The world in AD 1700

Africa

Gold paid for the war that remade the Gold Coast. William Bosman, an officer of the Dutch West India Company at Elmina, wrote in letters printed in London in 1705 that Denkyira, the inland kingdom whose gold reached the Dutch forts after a journey of five days, had been destroyed “a few months past” by the king of Asante in two battles, after which the Asante army spent 15 days on the plunder and the Denkyira captives were sold as slaves. The Metropolitan Museum’s Heilbrunn Timeline records that Denkyira had been the dominant Akan state since 1690 and dates the appearance of the Golden Stool before Osei Tutu, the ruler of Asante, to 1701. Farther east the same Timeline puts the Yoruba state of Oyo at about 18,000 square miles at the start of the 18th century.

• Why did the Benin Bronzes leave Benin City, and are they going home?1600

West Asia

Peace on the Ottoman northern frontier was one year old. Paul Rycaut, for 18 years English consul at Smyrna, closed the 1700 edition of his History of the Turks with the articles agreed at Karlowitz, on the border of Sirmium, between the chancellor of Sultan Mustafa and the envoys of the Emperor, Poland and Venice, with the English ambassador William Paget and the Dutch envoy Jacob Colyer as mediators; a separate instrument gave the tsar’s plenipotentiary a two-year truce. Persia had a different problem. Encyclopaedia Iranica records that Baluch raiders overran Kerman province in 1699, that Shah Sultan Husayn, enthroned at Isfahan on August 7, 1694, answered by making Gorgin Khan, the former viceroy of Georgia, governor of Herat, Qandahar and Kabul, and that the shah began the garden palace of Farahabad south of the Zayandarud in about 1700, while Omani ships raided the Persian Gulf coast.

• Naqsh-e Jahan: the 524-meter square of Shah Abbas's Isfahan1611

Europe

Charles XII of Sweden was 18 when Denmark, Saxony-Poland and Russia attacked his kingdom at the start of 1700. Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, the Swedish national biography, records the Saxon assault on Riga in February, the peace that Denmark signed at Traventhal on August 8 after a Swedish landing on Zealand, and the attack on the Russian siege lines at Narva on November 20 by the Swedish calendar, which it calls a complete catastrophe for the enemy. To the south the chronology kept by the Palace of Versailles states that Louis XIV hesitated for a long time before accepting the will of his brother-in-law Charles II on November 12, because the emperor Leopold I had a claim of his own, and that a new war with Austria was brewing.

• Why did factories appear first in one corner of England?1771
• March 12, 1610: a Venice pamphlet with four new moons around Jupiter1610
• Why did the revolutions of 1848 spread in weeks and fail in a year?1848

East Asia

A handscroll finished about 1698 shows what the Qing court wanted remembered. Wang Hui’s third scroll of the Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, now in the Metropolitan Museum, follows the emperor’s 1689 journey from Ji’nan to Mount Tai; the museum’s note says Kangxi made the tour to consolidate his authority over the south, and that Wang worked from maps and prints because he never saw the mountain. Engelbert Kaempfer, a physician with the Dutch factory on Dejima at Nagasaki, went to Edo with the annual embassy in 1691 and 1692, named “Tsinajos”, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, as the reigning shogun, and described the castle where Ieyasu’s successors lived; Columbia University’s Asia for Educators puts the population of Edo at about one million by 1700.

• January 24, 1601: a clock and a world map arrive at the Ming court1601
• How did one morning at Sekigahara settle Japan for 250 years?1600
• Why did Britain fight over opium, and what did the 1842 treaty start?1840

South Asia

Aurangzeb, in the forty-third year of his reign, was living in a siege camp. Niccolao Manucci, a Venetian who had lived in India since 1653 and was writing at Madras, recorded that after 19 years of war with the Marathas the emperor took the field in person in November 1699 and invested the fort of Satara, while Maratha armies sacked towns behind him and cut off the treasure and food bound for the royal camp, so that the army suffered as much from hunger as from fighting. The Maratha king Rajaram fell ill and died in March 1700, and Satara and five lesser forts surrendered. Manucci wrote that the minister Ramchandra Pant then gave the title of prince to a minor son named Shivaji, and that the raiding went on as he wrote.

• Tipu's Tiger: the growling organ taken at Seringapatam in 17991799
• How did Akbar hold together an empire of many faiths?1575

Central Asia

Bukhara and Balkh were one khanate under Subhan Quli Khan, enthroned on the white carpet on October 28, 1681, who held them until his death on July 26, 1702, by the dating of Encyclopaedia Iranica. The same article records that four of his sons appointed to govern Balkh died in office between 1683 and 1685, that in 1697 or 1698 he gave the city to his grandson Muhammad Muqim, and that a delegation from Urganj offered him Khwarazm after the Uzbek amirs there deposed their khan Anusha. Uzbek tribal groups were attaching themselves to particular territories, and after 1702 the amirs dominated the khanate in a way Iranica calls unprecedented.

• Bukhara, 1558: an Englishman finds the Silk Road trade too small1558

The Americas

Jesuit missions marked the northern edge of Spanish America. Eusebio Francisco Kino had founded San Cayetano de Tumacácori on the Santa Cruz River in January 1691 and Guevavi, 15 miles upriver, the next day; the National Park Service records that Guevavi became the mission headquarters in 1701, and that the Jesuits went no farther north than the Pimería Alta, the country of the O’odham. At the other end of the hemisphere gold had been found in the hills of Minas Gerais, and UNESCO dates the founding of Ouro Preto, the center of the Brazilian gold rush, to the end of the 17th century.

• How did Haiti win freedom in 1804, then pay France for it until 1888?1804
• Twelve books, 2,446 pages: the Florentine Codex Philip II confiscated1577
• How did silver from a mountain in the Andes end up in Ming China?1572

Oceania

HMS Roebuck, 12 guns, was the only European ship on the coasts of Australia and New Guinea that year. William Dampier had anchored in Shark’s Bay on the west coast of New Holland on August 6, 1699, found no fresh water after digging for it, reached New Guinea on December 3, and early in 1700 sailed along its eastern end, which he found to be a separate island and named New Britain. His men wanted to go home; on May 18, 1700, he was back at Timor, and the Roebuck foundered near Ascension on the way to England. Polynesia and Aboriginal Australia kept no written records of the year.

• December 19, 1642: four Dutch sailors die in a bay Māori already held1642
• Tupaia, the Tahitian navigator who sailed with Cook in 17691769
• Why do the Māori and English texts of the Treaty of Waitangi differ?1840

Sources

• William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London, 1705; reprint 1907), Letter VI
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline: Guinea Coast, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Paul Rycaut, The History of the Turks, beginning with the Year 1679 (London, 1700)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Rudi Matthee, Soltan Hosayn
• Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, Sven Grauers, Karl XII (vol. 20, 1973–75)
• Château de Versailles, The Duke of Anjou, King of Spain, 1700
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wang Hui, The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three (datable to 1698)
• Engelbert Kaempfer, The History of Japan, together with a description of the kingdom of Siam, 1690–92, vol. 3 (Glasgow, 1906)
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators, Key Points across East Asia, 1450–1750
• Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India 1653–1708, vol. 3, trans. William Irvine (London, 1907)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, R. D. McChesney, Central Asia vi. In the 16th–18th Centuries
• U.S. National Park Service, Tumacácori National Historical Park, Events
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Historic Town of Ouro Preto
• William Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland, Etc. in the Year 1699 (Project Gutenberg ebook 15675)