China. The Qing Dynasty allowed Moscow to establish a Russian Orthodox ecclesiastical mission in Beijing, which ultimately served as the Russian embassy in China. It would remain the only foreign mission of its kind in China for over a century.

War between the Ottoman Empire and Venice.

England. The House of Hanover reigns, with six sovereigns: George I, George II, George III, George IV, William IV, and Victoria. Queen Victoria has nine children, including the future King Edward VII, who, however, inheriting his father’s name, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, is considered a separate house.

South Africa. A smallpox epidemic wipes out the San population shortly after the arrival of Europeans.

Posthumous publication of Ars Conjectandi by Jakob Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician and physicist, with which Probability Theory reaches full maturity.

Irish philosopher George Berkeley publishes A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in which he argues that matter does not exist, that it is no more real than a rainbow.

The French attack the city of Rio de Janeiro, initially defeated but then the Portuguese surrender to the besiegers and pay a substantial ransom in gold, sugar and cattle; during the return journey two French ships sink during a violent storm and a good part of the treasure is lost.

Battle of Poltava: Sweden’s Baltic Empire falls and Russia occupies its eastern territories; the king in Sweden is the young Charles XII.

Epidemics of the “Picardy sweats” raged in France. The disease eventually disappeared completely, long before modern medicine could diagnose it.

Coalbrookdale, England. First blast furnace for smelting iron (in the West: the first ever was in China in 200 BC).

Irish philosopher George Berkeley publishes An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in which he approaches the problem of explaining how we judge the distance and size of the objects we see.

Scotland and England, with a specific Treaty of Union, officially formed the Kingdom of Great Britain. The kingdoms of Scotland and England had already been united dynastically since 1603.

Eruption of Mount Fuji in Japan.

Upper State, New York. A molar from an American mastodon is shipped to London. The bones will be studied in 1739. Further bones will be found in Ohio. The interpretation of these finds is mixed: some suggest they belong to giants who lived in ancient times, an American Incognitum, or they belong to multiple different animals.

The Great Storm of England devastates the British Isles; the Royal Navy alone loses 1,200 men in the shipwrecks.

Isaac Newton is voted a fellow and then chosen as president of the Royal Society, thus saving it from decline.

Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton’s archenemy, dies; this event will convince the reticent Newton to publish his particle theory of light in 1704, after several decades. Hooke and Newton have been privately and publicly engaged for years in a double dispute: over light and gravitation.

South Africa. First clash between the Dutch and the black Bantu people. The Dutch arrived in South Africa in 1652, starting from Cape Town, but encountered little organized resistance from the natives, only a few Khoisan villages. The Bantus, coming from Nigeria and Cameroon, stopped at the Fish River, 500 kilometers before Cape Town. Once the Dutch came into contact with the Bantus, armed with iron weapons, in 1702, there was violent fighting of uncertain outcome. The Dutch began advancing slowly, one or two kilometers a year, and it took them nine wars and 175 years to conquer South Africa. The Bantus stopped before Cape Town because their crops required summer rain crops, while European crops, on the other hand, required winter rain crops.

Isaac Newton: 2nd edition of “Principia Mathematica”: Calculation of the lunar orbit with an error of 10 arc minutes

Maria Kirch (wife of Gottfried Kirch, who was the first to use a telescope to discover and observe a comet) was the first woman to discover a comet. It was the “Comet of 1702.”

Isaac Newton was the right man in the right place at the right time to settle an age-old controversy, born of ignorance of statistics: the Pyx Test to monitor the variability of the weight of silver coins at the end of the minting process. But Newton failed miserably, and continued to make the same mistake he had made in the past, a mistake that would persist for another hundred years, benefiting fraud. In 1701, the great English minting of coins ended. Finally, it was decided to mint coins by machine, so as to make them as equal as possible, thus reducing fraud by those who shaved off excess silver from the coin. The law stated that a single coin could differ in weight from the reference value by no more than 1%, and Newton and his predecessors (and those who followed for a century) assumed that this meant that the average weight of a batch of newly minted coins must also differ by no more than 1% from the reference weight. But today we know (a law discovered by Abraham De Moivre in 1718) that the variability of the acceptable mean weight depends on the number of samples, with the square root of the number of samples. (De Moivre’s equation).

Johann Sebastian Bach is a 15-year-old boy at the Michaelisschule in the city of Luneburg, 50 km from Hamburg.

Berlin is a cosmopolitan city: one in five Berliners is a French Huguenot refugee, followed by Protestants from Salzburg, Waldensians, Mennonites, Scottish Presbyterians, Jews, Catholics, and openly agnostics. Freedom and the presence of so many foreigners have caused a prodigious cultural explosion. There is also a boom in publications in German, although the sovereign himself claims to detest German, preferring to write in French and using his native tongue only to address his horse.

Early origins of the London Stock Exchange

Florence. The Medici inventory of musical instruments already mentions “a harpicembalo by Bartolomeo Cristofori, of a new invention, which plays both piano and forte.” However, the first surviving piano was made by Cristofori himself in 1720 and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The second is in Rome and dates to 1722, and the third is in Leipzig, from 1726.

Adam Smith predicts that America and other new continents will be the new models of a mercantilist world

French Empire: extends to Louisiana, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, all of Northwest Africa, Madagascar, Southeast India, Siam

British Empire: the largest in the world (in area and population): India, Pakistan, Yemen, Malaysia, Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, the Middle East, North America, the Caribbean, Bermuda, the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Horn of Africa, South-East Africa, islands in the Pacific, Atlantic and Mediterranean, control of sea routes

With the Treaty of Karlowitz, Venice retained everything Francesco Morosini had conquered in the Ionian Sea and Morea, and even more. A fifteen-year period of peace followed for Venice.

Vladimir Atlasov discovers the Kamchatka Peninsula

James II, King of England, after being exiled to France, attempts again, for the third time in a few years, to return to England with the support of the French fleet, but an unexpected and terrible storm completely routs the French fleet. On May 5th, James II, increasingly distressed, must return to France to the court of Louis XIV.

William Kidd, a wealthy New York businessman, is hired by the King of England to fight the pirates threatening the Red Sea trade routes; however, he soon becomes a pirate himself under the name of Captain Kidd.

The Bank of England begins officially issuing paper money. It is the first in Europe. But paper money had already been invented in Asia several centuries earlier.

Isaac Newton suffers another nervous breakdown and retires from scientific research

James II, King of England, after being exiled to France, attempts to return to England with the support of the French fleet, but is defeated at La Hougue. The French general Tourville, with 44 ships, 21,000 sailors, and 3,000 cannons, is defeated by Edward Russell and John Ashby, two of the strongest English admirals, with 89 ships, 42,000 sailors, and 7,000 cannons. The French retreat after losing 1,700 sailors but no ships.

Indonesia. The Dutch bring coffee cultivation to Java.