1740s

The 1740s decade ran from January 1, 1740, to December 31, 1749.

Millennium:	2nd millennium
Centuries:	17th century 18th century 19th century
Decades:	1720s 1730s 1740s 1750s 1760s
Years:	1740 1741 1742 1743 1744 1745 1746 1747 1748 1749
Categories:	Births Deaths By country By topic Establishments Disestablishments

Events

1740

January–March

• 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]

April–June

• 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 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–September

• 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–December

• 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. However, her succession to the Holy Roman Empire is contested widely because she is a woman.
• 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.

Date unknown

• By an act of the Parliament of Great Britain, alien immigrants (including Huguenots and Jews) in the colonies receive British nationality.
• Enfield, North Carolina, is founded.
• George Whitefield founds the Bethesda Orphanage for boys near Savannah, Georgia.
• Spain begins construction on Fort Matanzas in the Matanzas Inlet, approximately 15 miles (24 km) south of St. Augustine, Florida.

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References

1. Wendy van Duivenvoorde, Dutch East India Company Shipbuilding: The Archaeological Study of Batavia and Other Seventeenth-Century VOC Ships (Texas A&M University Press, 2015) p145
2. "Mosquito Coast", in Historical Dictionary of the British Empire, ed. by Kenneth J. Panton (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) p384
3. "On this day in 1740..." Adam Smith Institute. 2010-07-07. Retrieved 2019-11-19.
4. Williams, Hywel (2005). Cassell's Chronology of World History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. 308. ISBN 0-304-35730-8.
5. Hamilton, Sidney Graves (1903). Hertford College. University of Oxford college histories. London: Robinson.
6. "Image: Bird's eye view of Batavia showing the massacre of the Chinese". Archived from the original on September 21, 2009. Retrieved November 12, 2006.