What was happening in 1914 before World War I?

The decade before 1914 saw revolutions in China and Mexico, war in the Balkans, and colonial revolts across Africa and Asia — the world was already in upheaval.

Explore the pre-war world →

The years before 1914 are usually remembered only as a countdown to one war. The map tells a fuller story: the world was already convulsing, far from Sarajevo. The decade opened with the Russo-Japanese War, whose Battle of Mukden in 1905 was among the largest land battles fought before World War I, ended by the Treaty of Portsmouth that September. Its outcome — an Asian power defeating a European empire — sent shockwaves well beyond the battlefield.

Revolutions followed across the globe. The Xinhai Revolution erupted in China in 1911; the Battle of Yangxia, fought at Hankou and Hanyang from October to November of that year, was its largest engagement and helped bring down the Qing dynasty. In the same year the Mexican Revolution was raging, with the Battle of Ciudad Juárez (1911) toppling the old regime, while in North Africa the Battle of Tripoli marked Italy's invasion of Ottoman Libya. Empires were being tested everywhere at once.

By 1912 the violence had reached Europe's doorstep through the First Balkan War, with battles like Kumanovo and Lule Burgas pushing the Ottomans out of most of their European territory — the immediate prelude to the crisis of 1914. Meanwhile colonial rule provoked armed resistance far away: the Maji Maji War in German East Africa (1905) and the Bambatha Rebellion in Natal (1906). Read the decade across the whole map and World War I looks less like a sudden rupture and more like the convergence of pressures that had been building, worldwide, for years.

More guides

Events from Wikipedia/Wikidata (CC-BY-SA); boundaries from OpenHistoricalMap (ODbL). Spotted a mistake? Email [email protected].