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In November 1871, journalist Henry Morton Stanley located the missing missionary David Livingstone in the wilds of Africa. Yet the famous meeting was only the beginning of Stanley's tumultuous career as an explorer. -
In 1877, Benjamin Disraeli, Conservative Prime Minister, had Queen Victoria proclaimed as Empress of India. India was already under crown control after 1858, but this title was a gesture to link the monarchy with the empire further and bind India more closely to Britain. -
The British military occupied Egypt in 1882 to protect financial interests in the country, culminating in a violent war. Britain won, restored the Khedival authority in Cairo, and established a 'veiled protectorate' over Ottoman-Egypt until the First World War. -
On February 5, 1885, Belgian King Leopold II established the Congo Free State by brutally seizing the African landmass as his personal possession. Rather than control the Congo as a colony, as other European powers did throughout Africa, Leopold privately owned the region. -
In 1884, the Berlin Conference was convened to discuss African colonization, with the aim of setting up international guidelines for making claims to African land to avoid conflict between European powers. -
With the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, all the states that make up present day Africa were parceled out among the colonial powers within a few years after the meeting. Lines of longitude and latitude, rivers and mountain ranges were pressed into service as borders separating the colonies. -
Isaac Peral is often considered the inventor of the submarine but he did not create the first submergible vessel: he is credited with the first submarine to be powered by electricity and to incorporate underwater torpedo-firing facilities. In this sense he might be better called the "father of the modern submarine". -
The war grew out of conflict between the two countries for supremacy in Korea. Korea had long been China's most important client state, but its strategic location opposite the Japanese islands and its natural resources of coal and iron attracted Japan's interest. -
The Second Boer War was a conflict between the United Kingdom and the founders of the independent republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, in north-eastern South Africa. -
When the Boxer Rebellion reached Beijing's (Peking's) foreign legations (embassies) in the spring of 1900, more violence was unleashed against foreigners. They burned Christian churches, killed Chinese Christians, and violently intimidated any Chinese official who attempted to suppress their revolt. -
The Japanese won the war, and the Russians lost. The war happened because the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan disagreed over who should get parts of Manchuria and Korea. The war was fought mostly on the Liaodong Peninsula and Mukden, the seas around Korea, Japan, and the Yellow Sea. -
The Treaty of Saint Petersburg of 1825 or the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1825, officially the Convention Concerning the Limits of Their Respective Possessions on the Northwest Coast of America and the Navigation of the Pacific Ocean, defined the boundaries between Russian America and British claims