Shahrukh is a contemporary of Mir Sayyed Mohammad Marashi, the son of a daughter of the late Safavid Shah Suleiman I and a clergyman, who is in charge of the affairs of the Holy Shrine in Mashhad.

Encouraged by the nobles, Mir Sayyed Mohammad comes to believe he is the true heir to the throne.

Thus he captures and blinds Shahrukh, capitalizing on the popular dissatisfaction with Shahrukh's rule, partly owing to the conduct of his Georgian favorite Rasul Beg, who has scandalized Mashad by making free with the harem of his master.

The proxy war continues in India, though a state of war does not exist in Europe.

The French ally with Chanda Sahib and Muzaffar Jung to bring them into power in their respective states, but the British soon also intervene, siding with those states’ rivals to check the designs of Dupleix.

They counter the French by supporting Nasir Jung and Muhammad Ali Khan Walajah (son of the deposed Nawab Anwaruddin Muhammed Khan of Arcot).

The French in 1749 initially succeed in both states in defeating their opponents and placing their supporters on thrones.

Dupleix next enters into negotiations, the object of which is the subjugation of southern India.

He sends a large body of troops to the aid of the two claimants of the sovereignty of the Carnatic and the Deccan.

France has the most modern and extensive road network in the world by the middle of the eighteenth century.

Engineers from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées have built modern highways, many of which are still in use today; they stretch from Paris to the most distant borders of France.

The public had generally accepted the mistresses of Louis XIV, who, apart from Madame de Maintenon, had all been chosen in the highest spheres of the aristocracy and had very little influence on the government, but that the king would thus compromise himself with a commoner is felt to be a disgrace.

Soon thereare libels published called poissonnades, a pun on Pompadour's family name, Poisson, which means "fish" in French.

Despite her critics, the Marquise de Pompadour has an undeniable influence on the flourishing of French arts during the reign of Louis XV, a reign that is often considered to represent the pinnacle of French architecture and interior design.

A patron of the arts, the Marquise is amassing a considerable amount of furniture andobjets d'artat her various estates.

She is responsible for the tremendous growth of the porcelain manufacturing in Sèvres, which has become one of the most famous porcelain manufacturers in Europe, and her commissions ensure the living of artists and families of craftsmen for many years.

She is also a prominent patron of architecture, responsible for the building of the Place Louis XV (now called the Place de la Concorde) and the École Militaire in Paris, both designed by her protégé Ange-Jacques Gabriel.

Her efforts to establish the École Militaire demonstrate her commitment to the training of officers from poor families of the aristocracy.

The Marquise is a political liberal at heart, and she steadily defends the Encyclopédie against the attacks from the Church.

She is also a supporter of Enlightenment philosophy and has tried to win the king over to its new ideas, albeit not quite as successfully as she hoped.

She is criticized for the lavish display of luxury at her various estates, although her wealthy family of financiers in many instances has given money to the government and saved the monarchy from bankruptcy. She has bequeathed all her estates to the state; they will revert to the crown at her death.

The Marquise de Pompadour is officially settled on the third floor (second story) of the Palace of Versailles in small but comfortable apartments that can still be visited today.

The atmosphere in these private quarters is so relaxed that the king is said to serve coffee during the suppers organized fro him by the Marquise.

The Encyclopédie had originally been conceived as a French translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728).

Ephraim Chambers had first published his Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences in two volumes in London in 1728, following several dictionaries of arts and sciences that had emerged in Europe since the late seventeenth century.

This work has become quite renowned, and four editions had been published between 1738 and 1742.

An Italian translation appears between 1747 and 1754.

In France a member of the banking family Lambert had started translating Chambers into French, but in 1745 the expatriate Englishman John Mills and German Gottfried Sellius were the first to actually prepare a French edition of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia for publication, which they entitled Encyclopédie.

Early in 1745 a prospectus for the Encyclopédie had been published to attract subscribers to the project.

This four page prospectus was illustrated by Jean-Michel Papillon and accompanied by a plan  stating that the work would be published in five volumes from June 1746 until the end of 1748.

The text was translated by Mills and Sellius, and it was corrected by an unnamed person, who appears to have been Denis Diderot.

The prospectus was reviewed quite positively and cited at some length in several journals.

The Mémoires pour l'histoire des sciences et des beaux arts journal was lavish in its praise: "voici deux des plus fortes entreprises de Littérature qu'on ait faites depuis long-tems" (here are two of the greatest efforts undertaken in literature in a very long time).

The Mercure Journal in June 1745, had printed a twenty-five-page article that specifically praised Mill's role as translator; the Journal introduced Mills as an English scholar who had been raised in France and who spoke both French and English as a native.

The Journal reported that Mills had discussed the work with several academics, was zealous about the project, had devoted his fortune to support this enterprise, and was the sole owner of the publishing privilege.

However, the cooperation fell apart later on in 1745.

André Le Breton, the publisher commissioned to manage the physical production and sales of the volumes, had cheated Mills out of the subscription money, claiming for example that Mills's knowledge of French was inadequate.

In a confrontation, Le Breton physically assaulted Mills.

Mills took Le Breton to court, but the court decided in Le Breton's favor.

Mills returned to England soon after the court's ruling.

For his new editor, Le Breton settled on the mathematician Jean Paul de Gua de Malves.

Among those hired by Malves were the young Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Denis Diderot.

Within thirteen months, in August 1747, Gua de Malves was fired for being an ineffective leader.

Le Breton then hired Diderot and d'Alembert to be the new editors.

Diderot will remain as editor funtil 1773, seeing the Encyclopédie through to its completion; d'Alembert will leave this role in 1758.

As d'Alembert works on the Encyclopédie, its title expands.

As of 1750, the full title is Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres, mis en ordre par M. Diderot de l'Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse, et quant à la partie mathématique, par M. d'Alembert de l'Académie royale des Sciences de Paris, de celle de Prusse et de la Société royale de Londres. ("Encyclopedia: or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, by a Company of Men of Letters, arranged by M. Diderot of the Academy of Sciences and Belles-lettres of Prussia: as to the Mathematical Portion, arranged by M. d'Alembert of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, to the Academy of Sciences in Prussia and to the Royal Society of London.")

The title page will be amended as d'Alembert acquires more titles.

The military successes of the War of the Austrian Succession had inclined the French public to overlook Louis' adulteries, but after 1748, in the wake of the anger over the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, pamphlets against the king's mistresses become increasingly widely published and read.

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, later the Marquise de Pompadour, who had met Louis XV in February 1745 at a masked ball given in honor of the marriage of the Dauphin, is one of the most famous mistresses of the reign.

She is the daughter of a chief agent of the powerful Paris family of financiers who had become embroiled in the intrigue that had ousted the Duke of Bourbon as a state minister in favor of Cardinal Fleury.

Starting in 1743 with the death of Fleury, the king had ruled alone without a first minister.

He had read many times the instructions of Louis XIV: "Listen to the people, seek advice from your Council, but decide alone."

His political correspondence reveals his deep knowledge of public affairs as well as the soundness of his judgement.

Most government work is conducted in committees of ministers that meet without the king.

The king reviews policy only in the Conseil d'en haut, the High Council, which is composed of the king, the Dauphin, the chancellor, the finance minister, and the foreign minister.

Created by Louis XIV, the council is in charge of state policy regarding religion, diplomacy, and war.

Here, he lets various political factions oppose each other and vie for influence and power: on the broadest level, the dévot party, led by the Comte d'Argenson, secretary of state for war, opposes the parti philosophique, which supports Enlightenment philosophy and is led by finance minister Jean Baptiste de Machault D'Arnouville.

The parti philosophique is supported by the Marquise de Pompadour, who has acted as a sort of minister without portfolio from the time she became royal mistress in 1745.

The Marquise is in favor of reforms.

Supported by her clan of financiers (Pâris-Duverney, Montmartel, etc.), she obtains from the king the appointment of ministers as well as their dismissal (such as Philippe Orry in 1745 and the Navy secretary Maurepas in 1749).

On her advice, the king supports the policy of fiscal justice designed by Machault d'Arnouville.

In order to finance the budget deficit, which amounts to one hundred million livres in 1745, Machault d'Arnouville had created a tax on the twentieth of all revenues that affect the privileged classes as well as commoners.

This breach in the privileged status of the aristocracy and the clergy, normally exempt from taxes, is a first in French history, although it had already been advocated by men such as Vauban under Louis XIV.

However, the new tax is received with violent protest from the privileged classes sitting in the estates of the few provinces that still retain the right to decide over taxation (most provinces had long lost their provincial estates and the right to decide over taxation).

The new tax is also opposed by the clergy and by the parlements.

The Council of Commerce has stimulated trade, and French foreign maritime trade has increased from eighty to three hundred and eight million livres between 1716 and 1748.

Rigid Colbertist laws left over from the previous reign have hindered industrial development, however.

Henry Fielding's comic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling is published in London.

Often known simply as Tom Jones, the novel—among the earliest English prose works describable as such—is both a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel.

Totaling 346,747 words, it is divided into eighteen smaller books, each preceded by a discursive chapter, often on topics unrelated to the book itself. It is dedicated to George Lyttleton.

Though lengthy, the novel is highly organized.

Although critic Samuel Johnson takes exception to Fielding's "robust distinctions between right and wrong", it becomes a best seller, with four editions being published in its first year alone.

Also this year, Fielding becomes magistrate at Bow Street, and first enlists the help of the Bow Street Runners, an early police force (eight men at first).

Tom Jones is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book, and as a very influential English novel.

...the mouth of Redstone Creek on the Monongahela River (a tributary of the Ohio River) which will later become Redstone Old Fort and even later Brownsville, Pennsylvania.

Maryland's land grant ends at the crest of the Appalachian mountains, but both Pennsylvania and Virginia claim their land grants continued westward, so the land claimed by Cresap and his traders west of the Appalachians will ultimately became part of upper West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

The territory of what is now Vermont had been first permanently settled by European settlers when William Dummer, acting governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, ordered the construction of a fort roughly where Brattleboro is located.

Massachusetts laid claim to the territory west of the Merrimack River at the time, and it had settlers on the Connecticut River who were prepared to move further north.

The border between Massachusetts and the neighboring Province of New Hampshire had been fixed by royal decree in 1741 at a line three miles (four point eight kilometers) north of Pawtucket Falls, where the Merrimack River turns north.

This decision eliminated claims by Massachusetts to the north of that line.

The territory between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, however, was also claimed by the Province of New York, whose claims extend eastward to the Connecticut.

Also in 1741, New Hampshire native Benning Wentworth had been appointed the first governor of New Hampshire of the eighteenth century who was not also a governor of Massachusetts.

Wentworth has chosen to read New Hampshire's territorial claims broadly, construung the decree setting the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border to mean that New Hampshire's jurisdiction extends as far west as the jurisdiction of Massachusetts extended.

Since the Massachusetts boundary extends to a point twenty miles (thirty-two kilometers) east of the Hudson River, Wentworth assumes the area west of the Connecticut belongs to New Hampshire.

New York bases its claim on the letters Patent, which granted Prince James, Duke of York, brother of King Charles II, all of the lands west of the Connecticut River to Delaware Bay.

Wentworth makes the first land grant, Bennington, a township west of the Connecticut River, on January 3, 1749.

The grants are usually six miles (nine point six kilometers) square (the standard size of a U.S. survey township, although the Public Land Survey System is not used in Vermont) and cost the grantee(s) twenty pounds.

The grants are then subdivided among the proprietors, and six of the lots are set aside—one for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (a missionary organization of the Church of England), one for the Church of England, one for the first clergyman to settle in the township, one for a school, and two for Wentworth himself.

The permanent annual tax on each grant, called a quitrent, is one shilling, paid directly to the king or his representative.

Cautioned by New York to cease and desist, Wentworth promises to await the judgment of the king, and refrains from making more grants in the claimed territory until it is rendered.