1767 - Political Events

Political Events

Russia's Catherine II (the Great) appoints a commission of 564 deputies to make recommendations for the modernization of the empire, with limits on the powers of landowners over their serfs and plans for comprehensive education. Included are landowners, burghers, administrators, Cossacks, and ethnic minorities, but no clergymen or serfs.

Britain's Chatham ministry resigns in December. A new Tory ministry headed by August Henry Fitzroy, 32, 3rd duke of Grafton, will rule until January 1770.

Burmese forces sack Siam's capital Ayutthaya in August and establish a new dynasty (see 1593; 1752; Siam, 1703). The Siamese general Phraya Taksin, 33, has fled the city before its fall and made his way to the southeast, where he raises fresh troops, regains the lower Chao Phraya River Valley, and makes himself king, beginning a reign that will continue until his death in 1782.

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania by Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson, 34, are published in their first installments. Dickinson drafted the resolutions and grievances of the Stamp Act Congress 2 years ago as a member of that body, and his Letters on the nonimportation and nonexportation agreements will continue to appear through much of 1768, winning him wide popularity in the colonies.

The Mason and Dixon line between the Pennsylvania and Maryland colonies is completed after a 4-year survey that has cost $75,000. British colonial authorities have engaged English surveyor-astronomers Charles Mason, 37, and Jeremiah Dixon to settle a century-old dispute as to ownership of lands that include the large fertile peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay. Self-educated Philadelphia astronomer David Rittenhouse, 31, has established an arc of 12 miles' radius centered at New Castle, Delaware; Mason and Dixon have used that as the basis of their amazingly accurate demarcation line. Marked by handsome boundary stones, with the Penn coat-of-arms on their north sides and the Calvert coat-of-arms on their south sides, it extends westward to the "top of the Great dividing Ridge of the Alleghaney Mountains," beyond which Mason and Dixon's Indian guides have refused to proceed out of fear of the Delaware and the Shawnee.