General
Population: 1.56 Billion*
- Entertainment: Writers include Shaw (Arms and the Man), Marx (posthumously), Knut Hamsun, Gerhart Hauptman, George du Maurier, G and W Grossmith,
Anthony Hope, Kipling (The Jungle Book), George Moore, SB Weyman, Zola, Benjamin Kidd, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (trade unions),
Pollock and Maitland,
Music includes Dvorák, Debussy, Sibelius composes Finlandia, Massenet, Richard Strauss
Art includes Aubrey Beardsley creates drawings to Oscar Wilde's "Salome", Matthew Corbett paints "Morning Glory", Gustave Caillebotte's collection of impressionist paintings rejected by the Musee Luxembourg in Paris,
Degas paints "Femme a sa toilette"
- Politics: Third part of Marx's Das Kapital published posthumously
- Science: Yersin and Kitasato independently discover plague bacillus
Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay discover argon
Dubois publishes on Java Man
2-foot dragonflies discovered suggesting higher oxygen content in carboniferous
- Sports: Baron de Coubertin founds committee to organize modern Olympic games
- Technology: Louis Lumiere invents the cinematograph
Berliner uses horizontal gramophone disc instead of cylinder as record for sound reproduction
- Transportation: First motorcycle sold
- Deaths: Tsar Alexander III, Freedom fighter Lajos Kossuth, Historian James Anthony Froude, Physicist Hermann von Helmholtz,
Composer Anton Rubinstein, Poet Christina Rossetti, French president Sadi Carnot, Physicist August Kundt, Composer Emmanuel Chabrier,
Actor Steele Mackaye, Author Robert L. Stevenson, Physicist Heinrich Hertz, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Africa
- Dahomey: (Benin) French set up protectorate
- Matabeleland: Starr Jameson completes occupation of Matabeleland (Rhodesia)
- Rwanda: Germany takes
- Uganda: Britain occupation
Americas
- Cuba: US tariffs harm economy
Asia
- General: Sino-Japanese (Chinese-Japanese) War begins as Korean uprising against China to 1895
Steamship Kow Shing torpedoed by British killing 1450
- China: Japan wins victories at Port Arthur and Yalu River
Canton and Hong Kong plague kills 80-100,000
- India: Plague outbreak kills 12 million
- Korea: War on China
- Tibet: Swedish explorer Sven Hedin travels
Europe
- General: Franco-Russian military alliance fails to be renewed
German-Russian commercial treaty
- France: Anti-Semitism increases with Dreyfus case - arrested for treason and accused of spying for Germany - deported to Devil's Island French Guiana
MF Sadi Carnot assassinated by an Italian anarchist
Joseph Vacher the French Ripper kills at least 11 men and women – later guillotined
- Germany: Prince Hohenlohe becomes German Chancellor
- Great Britain: End of Gladstone's third reign as Prime Minister
Home Rule for Scotland
Death duties (inheritance tax) introduced in Britain
- Russia: Death of Alexander III - Tsar Nicholas II begins reign
Middle East
Pacific
1894 
