Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1900

The world in AD 1900

By the Our Earth's History editorial team · Researched and written with AI assistance, checked against the sources below · How we make it

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TL;DR — In 1900 Britain was fighting the Boer republics, an international army relieved the legations in Beijing, Paris held a world’s fair, and Australia’s six colonies got one constitution.

The world of 1900 was run from a few capitals. Britain had close to 500,000 troops in South Africa against Boer commandos that South African History Online puts at 27,000 men. In China the Boxers, backed by the Empress Dowager Cixi, held the foreign legations in Beijing under siege until a multinational force marched in on August 15. Paris opened its Exposition Universelle on April 14 and, by the count in the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s chronicle, drew 47 million visitors; the first line of the Paris Métro opened on July 19. The United States went onto the gold standard on March 14, and on September 1 a new transatlantic cable carried telegrams between Kaiser Wilhelm II and President William McKinley. In Iran, Ethiopia, Tonga and the Ottoman lands, rulers who were not European still held their thrones.

Africa

The South African Republic had declared war on Britain on October 11, 1899, and by mid-1900 the British had relieved Kimberley (February 15) and Ladysmith, taken Bloemfontein (March 13), Johannesburg (June 1) and Pretoria (June 5), and, on May 28, declared the Orange Free State a British colony. From July the Boers turned to guerrilla war, and Lord Roberts’ declaration of September 19 that the war was over changed nothing on the ground; South African History Online counts more than 22,000 British dead, more than 34,000 Boers and more than 15,000 black South Africans by the peace of 1902. In the Horn, Menelik II had beaten an Italian army at Adwa in early 1896; the Library of Congress country study says that by 1900 he controlled most of present-day Ethiopia, had made Addis Ababa a permanent capital, and had licensed a French company to build a railroad to Djibouti.

West Asia

The Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) had ruled as an autocrat since the war with Russia of 1877–78 and the Treaty of Berlin that followed it; the Heilbrunn Timeline records that his opponents, the Young Turks, restored parliamentary government in the revolution of 1908–9. The Caucasus was by then mostly Russian. In Iran the Qajar shah Mozaffar al-Din was in the middle of the negotiations that Encyclopaedia Iranica traces from the French mining reports of 1892 to the concession he signed with William Knox D’Arcy on May 28, 1901: 60 years of exclusive rights to oil, gas and asphalt over the whole country except five northern provinces, which Russia insisted be left out, in return for 20,000 pounds in cash, 20,000 pounds in shares and 16 percent of profits.

Europe

Germany’s civil code came into force on January 1, and on June 12 the Reichstag passed the second naval law by 201 votes to 103, a program that the museum chronicle says was meant to double the high-seas fleet by 1917; a census on December 1 counted 56,345,014 Germans. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin flew his first airship over Lake Constance on July 2. In Paris the fair ran the second Olympic Games from May 24 to October 28 with 1,344 competitors from 22 countries, 12 of them women, and on June 2 an amnesty law ended the remaining prosecutions of the Dreyfus affair. King Umberto I of Italy was shot by an anarchist on July 29, and on Crete Arthur Evans began digging at Knossos on March 23.

East Asia

Secretary of State John Hay had sent his first Open Door note on September 6, 1899, asking the powers with spheres of influence in China to keep trade open to all; on July 3, 1900, with the legations under siege, he circulated a second note on China’s “territorial and administrative integrity.” The German minister Klemens von Ketteler was shot dead in a Beijing street on June 20, and the relief force entered the city on August 15. Japan had had a constitution since 1889 and, according to Columbia’s Asia for Educators, had fought the war of 1894–95 with China over control of Korea and taken Taiwan as its first colony. Korea’s king Gojong had adopted the reign name Gwangmu on August 16, 1897, and been crowned emperor at the new Hwangudan altar in Seoul on October 12 of that year, a ceremony the National Institute of Korean History describes from the reports of the Tongnip Sinmun.

South Asia

India was governed from Calcutta by George Curzon, governor-general from 1899 to 1905, whose partition of Bengal in 1905 would set off agitation in the streets and the press and turn the Congress toward open opposition. The Indian National Congress, founded in Bombay in 1885 by 73 delegates on the suggestion of the retired civil servant A. O. Hume, had by 1900 become an all-India organization; the Library of Congress country study calls its early gains meager and notes that it had failed to attract Muslims, many of whom looked instead to the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College that Sayyid Ahmad Khan had founded at Aligarh in 1875.

Central Asia

Russian rule in Turkestan took the form it would keep until 1917 in 1899, when, according to Encyclopaedia Iranica, the governorate-general at Tashkent was fixed at five regions, Syr Darya, Fergana, Samarkand, Semirech’e and Transcaspia, with serving generals as governors. Bukhara and Khiva survived as khanates under Russian control: the amir Abd al-Ahad (r. 1885–1910) traveled to Russia every year and was received at court, a Russian Political Agency had sat in Bukhara since 1888, and the Amu Darya had been Russia’s customs border since 1895. Cotton was remaking the economy; Iranica records that American varieties, introduced in the early 1880s, covered twice the acreage of local cotton by 1889 and that Central Asia soon supplied half of Russia’s needs, with Fergana growing about two thirds of the crop.

The Americas

In November the United States re-elected William McKinley, 292 electoral votes to 155 for William Jennings Bryan, with Theodore Roosevelt as vice president; the National Archives notes that McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, and died eight days later. The country had adopted the gold standard on March 14. Brazil was governed by Manuel Ferraz de Campos Sales (1898–1902), a spokesman for the coffee planters of São Paulo; the Library of Congress country study says Brazil grew 75 percent of the world’s coffee, that prices kept falling as competition grew, and that the government devalued the currency against the British pound, which raised the cost of imports and cut its own customs revenue.

Oceania

The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act became law when Queen Victoria signed it on July 9, 1900, after referendums in five colonies between June 1898 and September 1899; Western Australia voted on July 31, 1900, three weeks after the Act had passed, which is why the Act left the date of inauguration to a royal proclamation. The Museum of Australian Democracy records that women could vote in those referendums only in South Australia and Western Australia, and that a common policy to restrict Chinese immigration was among the strongest arguments for federation. In the islands, the Heilbrunn Timeline says that the Hawaiian monarchy had been deposed in 1893, that the United States and Germany divided Samoa in 1899, and that by 1900 Tonga was the only substantial independent state left in Polynesia; Germany set up its Samoan protectorate on February 17, 1900.

Sources

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Our Earth's History. (2026, September 21). The world in AD 1900. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1900/
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Our Earth's History. “The world in AD 1900.” Our Earth's History, September 21, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1900/.
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