1746

January–March

• January 8 - The Young Pretender Charles Edward Stuart occupies Stirling.
• January 17 - Battle of Falkirk Muir: British Government forces are defeated by Jacobite forces.
• February 1 - Jagat Singh II, the ruler of the Mewar Kingdom, inaugurates his Lake Palace on the island of Jag Niwar in Lake Pichola, in what is now the state of Rajasthan in northwest India
• February 19 - Brussels, at the time part of the Austrian Netherlands, surrenders to France's Marshal Maurice de Saxe.
• February 19 - Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, issues a proclamation offering an amnesty to participants in the Jacobite rebellion, directing them that they can avoid punishment if they turn their weapons in to their local Presbyterian church
• March 10 - Zakariya Khan Bahadur, the Mughal Empire's viceroy administering Lahore, orders the massacre of the city's Sikh people

  April–June

• April 16 - The Battle of Culloden in Scotland, the final pitched battle fought on British soil, brings an end to the Jacobite rising of 1745.
• May 27 - The three Scottish leaders of the Jacobite uprising— the Earl of Kilmarnock, Lord Balmerino, and Lord Lovat— are imprisoned for treason in the Tower of London, where they are held by the British government until their execution. Boyd and Balmerino are beheaded the following year, while Fraser is not put to death until 1747.
• June 16 - Battle of Piacenza: Austrian forces defeat French and Spanish troops.
• June 18 - Samuel Johnson is contracted to write his A Dictionary of the English Language.
• June 29 - Catherine of Ricci is canonized.

  July–September

• July 3 - Father Joachim Royo, the last of the five Spanish Catholic missionaries to Fuzhou in China, is captured by Chinese authorities after having spent three decades defying orders to not evangelize He and three fellow priests, are put to death two years later, on October 28, 1748.
• July 9 - King Philip V of Spain dies after a reign of more than 45 years. His oldest living son succeeds him as King Ferdinand VI
• August 1 - The wearing of the kilt is banned in Scotland by the Dress Act.
• August 18 - Two of the four rebellious Scottish lords, Earl of Kilmarnock and Lord Balmerinoch, are beheaded in the Tower of London.
• September 20 - Bonnie Prince Charlie flees to the Isle of Skye from Arisaig, after the unsuccessful Jacobite rising of 1745, marked by the Prince's Cairn on the banks of Loch nan Uamh.

  October–December

• October 11 - War of the Austrian Succession - Battle of Rocoux: The French army defeat the allied Austrian, British, Hanoveran and Dutch army in Rocourt.
• October 22 - The College of New Jersey is founded in Princetown, New Jersey. In 1896, it is renamed Princeton University.
• October 28 - An earthquake demolishes Lima and Callao, in Peru.
• November 4 - Anwaruddin Khan, the Nawab of the Arcot State in South India, is driven back by the Captain Louis Paradis of the French Army after he and 10,000 soldiers attempt to drive the French back out of Madras.
• December 5 - Rallied by a teenage boy, Giovanni Battista Perasso, the citizens of the Republic of Genoa rise up against the Austrian occupying troops and the collaborator Military Governor, the Genoese Marquis of Botta d'Adorno. By December 11, the Austrian soldiers are driven from the Italian city-state, but return a few months later

  Date unknown

• Eva Ekeblad reports her discovery, of how to make flour and alcohol from potatoes, to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
• The town of Vilkovo is founded.
• Gabriel Johnston, British Governor of the Province of North Carolina, moves to New Bern, the province's largest. New Bern replaces Edenton as the capital of North Carolina until Raleigh is established in 1792).
• Charles Batteux's Les beaux-arts réduits à un même principe is published in Paris, putting forward for the first time the idea of "les beaux arts": "the fine arts".