Ayutthaya, after a bloody period of dynastic struggle, had entered into what has been called the golden age, a relatively peaceful episode in the second quarter of the eighteenth century when art, literature, and learning flourished.

There were foreign wars—Ayutthaya had fought with the Nguyễn Lords (Vietnamese rulers of South Vietnam) for control of Cambodia starting around 1715—but a greater threat comes from Burma, where the new Alaungpaya dynasty (Konbaung dynasty) has subdued the Shan states.

The last fifty years of the kingdom have witnessed a bloody struggle among the princes, their prime target the throne.

Purges of court officials and able generals had followed.

The last monarch, Ekathat, originally known as Prince Anurakmontree, had forced the king, who was his younger brother, to step down and had taken the throne himself.

According to a French source, Ayutthaya in the eighteenth century comprises these principal cities: Martaban, Ligor or Nakhon Sri Thammarat, Tenasserim, Junk Ceylon or Phuket Island, Singora or Songkhla.

Her tributaries are Patani, Pahang, Perak, Kedah and Malacca.

In 1765, a combined forty thousand-strong force of Burmese armies invades the territories of Ayutthaya from the north and west.

Major outlying towns quickly capitulate.

The only notable example of successful resistance to these forces is found at the village of Bang Rajan.

Suzuki Harunobu develops the multicolor technique for ukiyo-e art.

Though some scholars assert that Harunobu was originally from Kyoto, pointing to possible influences from Nishikawa Sukenobu, much of his work, in particular his early work, is in the Edo style.

His work shows evidence of influences from many artists, including Torii Kiyomitsu, Ishikawa Toyonobu, the Kawamata school, and the Kano school.

However, the strongest influence upon Harunobu was the painter and printmaker Nishikawa Sukenobu, who may have been Harunobu's direct teacher.

Harunobu had begun his career in the style of the Torii school, creating many works which, while skillful, were not innovative and did not stand out.

It was only through his involvement with a group of literati samurai that Harunobu had tackled new formats and styles.

In 1764, as a result of his social connections, he had been chosen to aid these samurai in their amateur efforts to create calendar prints.

Calendars prints of this sort from prior to that year are not unknown but are quite rare, and it is known that Harunobu was close acquaintances or friends with many of the prominent artists and scholars of the period, as well as with several friends of the shogun.

Harunobu's calendars, which incorporated the calculations of the lunar calendar into their images, are exchanged at Edo gatherings and parties.

These calendar prints are the first nishiki-e (brocade prints).

As a result of the wealth and connoisseurship of his samurai patrons, Harunobu had created these prints using only the best materials he could.

Harunobu has experimented with better woods for the woodblocks, using cherry wood instead of catalpa, and has used not only more expensive colors, but also a thicker application of the colors, in order to achieve a more opaque effect.

The most important innovation in the creation of nishiki-e is the ability of Harunobu, again due to the wealth of his clients, to use as many separate blocks as he wishes for a single image; just twenty years previously, the invention of benizuri-e had made it possible to print in three or four colors; Harunobu applies this new technique to ukiyo-e prints using up to ten different colors on a single sheet of paper.

The new technique depends on using notches and wedges to hold the paper in place and keep the successive color printings in register.

Harunobu is the first ukiyo-e artist to consistently use more than three colors in each print.

Nishiki-e, unlike their predecessors, are full-color images.

As the technique is first used in a calendar, the year of their origin can be traced precisely to 1765.

The pertussis epidemic in Scandinavia has run for fifteen years and taken forty-five thousand lives.

Stanisław August, as Poniatowski now styles himself, combining the names of his two immediate royal predecessors, begins his rule with rough support within the nation; particularly, the lower nobility is favorable towards him.

He attempts to introduce a number of reforms in his first years.

He founds the Knights School, and begins to form a diplomatic service, with semi-permanent diplomatic representatives throughout Europe, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

On May 7, 1765, Poniatowski establishes the Order of the Knights of Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr, in honor of Poland's and his own patron saint, as Poland's second order of chivalry, to reward Poles for noteworthy service to the king.

Together with the Familia he tries to reform the ineffective government, reducing the powers of the hetmans (Commonwealth's top military commanders) and treasurers, moving them to commissions elected by the Sejm and responsible to the king.

In his memoirs, Poniatowski will call this period the "years of hope."

The Familia, which is interested in strengthening the power of their own faction, is dissatisfied with his conciliatory policy as he reaches out to many former opponents of their policies.

This uneasy alliance between Poniatowski and the Familia will continue for most of the first decade of his rule.

One of the points of contention between Poniatowski and the Familia concerns the rights of the religious minorities in Poland; whereas Poniatowski reluctantly supports a policy of religious tolerance, the Familia is opposed to it.

The growing rift between Poniatowski and the Familia is exploited by the Russians, who use this issue as a pretext to intervene in the Commonwealth's internal politics and destabilize the country.

Catherine has no desire to see Poniatowski's reform succeed; she has supported his ascent to the throne to ensure that the Commonwealth will remain a weak state under Russian control, and his attempts to reform the state's ailing machinery are a threat to the status quo.

Charlotte Murray, Duchess of Atholl, 8th Baroness Strange, sells the suzerainty of the Isle of Man in 1765 to the British government for £70,000 and an annuity of £2,000 (£5,235,000 and £150,000 respectively in modern terms).

The Isle of Man is brought under British control on June 21, 1765, the Isle of Man Purchase Act (coming into force May 10) confirming HM Treasury's purchase of the feudal rights of the Dukes of Atholl as Lord of Mann over the island and revesting them into the British Crown.

At the time of the second trial of John Harrison's 'Sea watch' (H4), another method for measuring longitude is ready for testing: the Method of Lunar Distances.

The moon moves fast enough, some thirteen degrees a day, to easily measure the movement from day to day.

By comparing the angle between the moon and the sun for the day one left for Britain, the "proper position" (how it would appear in Greenwich, England, at that specific time) of the moon could be calculated.

By comparing this with the angle of the moon over the horizon, the longitude could be calculated.

During Harrison's second trial of his H4, the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne is asked to accompany HMS Tartar and test the Lunar Distances system.

Once again the watch proves extremely accurate, keeping time to within thirty-nine seconds, corresponding to an error in the longitude of Bridgetown of less than ten miles (sixteen kilometers).

Maskelyne's measures are also fairly good, at thirty miles (forty-eight kilometers), but require considerable work and calculation in order to use.

At a meeting of the Board in 1765 the results are presented, but they again attribute the accuracy of the measurements to luck.

Once again the matter reaches Parliament, which offers £10,000 in advance and the other half once he turns over the design to other watchmakers to duplicate.

In the meantime Harrison's watch will have to be turned over to the Astronomer Royal for long-term on-land testing.

Unfortunately, Nevil Maskelyne had been appointed Astronomer Royal on his return from Barbados, and is therefore also placed on the Board of Longitude.

He returns a report of the watch that is negative, claiming that its "going rate" (the amount of time it gains or loses per day) is due to inaccuracies cancelling themselves out, and refuses to allow it to be factored out when measuring longitude.

Consequently, this first Marine Watch of Harrison's fails the needs of the Board despite the fact that it had succeeded in two previous trials.

Watt had been asked in 1763 to repair a model Newcomen engine belonging to the university.

Even after repair, the engine barely works.

After much experimentation, Watt demonstrates that about three-quarters of the thermal energy of the steam is being consumed in heating the engine cylinder on every cycle.

This energy is wasted because later in the cycle cold water is injected into the cylinder to condense the steam to reduce its pressure.

Thus by repeatedly heating and cooling the cylinder, the engine wastes most of its thermal energy rather than converting it into mechanical energy.

Watt's critical insight, arrived at in May 1765, is to cause the steam to condense in a separate chamber apart from the piston, and to maintain the temperature of the cylinder at the same temperature as the injected steam by surrounding it with a "steam jacket."

Thus very little energy is absorbed by the cylinder on each cycle, making more available to perform useful work.

Watt has a working model later this same year.

Despite a potentially workable design, there are still substantial difficulties in constructing a full-scale engine.

This requires more capital, some of which comes from Black.

More substantial backing comes from John Roebuck, the founder of the celebrated Carron Iron Works near Falkirk, with whom he now forms a partnership.

Roebuck lives at Kinneil House in Bo'ness, during which time Watt works at perfecting his steam engine in a cottage adjacent to the house.

The shell of the cottage, and a very large part of one of his projects, still exist to the rear.

The principal difficulty is in machining the piston and cylinder.

Iron workers of the day are more like blacksmiths than modern machinists, and are unable to produce the components with sufficient precision.

Much capital is spent in pursuing a patent on Watt's invention.

Strapped for resources, Watt is forced to take up employment—first as a surveyor, then as a civil engineer—for the next eight years.

The Stamp Act is passed by Parliament on March 22, 1765 with an effective date of November 1, 1765.

It passes 205–49 in the House of Commons and unanimously in the House of Lords.

The high taxes on lawyers and college students are designed to limit the growth of a professional class in the colonies.

The stamps have to be purchased with hard currency, which is scarce, rather than the more plentiful colonial paper currency.

To avoid draining currency out of the colonies, the revenues are to be expended in America, especially for supplies and salaries of British Army units who are stationed there.

Two features of the Stamp Act involving the courts attract special attention.

The tax on court documents specifically includes courts "exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction."

These type of courts do not currently exist in the colonies and no bishops are currently assigned to the colonies, who would preside over the courts.

Many colonists or their ancestors had fled England specifically to escape the influence and power of such state-sanctioned religious institutions, and they fear that this is the first step to reinstating the old ways in the colonies.

Some Anglicans in the northern colonies are already openly advocating the appointment of such bishops, but they are opposed by both southern Anglicans and the non-Anglicans who make up the majority in the northern colonies.

The Stamp Act allows admiralty courts to have jurisdiction for trying violators, following the example established by the Sugar Act.

However, admiralty courts have traditionally been limited to cases involving the high seas.

The Sugar Act seems to fall within this precedent, but the Stamp Act does not, and the colonists see this as a further attempt to replace their local courts with courts controlled by England.

General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief of forces in British North America, and other British officers who had fought in the French and Indian War, had found it hard to persuade colonial assemblies to pay for quartering and provisioning of troops on the march.

Therefore, he has asked Parliament to do something.

Most colonies had supplied provisions during the war, but the issue is disputed in peacetime.

The Province of New York is their headquarters, because the assembly had passed an Act to provide for the quartering of British regulars, but it had expired on January 2, 1764.

The result is the Quartering Act of 1765, which goes far beyond what Gage had requested.

No standing army had been kept in the colonies before the French and Indian War, so the colonies ask why a standing army is needed after the French had been defeated in battle.

This first Quartering Act is given Royal Assent on May 15, 1765, and provides that Great Britain will house its soldiers in American barracks and public houses, as by the Mutiny Act of 1765, but if its soldiers outnumber the housing available, will quarter them in "inns, livery stables, ale houses, victualing houses, and the houses of sellers of wine and houses of persons selling of rum, brandy, strong water, cider or metheglin", and if numbers require in "uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings."

Colonial authorities are required to pay the cost of housing and feeding these troops.

For Grenville, the first issue is the amount of the tax.

Soon after his announcement of the possibility of a tax, he had told American agents that he was not opposed to the Americans suggesting an alternative way of raising the money themselves.

However, the only other alternative would be to requisition each colony and allow them to determine how to raise their share.

This had never worked before, even during the French and Indian War, and there is no political mechanism in place that will ensure the success of such cooperation.

On February 2, 1765, Grenville meets to discuss the tax with Benjamin Franklin, Jared Ingersoll from New Haven, Richard Jackson, agent for Connecticut, and Charles Garth, the agent for South Carolina (Jackson and Garth are also members of Parliament).

These colonial representatives have no specific alternative to present; they simply suggest that the determination be left to the colonies.

Grenville replies that he wants to raise the money "by means the most easy and least objectionable to the Colonies".

Thomas Whately had drafted the Stamp Act, and he said that the delay in implementation had been "out of Tenderness to the colonies", and that the tax was judged as "the easiest, the most equal and the most certain."

The debate in Parliament begins soon after this meeting.

Petitions submitted by the colonies are officially ignored by Parliament.