this closely guarded property of the Vatican.

Mozart had written the opera Mitridate Rè di Ponto, performed with success in Milan in 1770.

This had led to further opera commissions, and Wolfgang and Leopold had returned twice from Salzburg to Milan (August–December 1771, October 1772–March 1773) for the composition and premieres of Ascanio in Alba (1771) and Lucio Silla (1772).

Leopold had hoped these visits would result in a professional appointment for his son in Italy, but these hopes are never fulfilled.

Wolfgang, towards the end of the final Italian journey, writes the first of his works that is still widely performed today, the solo cantata Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165.

The Crisis of 1772 had also set off a chain of events related to the controversy over the colonial tea market.

The East India Company is one of the firms that had suffered the hardest hits in the crisis.

Failing to pay or renew its loan from the Bank of England, the firm had sought to sell its eighteen million pounds of tea from its British warehouses to the American colonies.

In the 1760s and early 1770s, the Company had been required to sell its tea exclusively in London on which it paid a duty which averaged two shillings and six pence per pound.

Tea destined for the North American colonies would be purchased by merchants specializing in that trade, who transported it to North America for eventual retail sale.

The markups imposed by these merchants, combined with tea tax imposed by the Townshend Acts of 1767, had created a profitable opportunity for American merchants to import and distribute tea purchased from the Dutch in transactions and shipments that violated the Navigation Acts and were treated by British authorities as smuggling.

Smugglers imported some 900,000 pounds (410,000 kilograms) of cheap foreign tea per year.

The quality of the smuggled tea did not match the quality of the dutiable East India Company tea, of which the Americans bought 562,000 pounds (255,000 kg) per year.

Although the British tea is more appealing in taste, some Patriots, like the Sons of Liberty, had encouraged the consumption of smuggled tea as a political protest against the Townshend taxes.

In 1770 most of the Townshend taxes had been repealed, but taxes on tea are retained.

Resistance to this tax includes pressure to avoid legally imported tea, leading to a drop in colonial demand for the Company's tea, and a burgeoning surplus of the tea in the company's English warehouses.

By 1773 the Company is close to collapse due in part to contractual payments to the British government of £400,000 per year, together with war and a severe famine in Bengal which has drastically reduced the Company's revenue from India, and economic weakness in European markets.

Benjamin Franklin is one of several people who suggest things would be greatly improved if the Company were allowed to export its tea directly to the colonies without paying the taxes it was paying in London: "to export such tea to any of the British colonies or plantations in America, or to foreign parts, import duty of three pence a pound."

The administration of Lord North sees an opportunity to achieve several goals with a single bill.

If the Company were permitted to directly ship tea to the colonies, this would remove the markups of the middlemen from the cost of its tea, and reducing or eliminating the duties paid when the tea was landed in Britain (if it was shipped onward to the colonies) would further reduce the final cost of tea in the colonies, undercutting the prices charged for smuggled tea.

Colonists would willingly pay for cheaper Company tea, on which the Townshend tax was still collected, thus legitimizing Parliament's ability to tax the colonies.

The Tea Act, which receives the royal assent on May 10, 1773 reduces the tea price and enables the East India Company’s monopoly over the local tea business in the colonial tea market.

Proposals are made that the Townshend tax also be waived, but North opposes this idea, citing the fact that these revenues are used to pay the salaries of crown officials in the colonies.

The Parliament imposes a three pence tax for each pound of tea sold, and allows the firm to sell directly through its own agents.

Citizens in Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, furious about how the British government and the East India Company control the colonial tea trade, reject the imported tea, and these protests eventually lead to the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

Harrison finally receives a monetary award in the amount of £8,750 from Parliament for his achievements in 1773, when he is eighty years old, but he will survive for just three more years, never to receive the official award (which is never awarded to anyone).

In total, Harrison will receive £23,065 for his work on chronometers.

He has received £4,315 in increments from the Board of Longitude for his work, £10,000 as an interim payment for H4 in 1765 and £8,750 from Parliament in 1773.

This gives him a reasonable income for most of his life (equivalent to roughly £45,000 per year in 2007, though all his costs, such as materials and subcontracting work to other horologists, had had to come out of this).

He becomes the equivalent of a multimillionaire (in today's terms) in the final decade of his life.

Virginia, the largest colony, sets up its Committee of Correspondence in early 1773, on which Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson serve.

Parliament meanwhile passes the Tea Act to lower the price of taxed tea exported to the colonies in order to help the East India Company undersell smuggled Dutch tea.

Special consignees are appointed to sell the tea in order to bypass colonial merchants.

In most instances, the consignees are forced to resign and the tea is turned back, but Massachusetts governor Hutchinson refuses to allow Boston merchants to give in to pressure.

A town meeting in Boston determines that the tea will not be landed, and ignores a demand from the governor to disperse.

On December 16, 1773, a group of men, led by Samuel Adams and dressed to evoke the appearance of natives, board the ships of the British East India Company and dump £10,000 worth of tea from their holds (approximately £636,000 in 2008) into Boston Harbor.

Decades later, this event will become known as the Boston Tea Party and will remain a significant part of American patriotic lore.

Private letters are published in 1773 in which Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson claims that the colonists cannot enjoy all English liberties, and Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver calls for the direct payment of colonial officials.

The letters' contents are used as evidence of a systematic plot against American rights, and discredit Hutchinson in the eyes of the people; the Assembly petitions for his recall.

Benjamin Franklin, postmaster general for the colonies, acknowledges that he had leaked the letters, which lead to him being berated by British officials and fired from his job.