1740s

• January 8 – All 237 crewmen on the Dutch East India Company ship Rooswijk are drowned when the vessel strikes the shoals of Goodwin Sands off of the coast of England. Rooswijk was beginning its second voyage to Indies. The wreckage is discovered more than 250 years later in 2004. [1]
• February 20 – The North Carolina General Assembly incorporates the town of Newton as Wilmington, North Carolina, named for Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington and patron of Royal Governor Gabriel Johnston.
• March 16 – King Edward of the Miskito Indians signs a treaty making his kingdom, located on the coast of modern-day Nicaragua, a protectorate of Great Britain. [2]
• March 25 – Construction begins on Bethesda Orphanage for boys near Savannah, Georgia, founded by George Whitefield.

• April 8 – War of the Austrian Succession: The Royal Navy captures the Spanish ship of the line Princesa off Cape Finisterre, and takes her into British service.
• May 31 – Frederick II comes to power in Prussia upon the death of his father, Frederick William I.
• June 1 – Plantation Act or Naturalization Act of the Parliament of Great Britain comes into effect providing for Protestant alien immigrants (including Huguenots, and also Jews) residing in the American colonies for 7 years to receive British nationality.
• June 16 – Pour le Mérite first awarded in Prussia as a military honour.
• June 26 – War of Jenkins' Ear: Siege of Fort Mose – A Spanish column of 300 regular troops, free Black militia and Indian auxiliaries storms Britain's strategically crucial position of Fort Mose, Florida.

• July 7 – Adam Smith sets out from Scotland to take up a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford.[3]
• July 11 – Pogrom: Jews are expelled from Little Russia.
• August 1 – The song Rule, Britannia! is first performed at Cliveden, the country home of Frederick, Prince of Wales, in England.[4]
• August 17 – Pope Benedict XIV succeeds Pope Clement XII, as the 247th pope.
• September 8 – Hertford College, Oxford, England, is founded for the first time.[5]

• October 9–22 – Batavia Massacre: Troops of the Dutch East India Company massacre 5,000–10,000 Chinese Indonesians in Batavia.[6]
• October 20 – Maria Theresa inherits the hereditary dominions of the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and modern-day Belgium) under the terms of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 on the death of her father, Charles VI. Her succession to the Holy Roman Empire is contested widely because she is a woman, but she will reign for 40 years.
• November 6 – Samuel Richardson's popular and influential epistolary novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, is published in London.
• November 14 – The University of Pennsylvania is officially established.
• December 16 – Frederick II of Prussia invades the Habsburg possession of Silesia, starting the War of the Austrian Succession.

• Enfield, North Carolina, is founded.
• Spain begins construction on Fort Matanzas in the Matanzas Inlet, approximately 15 miles (24 km) south of St. Augustine, Florida.

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