• William Henry Harrison, 9th President of the United States.
• English physicist Thomas Young.
• Swiss economist Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi.

Scottish Botanist Robert Brown.
• German composer Johann Joachim Quantz.
• Prince Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar von Metternich, architect of Post-Napoleonic Europe, in Koblenz.

• The Trouble with Tea
• The British Parliament takes some control of India away from the corrupt British East India Company with a Regulating Act asserting sovereignty over India and laying out its governance.
• The East India Company gains a monopoly over opium production and founds a bank in Canton with the profits.
• (May) In order to keep the East India Company from going bankrupt, Parliament passes the Tea Act:
• authorizing the sale of half a million pounds of tea to the American colonies free of duties.  For the Company, that is.
• Allowing the Company to sell tea only through selected merchants, effectively setting up monopolies.
• (December) The Sons of Liberty, disguised as Indians, board ships in Boston Harbor and toss the ships' cargo of tea into the harbor in order to protest the British tax on tea. (the Boston Tea Party)
• Pope Clement XIV bows to the pressure of the Bourbon monarchs and issues an order suppressing the Jesuit Order.
• The first assembly on Prince Edward Island convenes.
• Yemelyan Pugachev escapes from Imperial Russian authorities.  Posing as Emperor Peter III (who had been murdered in 1762), he leads a rebellion consisting of serfs, Cossacks, and clergymen. He lays siege to the city of Orenburg in the Ural Mountains.
• An earthquake destroys the capital of Guatemala, Santiago de Guatemala, (now called Antigua Guatemala).
• Captain James Cook's ship, the Resolution, is the first to cross the Antarctic Circle.  The fabulous southern continent is shown not to exist.

1772 - 1773 - 1774