18th century

As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800 in the Gregorian calendar.

Some history scholars will sometimes specifically refer to the 18th century as 1715-1789, denoting the period of time between the death of Louis XIV of France and the start of the French Revolution, or even 1688-1789, denoting the period of time between the Glorious Revolution in England and the start of the French Revolution. British historians such as Frank O'Gorman sometimes refer to the "Long Eighteenth Century" running from the Revolution of 1688 to the Great Reform Act of 1832.

The storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789, an iconic event of the French Revolution.

Events

1700s

Union flag of The Kingdom of Great Britain

• 1701-1714: War of the Spanish Succession
• 1703: Saint Petersburg founded by Peter the Great. Russian capital until 1918.
• 1707: Act of Union passed merging the Scottish and the English Parliaments, thus establishing The Kingdom of Great Britain.
• 1707: After Aurangzeb's death, the Mughal Empire enters a long decline.

1710s

• 1715: Louis XIV died leaving France deep in debt.
• 1718: City of New Orleans founded by the French in North America

1720s

• 1720: The South Sea Bubble
• 1721: Robert Walpole became the first Prime Minister of Great Britain (de facto).
• 1721: Treaty of Nystad signed, ending the Great Northern War.
• 1722-23: Russo-Persian War
• 1722: Afghans conquered Iran, ending the Safavid dynasty.
• 1722: Kangxi Emperor of China died.

1730s

Qianlong Emperor

• 1733-38: War of the Polish Succession
• 1735-99: The Qianlong Emperor of China oversaw a huge expansion in territory.
• 1736: Nadir Shah assumed title of Shah of Persia and founded the Afsharid dynasty. Ruled until his death in 1747.
• 1739: Nadir Shah defeated the Mughals and sacked Delhi.

1740s

• 1740: Frederick the Great crowned King of Prussia.
• 1740-48: War of the Austrian Succession
• 1741: Russians began settling the Aleutian Islands.
• 1745: Second Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland began.
• 1747: Ahmed Shah Durrani founded the Durrani Empire in modern day Afghanistan.

1750s

• 1750: Peak of the Little Ice Age
• 1755: The Lisbon earthquake
• 1756-63: Seven Years' War fought among European powers in various theaters around the world.
• 1757: Battle of Plassey signaled the beginning of British rule in India.

1760s

Frederick II the Great, King of Prussia

• 1760: George III became King of Britain.
• 1762-96: Reign of Catherine the Great of Russia.
• 1766-99: Anglo-Mysore Wars
• 1767: Burmese conquered the Ayutthaya kingdom.
• 1768: Gurkhas conquered Nepal.
• 1768-1774: Russo-Turkish War
• 1769: Spanish missionaries established the first of 21 missions in California.
• 1769-73: The Bengal famine of 1770 killed one third of the Indian population.

1770s

• 1772-1795: The Partitions of Poland ended the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and erased Poland from the map for 123 years.
• 1775-1782: First Anglo-Maratha War
• 1775-1783: American Revolutionary War
• 1779-1879: Xhosa Wars between British and Boer settlers and the Xhosas in South Africa

1780s

• 1785-95: Northwest Indian War between the United States and Native Americans
• 1787: Freed slaves from London founded Freetown in present-day Sierra Leone.
• 1788: First European settlement established in Australia at Sydney.
• 1789: George Washington elected President of the United States. Served until 1797.
• 1789-99: The French Revolution

1790s

A Phrygian cap from 1790s France

• 1791-1804: The Haitian Revolution
• 1792-1815: The Great French War started as the French Revolutionary Wars which lead into the Napoleonic Wars.
• 1792: New York Stock & Exchange Board founded.
• 1793: Upper Canada bans slavery.
• 1795: Pinckney's Treaty between the United States and Spain granted the Mississippi Territory to the US.
• 1796: British ejected Dutch from Ceylon.
• 1797: Napoleon's invasion and partition of the Republic of Venice ended over 1,000 years of independence for the Serene Republic.
• 1798-1800: Quasi-War between the United States and France.
• 1799: Napoleon staged a coup d'état and became dictator of France.
• 1799: Dutch East India Company is dissolved.

Significant people

Johann Sebastian Bach

• Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Italian mathematician
• Ahmad Shah Abdali, Afghan King
• Ueda Akinari, Japanese writer
• Jean le Rond d'Alembert, French mathematician, physicist and encyclopedist
• Queen Anne, British monarch
• Aurangzeb, Mughal Emperor
• Johann Sebastian Bach, German composer
• George Berkeley, Irish empiricist philosopher
• Pierre Beaumarchais, French writer
• Jeremy Bentham, English philosopher and reformer
• Daniel Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and physicist
• William Blake, English artist and poet
• François Boucher, French painter
• Edmund Burke, British statesman and philosopher
• Robert Burns, Scottish poet
• Giacomo Casanova, Venetian adventurer, writer and womanizer
• Catherine the Great, Russian Tsaritsa
• Cao Xueqin, Chinese writer
• Alexis Clairault, French mathematician

Carl Friedrich Gauss

• James Cook, British navigator
• François Couperin, French composer
• Denis Diderot, French writer and philosopher
• Eugenio Espejo, Ecuadorian scientist
• Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician
• Jean-Honoré Fragonard, French painter
• Benjamin Franklin, American scientist and statesman
• Frederick the Great, Prussian monarch
• Thomas Gainsborough, English painter
• Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician, physicist and astronomer
• King George III, British monarch
• Christoph Willibald Gluck, German composer
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer
• George Frideric Handel, German-English composer
• Alexander Hamilton, American statesman
• Joseph Haydn, Austrian composer
• Eliza Haywood, English writer

Samuel Johnson

• William Hogarth, English painter and engraver
• David Hume, Scottish philosopher
• Thomas Jefferson, American statesman
• Edward Jenner, English inventor of vaccination
• Jiang Tingxi, Chinese artist and scholar
• Samuel Johnson, British writer and literary critic
• Joseph II, Austrian Emperor
• Kangxi Emperor, China
• Immanuel Kant, German philosopher
• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, French writer
• Joseph Louis Lagrange, Italian-French mathematician and physicist
• Pierre Simon Laplace, French physicist and mathematician
• John Law, Scottish economist
• Mikhail Lomonosov, Russian scientist
• Antoine Lavoisier, French chemist
• Adrien-Marie Legendre, French mathematician
• Alphonsus Liguori, Italian bishop, founder of Redemptorists, Saint
• Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), Swedish biologist

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

• Louis XV of France, French monarch
• Louis XVI of France, French monarch
• James Madison, American statesman
• Maria Theresa of Austria, Austrian Empress
• Marie Antoinette, Austrian-born French Queen
• Michikinikwa, Miami tribe chief and war leader
• Honoré Mirabeau French writer and politician
• Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, French thinker
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer
• Nadir Shah, Persian King
• Thomas Paine, British intellectual
• Peter I of Russia (Peter the Great), Russian Tsar
• Pius VI, Roman Pope
• François-André Danican Philidor, French composer and chess master

Voltaire

• Marquis of Pombal, Portuguese Prime Minister
• Alexander Pope, British poet
• Qianlong Emperor, China
• Francis II Rákóczi, prince of Hungary and Transylvania, Revolutionary leader
• Jean-Philippe Rameau, French composer
• Bartolomeo Rastrelli, Italian-born Russian architect
• Sir Joshua Reynolds, British painter
• Maximilien Robespierre, French revolutionary leader and dictator
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French writer and philosopher
• Marquis de Sade, French writer and philosopher
• Domenico Scarlatti, Italian composer.
• Friedrich Schiller, German writer
• John Small, English cricketer
• Adam Smith, Scottish economist and philosopher
• Laurence Sterne, British writer
• Edward "Lumpy" Stevens, English cricketer

George Washington

• Alexander Suvorov, Russian military leader
• Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish scientist, thinker and mystic
• Jonathan Swift, Anglo-Irish satirist
• Toussaint L'Ouverture, Haitian revolutionary leader
• Túpac Amaru II, Peruvian revolutionary
• Kitagawa Utamaro, Japanese printmaker and painter
• Antonio Vivaldi, Italian composer
• Voltaire, French writer and philosopher
• Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, Arab islamic theologian and founder of Wahhabism
• Robert Walpole, British Prime Minister
• George Washington, American general and first President of USA
• James Watt, Scottish scientist and inventor
• Antoine Watteau, French painter
• John Wesley, British churchman, founder of Methodism
• Mary Wollstonecraft, British writer and feminist
• William Pitt, British Prime Minister
• Yuan Mei, Chinese poet, scholar and artist
• Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, German religious writer and bishop

See Founding Fathers of the United States

Inventions, discoveries, introductions

Main articles: Timeline of invention#18th century and Timeline of scientific discoveries#1700s

The Spinning Jenny

• 1709: The first piano was built by Bartolomeo Cristofori
• c. 1710: Steam Engine invented by Thomas Newcomen
• 1717: The diving bell was successfully tested by Edmond Halley, sustainable to a depth of 55 ft.
• c. 1730: The sextant navigational tool was developed by John Hadley in England, and Thomas Godfrey in America
• 1736: Europeans discovered rubber - the discovery was made by Charles-Marie de la Condamine while on expedition in South America. It was named in 1770 by Joseph Priestly
• c. 1740: Modern steel was developed by Benjamin Huntsman
• 1741: Vitus Bering discovered Alaska
• 1745: The Leyden jar invented by Ewald von Kleist was the first electrical capacitor
• 1751 - 1785: The French Encyclopédie
• 1755: The English Dictionary by Samuel Johnson
• 1764: The Spinning Jenny created by James Hargreaves brought on the Industrial Revolution
• 1761: The problem of Longitude was finally resolved by the fouth chronometer of John Harrison
• 1768 - 1779: James Cook mapped the boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and discovered many Pacific Islands
• 1776: The Wealth of Nations, foundation of the modern theory of economy, was published by Adam Smith
• 1779: Photosynthesis was first discovered by Jan Ingenhouse of the Netherlands
• 1798: Edward Jenner publishes a treatise about smallpox vaccination
• 1799: Rosetta stone discovered by Napoleon's troops.

Decades and years

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