1720

• (approx.) Ottawa chief Pontiac.
• Charles Edward Stuart, aka to Scots as "The Young Pretender", focus of a 1745 Jacobite uprising.
• Italian composer Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
• English actor and theater owner Samuel Foote.
• American Quaker leader and abolitionist John Woolman.
• English socialite, author, and wit Elizabeth Montagu.
• Swedish naturalist Charles Bonnet, proponent of parthenogenesis.
• English architect Nicholas Revett, one of the engines of the neoclassical movement.
• Swedish entomologist Charles De Geer.
• Freiherr Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen.
• Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto.

• Flemish painter Peter Van Bloeman.
• English poet Anne Finch (Countess of Winchlesea).
• Jacobite leader James Cotter, hanged.
• John Flamsteed, British royal astronomer.  He is succeeded by Edmund Halley.
• French painter Antoine Coysevox.
• English pirate captain Mary Read, in prison.
• Perisan Shah Ahmed I.
• Ihe Sayyid brothers, Hussein Ali (assiasinated), and Abdullah Ali, at the Battle of Hasanpur.   Muhammad Shah has control of the Mughal Empire (reduced to little nmore than Delhi).

• Coffee houses in Italy introduce the latest craze from the New World, chocolate.
• Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit introduces his temperature scale.
• Russian trade treaty with China
• European books allowed into Japan by shogun Yoshimune.
• Plague kills 50,000 in Marseilles.
• Well-to-do Englishmen begin decorating their walls with wallpaper.
• The British Parliament passes the Declaratory Act giving itself the right to legislate for Ireland.
• Sweden and Denmark sign a peace treaty ending their part of the Great Northern War.  Sweden, once the Superpower of Eastern Europe, is back down on a par with Denmark.
• British authorities in Bombay expel all Franciscan missionaries from the island, over fears that they were secretly working to restore Portugese rule.  Carmelites immediately take their place.
• Chinese Emperor Qang Xi drives the Zungars out of Tibet and installs the pro-Chinese Dalai Lama in their place.
• Treaty of the Hague ending its war with the Quadruple Alliance of Great Britain, France, Holland and Austria.
• Spanish king Philip V agrees that his son Charles will give up any claim to the throne of Italy, although he will inherit Parma, Piacenza, and Tuscany from his maternal grandfather.
• Austrian emperor Charles VI gives up his claim to Spain.
• Duke Victor Amadeus of Savoy agrees to let Austria keep Sicily; he is given Sardinia in exchange and he now styles himself "King of Sardinia".
• The South Sea Bubble is the first major stock market collapse.
• (February) With stock at £175 per 100 shares, and a monopoly on trade with the South Sea, people imagining piles of gold in Chile and Peru begin speculating on the stock of the as-yet unprofitable British South Sea Company.
• (April) The BSSC buys the entire public debt of Great Britain, after many influential people are bribed with stock, whose price has been increasing since January.
• (June) To prevent low-quality stock scams, Parliament passes the Bubble Act requiring all publicly traded companies to have a royal charter.   High-quality scams such as the BSSC are unaffected; the price of a share has reached £1000.  However, people begin to stop believing in fairies, and start selling.
• (August) Margin calls result in an unprecedented number of bankruptcies.
• (September) BSSC's stock is now £135.

1719 - 1720 - 1721

How they Were Made - 18th Century