| 1730–1807 | UK [newspapers] | The Daily Advertiser is launched in London, England. With its dependence on advertisements, this may be regarded as the first modern newspaper. |
| 1750–1777 | Portugal [law and government] | Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, the Marquis of Pombal, virtual ruler of Portugal during the reign of José I, carries out a series of extensive reforms aimed at breaking the power of the nobility and revitalizing Portugal's finances, industry, agriculture, and education system. |
| 1766–1777 | UK [canals] | English engineer James Brindley begins work on the Grand Trunk Canal linking the Trent and Mersey rivers. It crosses the Pennines by the Harecastle tunnel and will establish a water route between the North Sea and the Irish Sea. |
| 1770–1780 | America [statistics and demography] | The estimated population of the American colonies is 2,780,369 including 575,420 black slaves. |
| 1775 | UK [work and unemployment] | King George III orders women and young children out of the British coal and salt mines. Many children were under eight years old but worked the same ten to twelve-hour days as the women. |
| 1775 | Rome [Catholicism] | The Italian churchman Giannangelo Braschi is elected Pope Pius VI. He is pope until 1799. |
| 1775 | France [plays] | The play The Barber of Seville by the French writer Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is produced in Paris, France, after two years' prohibition on the grounds that it was seditious. |
| 1775 | Ireland, England [plays] | The comedy The Rivals, by the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, is first performed, in London, England. |
| 1775 | France [roads] | French engineer Pierre-Marie-Jérôme Trésaguet describes his three-tier method of road building which separates the hard-stone surface from the rubble base and provides good drainage. |
| 22 January 1775 | France [births and deaths] | André Marie Ampère, French physicist who founded the science of electromagnetism, born in Lyon, France (–1836). |
| 23 March 1775 | England [births and deaths] | J(oseph) M(allord) W(illiam) Turner, English Romantic landscape painter, born in London, England (–1851). |
| 19 April 1775 | America [American Revolution] | Military action in the American Revolution begins with the skirmishes between colonials and British forces under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts; the British force withdraws to Boston. |
| 17 June 1775 | America, UK [American Revolution] | British troops under General Sir William Howe defeat American colonial forces commanded by Colonel William Prescott at Bunker Hill, near Boston, Massachusetts, but sustain 1,150 casualties against 411 American casualties. |
| 25 July 1775 | Pacific [exploration] | English explorer James Cook returns to England after a second voyage in the South Seas, having completed the first successful west–east circumnavigation of the world. |
| 16 December 1775 | England [births and deaths] | Jane Austen, English novelist, born in Steventon, Hampshire, England (–1817). |
