1870–1945
Every story on the clock
The map shows the borders move. These are the stories a year cannot be understood without, each on its own page with a book, and a podcast where there is a good one.
The age of empire1870–1913
Back to the eras- 1870–1911Meiji JapanMeiji Japan rebuilt itself as a modern power in one lifetime, and learned empire from the empires it feared.
- 1870The emperor at SedanFrance's defeat at Sedan let Prussia make a united German Empire, and left a French grievance that lasted until 1918.
- 1876–1878A durbar in a famineA failed monsoon killed millions in India while the Raj, putting markets and budgets first, held back relief.
- 1880–1924The emigrant AtlanticSome twenty million Europeans crossed to America before 1914, building its cities — until it shut the door in 1924.
- 1881–1945Jewish life in EuropeEurope's nine million Jews were a living civilisation; by 1945 six million had been murdered and that world was gone.
- 1884–1885A map of Africa in BerlinIn Berlin, Europe agreed the rules for taking Africa; within thirty years only Ethiopia and Liberia were free.
- 1885–1945The Indian independence movementIndia's national movement grew from polite petitions in 1885 into mass resistance the Raj could jail but not end.
- 1896The hills at AdwaEthiopia defeated an invading European army and stayed independent while almost all the rest of Africa was colonised.
- 1898Morning in Manila BayA war fought over Cuba gave the United States an empire in the Pacific.
- 1899–1902The camps on the veldTo defeat Boer guerrillas, Britain burned farms and herded civilians into camps where tens of thousands died.
- 1905A petition to the TsarWhen troops fired on a peaceful petition in 1905, Russia's autocracy survived — but lost the trust that held it up.
- 1905The fortress at Port ArthurJapan's victory over Russia showed the world that a European empire could lose to an Asian power.
- 1911–1912A bomb in HankouAn accidental bomb set off the revolt that ended two thousand years of Chinese emperors, and opened forty years of struggle over who would rule.
- 1912The road at KumanovoThe Balkan Wars drove the Ottomans out of almost all of Europe and left a larger Serbia that Austria-Hungary feared.
- 1913A woman at the DerbyAfter half a century of petitions and a few years of militancy, women in Britain, America and much of Europe won the vote between 1918 and 1928.
The Great War1914–1918
Back to the eras- 1914A wrong turn in SarajevoA local murder in Sarajevo became a world war in five weeks, as Vienna, Berlin and St. Petersburg each chose to escalate.
- 1914Christmas in the ditchMonths into the war, men in the trenches stopped it themselves for Christmas, and their commands made sure it never happened on that scale again.
- 1914–1918The Great WarThe Great War destroyed four empires and made the world — and the grievances — of the next thirty years.
- 1914The lakes at TannenbergIn the first month Russia invaded faster than Germany had planned and lost an army; the east became a war of movement the west never saw.
- 1914The lamps go out in BelgiumInvading a neutral country to save time brought Britain and its empire into the war.
- 1915–1916GallipoliThe bid to break the stalemate by sea failed; Australians, New Zealanders and Turks each came out of it with a founding story.
- 1915–1916The roads from AnatoliaUnder cover of war, the Ottoman state deported and murdered about a million Armenians, a genocide Turkey still denies.
- 1916Easter in DublinA failed rising became a successful revolution because of how Britain punished it, and then tried to conscript Ireland.
- 1916The SommeThe Somme made attrition a method: over a million men killed, wounded or captured in four and a half months of 1916.
- 1917A war messageAmerica's entry tipped the balance of 1918 and gave it a seat at the peace.
- 1917The sealed trainGermany shipped Lenin into a collapsing Russia; within seven months his party had seized the capital.
- 1918The eleventh hourThe war ended with Germany's army still on foreign soil — fertile ground for the myth that it had been betrayed.
- 1918–1919The other warA pandemic carried on the war's troopships killed more people than the war itself.
Between the wars1919–1938
Back to the eras- 1910–1940Revolutionary MexicoMexico's revolution was the century's first great one, and it ended as a one-party state.
- 1912–1945Imperial Japan's modernsBetween the wars Japan tried party politics, jazz and mass culture, then let the army decide what modern meant.
- 1916–1945Arab nationalismThe Arabs who rose against the Ottomans for independence got British and French mandates instead.
- 1917–1945The Soviet experimentIn the 1920s the Soviet state legalised divorce and abortion, taught millions to read and let the avant-garde loose; Stalin took much of it back.
- 1918–1935Harlem and the Black worldThe Great Migration made Harlem a capital of the Black world, where Garvey, Du Bois and a renaissance of writers took on Jim Crow and empire.
- 1918–1921The war after the revolutionThe Bolsheviks won a civil war that killed millions, and built the Soviet state out of what it left.
- 1919–1937May FourthIn 1919 Chinese students turned anger at Versailles into a movement both of China's rival parties would claim.
- 1919The Hall of MirrorsThe peace that blamed Germany for the war redrew Europe and the Middle East, and left grievances the next war would exploit.
- 1919–1933Weimar BerlinGermany's first democracy was a laboratory of modern culture that could not defend itself.
- 1922The march on RomeMussolini was handed power after a bluff nobody called, and built the first fascist state.
- 1922–1923The quay at SmyrnaOut of the Ottoman defeat Turkey won its own war, and the peace swapped whole peoples by religion.
- 1929The ticker stopsThe 1929 crash began a world depression, deepened by bank failures, gold and tariffs, that made extremists look like answers.
- 1931–1932A railway near MukdenJapan's army staged an incident to seize Manchuria, and the League of Nations could only write a report.
- 1932–1933The harvest that was takenStalin's grain seizures turned Ukraine's harvest into a famine that killed some four million people in 1932–33.
- 1933Nothing to fearRoosevelt took office as America's banks collapsed in March 1933, and the New Deal answered the Depression with a bigger democratic state.
- 1933The legal road to hellHitler came to power legally, invited in by conservatives who thought they could control him.
- 1934–1935The Long MarchDriven from their base by Chiang, China's Communists marched across the country in 1934–35; a tenth arrived, and Mao came out leading them.
- 1935–1936A member of the LeagueWhen Italy invaded Ethiopia, the League's failure showed every dictator that aggression paid.
- 1937A market day in GuernicaThe bombing of a Basque market town became the image of a new kind of war on civilians.
- 1937–1938The fall of NanjingTwo years before Europe's war began, Japan took China's capital, and its army murdered prisoners and civilians on a vast scale.
- 1937–1938The trenches at ButovoIn 1937–38 Stalin's secret police arrested about 1.5 million Soviet citizens and shot some 700,000, the army's commanders among them.
- 1938Peace for our timeBritain and France gave Hitler part of Czechoslovakia to avoid war, and bought only a year.
The Second World War1939–1945
Back to the eras- 1939Poland, first lightGermany and the Soviet Union divided Poland between them — the war in Europe began as a partition.
- 1939–1945The Second World WarThe Second World War was several wars at once, and it ended with America and the Soviet Union as the powers left standing.
- 1940The Battle of BritainBritain's air defence kept it in the war in 1940, when it fought on without an ally left in Europe.
- 1940The Meuse at SedanFrance, thought to have Europe's best army, fell in six weeks to a gamble through the Ardennes.
- 1941BarbarossaHitler's invasion of the Soviet Union opened the largest and deadliest front in history.
- 1941Pearl HarborJapan's strike on Pearl Harbor brought America into the war, and four days later Hitler declared war on it too.
- 1942A villa on the lakeAt Wannsee, officials coordinated the murder of Europe's Jews as a matter of administration.
- 1942–1943StalingradAt Stalingrad a whole German army was destroyed, and the war in the east changed direction for good.
- 1942The fall of SingaporeSingapore's fall in 1942 was the largest surrender in British history, and Britain's authority in Asia never recovered.
- 1943A firestorm in HamburgIn a week of July 1943 British and American bombers burned out much of Hamburg and killed some 37,000 people, half of them in one night.
- 1943Famine in BengalIn 1943 up to three million people starved in Bengal while the empire put the war first.
- 1944The Channel, before dawnThe Normandy landings opened the second front; with the Soviet advance, Germany was crushed between them.
- 1944–1945The ramp at BirkenauAuschwitz was the largest Nazi killing centre: about a million Jews were murdered there, some 320,000 of them from Hungary in eight weeks of 1944.
- 1945A city of cellarsThe Red Army took Berlin street by street; the European war ended in its ruins, with Germany beaten, occupied and soon divided.
- 1945A new kind of lightIn ten days of August 1945 two atomic bombs fell, the Soviet Union invaded and Japan surrendered, and the age of nuclear fear began.
- 1945Three men in a Crimean palaceAt Yalta the Allies planned the peace, but in eastern Europe the lines were where the Red Army already stood.
People
Back to the eras- 1870–1898Otto von BismarckBismarck united Germany through war, then kept Europe's peace with a balance only he could hold.
- 1893–1945Mahatma GandhiGandhi turned non-violent mass disobedience into a political weapon that millions could use against the Raj.
- 1898–1919Rosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg opposed both the war and Lenin's dictatorship, and was murdered for a rising she doubted.
- 1898–1945Winston ChurchillChurchill was wrong about a great deal, and right in 1940, when he kept Britain in the war.
- 1903–1924Vladimir LeninLenin turned a collapsing empire into the first one-party state, and taught the century how to run one.
- 1907–1945Adolf HitlerHitler turned Germany's defeat into a programme of conquest and genocide, and the state carried it out.
- 1907–1945Joseph StalinStalin built a superpower out of a peasant country, and killed millions of his own people doing it.
- 1908–1938Mustafa Kemal AtatürkAtatürk turned the defeated heart of the Ottoman Empire into a secular Turkish republic, by war and by decree.
- 1911–1945Chiang Kai-shekChiang Kai-shek held China in the war against Japan for eight years, and lost the civil war that followed.
- 1911–1935T. E. LawrenceLawrence fought for an Arab freedom his own government had already traded away.
- 1912–1924Woodrow WilsonWilson tried to remake the world on principle in 1919, and lost the peace at home.
- 1916–1933Faisal ibn HusseinFaisal led the Arab revolt north, lost his kingdom in Damascus to France, and built Iraq as its king under British rule.
- 1916–1945Haile SelassieHaile Selassie became the face of a nation abandoned by the League, and of African independence.
- 1919–1945Benito MussoliniMussolini invented fascism and built the fascist one-party state Hitler copied, then took Italy into a war that destroyed his regime.
- 1919–1945Mao ZedongMao turned China's Communists into a peasant army, came out of the Long March leading them, and built in Yan'an the party that would take China.
- 1921–1945Franklin D. RooseveltRoosevelt pulled America through the Depression and into the war, and designed the peace he did not live to see.