After the 1857 rebellion, the Government of India Act transfers rule from the East India Company to the British Crown; the Mughal Empire formally ends.
King Leopold II of Belgium ruled the Congo as a personal possession; its forced-labour rubber regime caused mass deaths until Belgium annexed the territory in 1908.
The anti-foreign Boxer movement besieges Beijing's legation quarter; an Eight-Nation Alliance intervenes and occupies Beijing in 1900.
After Spain cedes the Philippines to the United States, forces of the Philippine Republic fight American rule but are defeated.
The British Empire fought the Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State; the war ended with the Treaty of Vereeniging, after tens of thousands of civilians died in concentration camps.
Six British colonies united to form the Commonwealth of Australia, with Edmund Barton as its first prime minister.
The first Nobel Prizes are awarded on the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death; Wilhelm Röntgen receives the first Nobel Prize in Physics.
Guglielmo Marconi reports receiving a radio signal in Newfoundland transmitted from Cornwall across the Atlantic.
At Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers make the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight.
In German South West Africa (present-day Namibia), German forces suppressed uprisings in a campaign that killed most of the Herero and about half of the Nama people.
Japan defeats the Russian Empire in a war over Manchuria and Korea, the first modern victory of an Asian power over a European one.
Phan Bội Châu organises sending young Vietnamese to study in Japan to prepare for the independence struggle.
Albert Einstein publishes four papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass–energy equivalence.
A revolutionary movement forces the Qajar shah to accept a constitution and establish Iran's first parliament, the Majlis.
Soldiers fire on peaceful workers marching to the Winter Palace, sparking the Russian Revolution of 1905.
Reformist scholars open the Tonkin Free School in Hanoi to promote modern learning and the quốc ngữ script; the French close it within the year.
The Committee of Union and Progress forces Sultan Abdul Hamid II to restore the 1876 constitution, opening the Second Constitutional Era.
The Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange River colonies united as the Union of South Africa, a self-governing dominion of the British Empire.
The Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty takes effect, making Korea a Japanese colony until 1945.
Francisco Madero calls for revolt against Porfirio Díaz, launching a decade-long revolution involving figures such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.
From alpha-particle scattering experiments, Ernest Rutherford proposes that the atom has a small, dense, positively charged nucleus.
Nguyễn Tất Thành (later Hồ Chí Minh) leaves Saigon as a kitchen hand aboard the Amiral Latouche-Tréville, bound for France.
Võ Nguyên Giáp, later commander-in-chief of the Vietnam People's Army, is born in Quảng Bình.
A mutiny in Wuchang triggers the Xinhai Revolution, which spreads across the provinces and brings down the Qing dynasty.
Amid the Xinhai Revolution, Outer Mongolia declares independence and enthrones the Bogd Khan as its ruler.
The Norwegian expedition led by Roald Amundsen becomes the first to reach the geographic South Pole.
Sun Yat-sen is inaugurated as provisional president in Nanjing, founding Asia's first republic.
The South African Native National Congress, forerunner of the ANC, was founded in Bloemfontein to defend the rights of Black Africans.
The last Qing emperor abdicates, ending more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China.
RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage after striking an iceberg; more than 1,500 people die.
Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore becomes the first Asian Nobel laureate, honoured chiefly for Gitanjali.
Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premieres in Paris amid uproar in the audience, becoming a landmark of modernist music.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife are shot dead by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, triggering the crisis that leads to the First World War.
Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, drawing Europe's powers into a global war that lasts until the armistice of 11 November 1918.
The US-built Panama Canal officially opens, linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
During the First World War, Ottoman authorities carry out mass deportations and killings of Armenians, causing roughly a million or more deaths.
The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in the Allies' unsuccessful campaign against the Ottoman Empire; 25 April is now commemorated as Anzac Day.
Albert Einstein presents the field equations of general relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, describing gravity as the curvature of spacetime.
Irish republicans rise in Dublin and proclaim an Irish Republic; the rebellion is put down by British forces after six days.
Britain and France secretly agree to divide the Ottoman Empire's Arab lands into post-war spheres of influence.
With British backing, Sharif Hussein of Mecca launches an uprising against the Ottoman Empire seeking Arab independence.
The Bolshevik Red Army fights the White movement and other forces after the October Revolution; the Bolsheviks emerge victorious.
Protests and mutinies in Petrograd force Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate, ending more than three centuries of Romanov rule.
The US Congress declares war on the German Empire, bringing the United States into World War I on the Allied side.
The British government declares support for a 'national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine, while stating that the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities should not be prejudiced.
The Bolsheviks led by Lenin overthrow the Provisional Government in Petrograd (25 October in the Julian calendar then used in Russia).
An H1N1 influenza pandemic spreads worldwide, killing tens of millions of people, one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
Former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, their children and their retainers are shot by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg.
Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid leader and South Africa's first Black president, was born in the village of Mvezo.
Koreans proclaim independence and stage nationwide peaceful protests against Japanese rule; the movement is suppressed.