The British first reach the Pacific Northwest by sea in 1778, during James Cook's third voyage.

His exploration of the Pacific coast, Vancouver Island in particular, results in the beginnings of British participation in the Maritime Fur Trade.

While sailing north to search for the fabled Northwest Passage, Cook had discovered the Hawaiian Islands.

On the Northwest Coast, he spends a month in Nootka Sound, during which he and his crew trade with the Nuu-chah-nulth from the village of Yuquot.

They end up with over three hundred furs, mostly sea otter, but think them of no great value.

James Cook enters Prince William Sound in 1778 and names it Sandwich Sound, after his patron the Earl of Sandwich.

The editors of Cook's maps will later change the name to Prince William Sound, in honor of Prince William, who will later become King William IV.

The element molybdenum is not formally discovered and identified until 1778, when Scheele attacks pulverized molybdaina (now molybdenite, MoS₂), long thought to be a lead ore or graphite, with concentrated nitric acid; he then evaporates the residue to dryness.

Scheele proves that the ore certainly contains sulfur and an oxide of, possibly, a previously unknown metal.

Danish physicians, on the king’s orders, move to open two major vaccination houses in Denmark in 1778.

One clear result of the renewal of the Anglo-French contest in the East Indies between 1778–1783 will be a greater appreciation by the British of the strategic needs of their newly acquired possessions in Asia.

The superimposition of a global struggle between European powers upon several localized Indian wars does unnerve the Company and seriously embarrass its presidencies.

Furthermore, the war exposes the rival geo-political ambitions of the French and these in turn provoke the more stolid, unreflecting British to formulate their own logic of empire.

When word reaches India in 1778 that France has entered the war, the British East India Company moves quickly to capture French colonial outposts there, notably capturing Pondicherry after two months of siege.

Pius VI, besides facing dissatisfaction with this temporizing policy, meets with practical protests tending to the limitation of papal authority.

Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim, writing under the pseudonym of "Febronius", the chief German literary exponent of Gallican ideas of national Catholic Churches, is himself induced (not without scandal) publicly to retract his positions; but they are adopted in Austria nevertheless.

Neapolitan nurses inoculate infants in Italy in 1778 without the knowledge of their parents.

The Dutch refuse to be bullied into taking Britain's side in the war against France in 1778.

The British invoke a number of old treaties (1678, 1689, 1716) to have the Republic support them militarily, but as in the Seven Years' War the Dutch government refuses.

William Pitt speaks out in Parliament, urging Britain to make peace in America and to unite with America against France, while other British politicians who had previously sympathized with colonial grievances now turn against the Americans for allying with Britain's international rival and enemy.

Percivall Pott becomes the first scientist to demonstrate that a cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen when, in 1775, the English surgeon finds an association between exposure to soot and a high incidence of scrotal cancer (later found to be squamous cell carcinoma) in chimney sweeps.

This is the first occupational link to cancer, and the early investigations cry post, one of the founders of orthopedy, contribute to the science of epidemiology and lead to the Chimney Sweeper's Act of 1788.