1904

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• On 8 February, Japanese troops attack Port Arthur in Russia, starting the Russo-Japanese War (ends 1905). When the Japanese navy sinks the Russian fleet at Tsushima on 27-28 May 1905, it is the century's first decisive defeat of a European power by an Asian one.

• On 8 April, France and Britain sign the Entente Cordiale, an agreement to settle their colonial rivalries in Egypt, Morocco, Newfoundland, Madagascar and Siam.

• On 8 November, Theodore Roosevelt wins the US presidency in his own right.

• The ultraviolet lamp is invented.

• In January, the first performance in Moscow of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's last great naturalistic play The Cherry Orchard (he dies, aged 44, on 2 July).

• In October, 22-year-old Irish writer James Joyce leaves Ireland to escape its cultural provincialism. He begins his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

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