March 5 - A Royal Navy fleet with 16,000 men departs Britain from Spithead and sets sail toward Cuba in order to seize strategic Spanish Empire possessions in the Americas.
March 10 - Jean Calas, a 68 year old French merchant convicted unjustly of murdering his son because of religious differences, is brutally executed on orders of the Parliament of Toulouse. After his legs and hips are broken and crushed, Calas is tortured on the breaking wheel, to remain "in pain and repentance for his crimes and misdeeds, for as long as it shall please God to keep him alive."
March 17 - The first Saint Patrick's Day Parade in New York City takes place in lower Manhattan, inaugurating an annual tradition; the Ancient Order of the Hibernians organization later becomes the sponsor of the event, which attracts as many a 300,000 marchers in some years.
March 20 - Innovative publisher Samuel Farley launches the weekly newspaper The American Chronicle, the seventh in New York City.
April 5 - France issues a new ordinance requiring all black and mixed-race Frenchmen to register their identity information with the offices of the Admiralty Court, upon the advice of Guillaume Poncet de la Grave, adviser to King Louis XV. The new rule, which requires both free and enslaved blacks and mulattoes to list data including their age, surname, purpose for which they are residing in France, whether they have been baptized as Christians, where they emigrated from in Africa and the name of the ship upon which they arrived. Previously, the Declaration of 1738 required slave-owners to register their slaves, but placed no requirement on free people.
May 26 - Dissatisfied with the progress of the French and Indian War, King George III dismisses his Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, and replaces him with his son's tutor, Tory politician John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. The Bute ministry lasts less than a year before Stuart's dismissal in 1763.
June 8 - Cherokee Indian war chief Ostenaco and his two aides, Standing Turkey and Pouting Pigeon, are received by King George III. They had arrived three days earlier at Plymouth on the British frigate Epreuvre as guests of the Timberlake Expedition of Henry Timberlake, to discuss terms of peace with the British government.
June 24 - Battle of Wilhelmsthal: The Anglo-Hanoverian army of Ferdinand of Brunswick defeats the French forces in Westphalia. The British commander Lord Granby distinguishes himself.
July–September
July 9 - Catherine II becomes empress of Russia after planning the overthrown of her husband, the Tsar Peter III. The incipient Russo-Prussian alliance falls apart, but Russia does not rejoin the war.
* Empress Go-Sakuramachi succeeds to the throne of Japan upon the death of her brother, the Emperor Momozono. She reigns for eight years before abdicating on January 9, 1771.
December 4 - Less than six months after becoming Russia's Empress, Catherine the Great announces that almost all foreigners are welcome to travel to and settle in Russia, and waives previous requirements that new residents must be members of the Russian Orthodox Church; however, the manifesto adds the phrase kromye Zhydov - "except the Jews".
December 22 - Catherine follows the waiver of religious requirement for Russian immigration with a 190-word invitation, translated into various European languages, that invites Europeans to build settlements along arable, but undeveloped, land in southern Russia along the Volga River; when the invitation attracts little notice, she follows on July 22 with a longer manifesto promising free travel expenses and a written guarantee of rights.
Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract and Emile, or On Education are published in Amsterdam and The Hague respectively, and in Rousseau's native Republic of Geneva and in Paris they are prohibited and publicly burned.
James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's architectural treatise Antiquities of Athens is published.
Approximate date of the foundation of Zubarah on the northwestern shore of the Qatari Peninsula, by Shaikh Mohamed bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, who assumes the chieftainship of the city state and gains authority over the Arab tribes in the area.
