Early Modern
Russian Annexation of Crimea (1783): End of the Crimean Khanate
The Crimean Khanate was abolished and its lands became part of the Russian Empire, a change accepted by the Ottoman Empire in January 1784.
Region
Europe
Early Modern
Laki Eruption (1783): Iceland's Fissure That Poisoned Europe
The Haze Famine killed roughly 20 to 25 per cent of Iceland's population, and the sulphurous haze caused illness and excess deaths across Europe.
Early Modern
Mesmer Royal Commission (1784): Franklin Tests Mesmerism
The commission found no evidence for a magnetic fluid and attributed the patients' reactions to imagination, discrediting animal magnetism as science.
Early Modern
Kant's What Is Enlightenment? (1784): Dare to Know, Sapere Aude
Kant's short essay became the most famous definition of the Enlightenment and a lasting statement on freedom of thought and public reason.
Early Modern
Province of Freedom (1787): The Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme
The first settlement, Granville Town, failed, but the scheme led to the Sierra Leone Company and the founding of Freetown by Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia in 1792.
Early Modern
Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787)
The society built a national campaign of petitions, publications and boycotts that helped bring about the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807.
Early Modern
First Fleet (1787–1788): Convict Ships Sail to Botany Bay
The fleet founded the penal colony of New South Wales at Sydney Cove, beginning British settlement of Australia and the dispossession of its Aboriginal peoples.
Prehistory
Megatherium: The Giant Ground Sloth Found in Argentina in 1787
The Luján skeleton became one of the first fossil vertebrates ever mounted and, through Cuvier, a founding piece of evidence for extinction.
Early Modern
Brookes Slave Ship Diagram (1788): The Image That Shocked Britain
The diagram became the most widely reproduced image of the abolition campaign and a lasting symbol of the Middle Passage.
Early Modern
Storming of the Bastille (1789): The Day That Began a Revolution
Insurgents captured the Bastille, and royal authority in Paris collapsed in favour of the new revolutionary order.
Early Modern
Selim III and the Nizam-i Cedid: Ottoman Military Reform
Selim built a modern army of over 20,000 men but was deposed in 1807 by a Janissary-backed revolt and killed in 1808; his reforms were revived by Mahmud II.
Early Modern
Great Fear (1789): Panic and Peasant Revolt in Rural France
The panic and peasant attacks on manor houses led the National Assembly to announce the abolition of the feudal system on 4 August 1789.