Russia’s reform era ended in 1881, after which highly conservative, even repressive, policies went into effect in most quarters. The Ministry of Finance, however, maintained a commitment to change. The resultant tension was no small factor in the ultimately revolutionary impact of Russian industrialization, as Russia tried to combine industrial dynamics with a stagnant political context and, even then, had to contend with resistant conservatives who objected to the social danger of continued industrialization. Nevertheless, vigorous economic policies were sufficient to propel growth despite the political recalcitrance. The minister of finance during the 1890s, Serge Witte, was a genuine economic planner of a type that rarely had been seen in the Russian bureaucracy at the time. Witte devoted his great talents to the stabilization of Russian finance. Among his goals for the country were the acquisition of a considerable gold reserve, the rapid growth of railroads, and the promotion of heavy industry.

Witte’s background was as a railroad official, and he advocated rapid additions to the Russian network. Mileage doubled between 1895 and 1905, the additions including almost the whole of a line across Siberia that opened the vast resources of this region to industrial use. In 1860 Russia had boasted less than 700 miles of railroads, but by 1894 the total was already 21,000 miles, and by 1900 it had soared to over 36,000. Private companies, working under government concessions, did much of the work, but after 1880, state control increased. Most new lines were built and operated directly by the government. Some private lines were purchased; the rest were strictly supervised. …

The Russian government assumed an unusually extensive role in investment banking. Private banks, though they were virtually unknown before the reform period, did exist; the first corporate commercial bank was founded in 1864, and the number of institutions grew steadily thereafter. In addition, the government operated not only a state bank for commerce but also a number of other special credit institutions. Regularization of Russia’s monetary system was another crucial government contribution. Russia’s paper money had been nearly worthless in foreign exchange during the 1850s. Gradually the gold backing of Russian currency was increased, so the ruble became more stable and more open to international trade. Further, as part of improvements in commercial law, the government facilitated the formation of joint stock companies, or corporations. Only eighty corporations had existed in the whole of Russia before 1860. From 1861 to 1873, 3,547 new companies were formed, and this trend accelerated in later decades. Finally, the government enacted high tariffs on industrial products, protecting nascent Russian industry and encouraging still more manufacturing.

A key ingredient in Russia’s early industrial revolution, along with increasingly focused government planning and railway development, was foreign entrepreneurship, from which Russia gained much-needed capital and technical knowledge. … West European industrialists were quite aware of Russia’s vast potential. The huge population, though largely impoverished, presented a tempting market to target. Still more obviously, the rich reserves of coal and iron begged for rapid exploitation. There were clear profits to be made, potentially at higher yield rates than in the more crowded industrial fields of western Europe. Foreign capital…constituted at least 20 percent of all capital invested before the 1890s and then began to expand even further, accounting by 1914 for a full 47 percent of all corporate investment in the nation. Because the government was not actually pumping much funding directly into industry—even railroad construction commanded only about 5 percent of the total budget—the west European component effectively compensated both for Russia’s poverty and for the state’s commitment to wide-ranging military and bureaucratic programs that strained its resources. …

West European activities spread across Russia’s industrial map. A number of French and Belgian metallurgical firms set up Russian branches. A French steelmaker, Eugene Verdie, established a steel company in Russian Poland in 1877. … Allgemeine Elektrizitaets Gesellschaft and Siemens, the two great German electrical firms, dominated the same industry in Russia through wholly owned subsidiaries; the Westinghouse company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, operated as well, through a French subsidiary. German companies were also active in textiles, sometimes in partnership with Russians or Poles. French and Belgians joined the textiles parade as well; the Artificial Silk Company of Myszkov, for example, was founded with a link to Brussels in 1911 and claimed an improved process for treating cellulose and producing rayon. …Finally, Western engineers conducted a number of operations in Russia, for example in shipyard design…. 

Not surprisingly, failures and disputes in Russia were common, and some foreigners pulled out after extensive problems with their workforce or clashes with local property owners, deriving from the foreigners’ unfamiliarity with Russian property law. Foreign managers were themselves not always of top quality, and mistakes in equipment installation or business calculations were frequent…. 

A number of individual Russians exploited new industrial opportunities from the 1860s onward. Certain groups, such as the Old Believers, a religious minority that had clung to older Orthodox traditions and gained state disfavor in the eighteenth century, provided disproportionate numbers of entrepreneurs. As in western Europe earlier, minority status was often a spur to seeking achievement in this new field. 

Exploitation of Russia’s iron mines and coalfields began slowly in the 1850s, pioneered by individual Western industrialists. Coal deposits in the Donets district of south Russia had been discovered late in the eighteenth century, but there was no extensive mining until after 1850—the effective beginning of a modern coal-mining industry in the nation. Oil was discovered in the Caucasus around 1870, and a growing petroleum industry took shape soon thereafter. By 1900, Russia was second in the world in production of petroleum, supplying about one-fourth the total. Heavy industry in general grew rapidly. During the 1890s the number of industrial companies grew by a full 216 percent. Oil production rose 132 percent; pig iron 190 percent; coal 131 percent; manufactured iron 116 percent; and cotton manufactures 76 percent. Overall industrial growth rates, held at 6 percent per year during the late 1880s, soared to 8 percent during the 1890s and then resumed a 6 percent level after 1908. …

By 1914 there was no question that Russia had passed through a first industrialization phase. It had concentrated particularly on heavy industry because of native resources, foreign interest, and the government’s military needs. The military emphasis helped generate a substantial number of large factories and encouraged relative neglect of the consumer-goods sector despite the growth in textiles and other light industries. Technological development has also been impressive, in part because of the input from abroad. Expansion of the number of trained Russian engineers had helped maintain the pace of change; the availability of skilled workers grew, though it lagged somewhat behind the levels in western Europe and the United States.…Overall, rapid urbanization rates paralleled the spurts of industrial growth around 1900 and resembled the patterns in Germany or Britain a half century or more before. …

Russia is the only nation to have experienced massive political revolution after starting a successful industrialization effort. Its working class played major roles both in the Revolution of 1905 and then in the great uprising of 1917, in which workers’ councils, or soviets, formed the backbone of the revolutionary effort. Russian workers became unusually successful at expressing moral outrage. Despite the substantial internal differences in most of the industrial working groups—urban artisans, workers in heavy industry, more isolated coal miners, and less skilled and often largely female labor forces in textile factories—a sense of class consciousness emerged by the early twentieth century. Workers in many Western countries had felt some of the grievances the Russian workers articulated; a few comparable outpourings formed a labor ingredient in the revolutions of 1848 in France and Germany. But industrial workers as part of a sustained, successful revolutionary effort constituted a first, and the phenomenon has never recurred in this fashion anywhere.

The rapidly growing Russian working class faced many material problems. Child labor was widely used and abused in some cotton factories. The emancipation of the serfs, combined with substantial population growth, unleashed a flood of potential urban workers, and wages in many early factories were quite low in consequence. Moscow industrialists, slower to mechanize than their colleagues in St. Petersburg but able to draw from a densely populated rural hinterland, compensated for their shortcomings through cheap labor. Factories in the Urals, where traditional heavy industry had already attracted many workers, paid low wages. To be sure, places that had to recruit new workers, like St. Petersburg or the growing Donets area, offered high pay at least to a skilled minority. Even in these regions, however, conditions were worsened by employer imposition of company stores or shoddy worker barracks. Housing conditions in factory centers were typically crowded, and a stark iron bedstead with a straw mattress was the only furnishing. Housing in the rapidly growing cities deteriorated as construction failed to keep pace, and foul sanitary conditions added to worker woes. Many employers reduced pay by arbitrary fines. Safety conditions were dreadful; textile factories were dusty, chemical works filled with noxious fumes. Hours of work were long, ranging up to fourteen a day. Family life was often disrupted. Many male workers left their families back in their villages as they wandered in search of temporary factory work. Considerable use of women in textiles and other industries cut into family time. Sexual habits loosened. Workers with some experience in the factories began to engage more commonly in sexual intercourse before marriage, and working class attitudes toward sexuality—particularly for men—relaxed traditional peasant standards. Finally, there was the new work regime itself to come to terms with. Russian peasant labor had not been joyous, but the pace and regimen of the factories came as a tremendous shock. 

Workers reacted to their new environment in many ways. Changing jobs and leaving factory centers altogether to return to the countryside were endemic. Many companies worried about the long absence of workers for four or five months in the summer. Drinking, already a popular pastime among the Russian peasant masses, often increased in a group that had few other regular leisure outlets. The unusual foreign involvement in Russian industrialization played some role in stimulating grievances beyond the levels prevailing earlier in the industrializing West. The privileges of foreign workers often drew attack. In 1900, after a mutual name-calling incident, two hundred workers burned all the buildings and possessions of sixty thoroughly frightened Belgian workers at a glass factory. Western managers were an obvious target for some labor leaders, who associated foreignness with exploitation.…

Organizations among industrial workers began in the 1870s, though there had been important strikes even before then. Unions in Odessa and St. Petersburg were broken up by the police. A great textile strike occurred in 1878, and strikes began to pepper the industrial landscape. Many resulted in arrests and trials, but these, in turn, publicized the hardships of factory life and spread a message of potential liberation. The government issued a new factory law in 1866 to protect workers from unsafe conditions, but it also reaffirmed the prohibition on worker organizations and increased the penalties for striking. Employer pressure brought a softening of the factory law in 1890, but workers were gaining new ground. By the 1890s Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and other Marxist leaders were spreading socialist doctrines in the cities, forming the Social Democratic Workers Party in 1898. The economic slump after 1900 caused widespread unemployment and new unrest, including strikes in many centers.

From this context emerged the general strike of 1905, triggered by Russia’s loss to Japan in the 1904 war. Unions, or soviets, were established in many factory centers. Workers briefly won the vote and the legality of strikes for economic (but not political) goals. Employer resistance stiffened, however, creating growing class antagonism. The government banned the Marxist party, jailing or exiling many leaders. Workers were briefly cowed, but a new and more determined strike wave resumed in 1912. Several strikes led to brutal confrontations with police and many arrests and injuries. When the hardships of World War I added still greater incentive, workers were ready to rebel in 1917. Again the soviets formed, and this time they served as the basis for the new communist regime headed by Lenin, which overturned the short-lived middle-class government that had initially replaced the czar. The world’s most genuine working-class revolution had triumphed.

Japan was in many ways an unlikely candidate for a quick response to the new industrial challenge of western Europe and the United States. The nation, long isolated, faced many problems in trying to comprehend the West, even as it began to realize that some imitation of Western ways was essential (among them, of course, an industrial revolution). Japan…saw the centrality of Western technology early on.… They also realized the importance of science in Western education and began to incorporate it into Japanese training fairly rapidly, jettisoning Confucian traditionalism, though not the larger Confucian emphasis on group harmony and devotion to society.

Not surprisingly, as in Russia, a number of Japanese continued to oppose even the limited westernization that occurred. A number of feudal lords hoped to restore isolation in the 1860s rather than industrialize; they lost, and on balance anti-industrial sentiment was lower in Japan than in Russia. But a broader concern about the direction of change complicated aspects of the industrialization process.

Japan was also poor in the relevant natural resources. It had some coal and copper and traces of other minerals, but it quickly recognized the need to trade not simply for complex equipment from the industrialized nations but for the raw materials that were the sinews of industry. Textile fibers appropriate for mechanization, notably cotton, also had to be imported. In short, understanding the resource problems that guided Japanese industrialization almost from the start is an aid to understanding several facets of the process: why the government subsidized mining ventures so quickly—and also why several failed; why there was an early and lasting attempt to develop a large export sector—to pay for vital supplies as well as new technology; and why Japan engaged in early imperialist expansion—to acquire territory that could provide secure, cheap supplies of needed materials.

Japan also faced the burdens of established Western competition. This is one reason both Japan and Russia required extensive government involvement in the industrialization effort—as a way to compensate for backwardness and to provide guidance and capital designed to speed the process of change lest catching up become impossible. Japan, however, had to deal with far greater constraints than those faced by Russia. It could not impose high tariffs on industrial imports. British and U.S. pressure, backed by military threats, forced largely open markets; only in 1911 did Japan regain control over its tariff policy. Western businesses operated in parts of Japan under Western, not Japanese, commercial law. In this context the Japanese government had to work even harder than its Russian counterpart to achieve the same result: adequate national control over the economy and adequate national monitoring of the necessary borrowing from Western experts and financiers. Japan managed to prevail: Western investments were limited to a far greater extent than in Russia. Government subsidies and guarantees on investment earnings made up part of the difference. Japan also early established a policy of encouraging Japanese business to “buy Japanese” rather than to import from abroad. Some imports were technically imperative, but where there were options, the government pushed native pride in Japanese distinctiveness and cultural traditions of social solidarity to prevent overreliance on foreign economies. This pride was another distinctive feature inserted in the industrial economy that continued to affect policy into the late twentieth century….

Japan’s early commitment to industrialization came in the 1860s. In contrast to Russia, Japan altered political as well as social structures, though without revolution, thus reducing some of the tensions industrialization created when inserted into a traditional political fabric. The abolition of feudalism did not eliminate the powerful nobility, however, and finding outlets for samurai energies continued to be a preoccupation. Many samurai were able to adapt their values to successful industrial management, and the way was left open for other kinds of leaders, notably successful businessmen, to join elements in the former nobility in creating a new elite. The Russian dilemma—seeking industrialization while trying to preserve the political dominance of the czar and the nobility—was thus avoided. 

Initial Meiji reforms brought additional gains. With the abolition of feudalism came freedom of occupations. Farmers were able to trade directly. The elimination of earlier monopolies on regional trade meant open access to urban markets and the abolition of tax barriers on roads. A fully national economy emerged for the first time. Most traditional merchant houses—and preindustrial Japan had developed a large merchant class and big trading companies—were tied to the finances of feudal lords and proved unable to make the transition to a new economy. Many business failures occurred. But new commercial ventures proliferated, bringing a host of new small businesses and a few potential giants to the fore…. 

Agriculture changed as well. Taxes on peasants were reduced slightly; farmers gained clear title to the land, which enabled them to buy and sell land.… The owners, including progressive landlords, began to introduce fertilizers and farm equipment. The government provided technical assistance, setting up a faculty of agriculture at the Tokyo Imperial University. Production soared. Rice output more than doubled between 1880 and 1930. At the same time, the Japanese government quickly copied some Western public health measures. The result, along with greater food supplies, was a rapid population increase, from about 30 million in 1868 to 45 million in 1900 (and on to 73 million in 1940). Because the numbers of people needed on the land did not increase, vast new labor supplies were available for factory and other urban jobs. 

This was the context in the 1870s in which the government began to sponsor pilot industries. The Ministry of Industry was established in 1870 under Ito Hirobumi and quickly became one of the leading agencies of the state. The government expanded arsenals and shipyards, built telegraph lines, and of course made the start on railroads and new mining. The railroad network was absolutely vital, since Japanese commerce previously had depended on very expensive coastal shipping. In 1868 it cost as much to ship goods fifty miles inland as to transport them to Europe. Railroads gave Japan an internal circulatory system, opening up previously isolated areas both to sales and to purchases. The state also set up a few model factories in textiles, cement, glass, and machine tools. These early factories generated little output, but they helped train Japanese technical experts and labor. New roads and ports, more suitable commercial laws, and a new banking system helped round out the government-sponsored infrastructure.

The government also pioneered the development of new mines for iron, lead, copper, gold, silver, and coal. Private mines existed, but only the state enterprises—there were six by 1881—operated on a large scale with modern, imported machinery. The government invested heavily in the technical modernization process. It put 2.4 million yen into the Kamaishi iron mines, but the effort failed and the mines were put out of operation and ultimately (in 1887) sold to a private investor for a mere 12,600 yen. A copper mine also sputtered along and finally was sold for a fifth of what the government had invested. The Miike coal mines, however, were successful and turned a good profit when they were sold—six times the state’s outlay. 

The first truly industrial phase of growth began in the 1880s. Big businesses emerged, the forerunners of zaibatsu, the great industrial conglomerates. Would-be industrial giants faced obvious problems in finding capital. A few won some loans from Western banks. Still more, like the Mitsubishi founder, gained capital from political connections, serving government shipping and military needs....Textile growth also gave Japanese industrialization a more rounded quality than existed in the contemporaneous process in Russia. Consumer goods drew considerable attention in Japan, despite the government’s urgent interest in shipbuilding and other industries more directly relevant to military strength. During the 1890s modern industries were established in construction goods—cement, bricks, and glass— and in food processing (including beer), match production, and chemicals. These industries drew a variety of new Japanese entrepreneurs who operated within the solid context for growth the government had established.

By the 1890s a vast increase in education that had been launched in 1872 was beginning to pay off in terms of the technical expertise available in Japan and also the quality of the factory labor force…. Study trips abroad, often government-sponsored and launched even before the Meiji regime, continued, providing the information flow on which the leading Japanese industries depended to stay up-to-date…. 

A second major industrial spurt took shape after 1905 and extended to 1918. The boom centered on light industries, but there was growth in shipping, coal, chemicals, and electric power as well. It was at this point also that Japan installed a significant metallurgical sector, developing the ability to produce its own locomotives and other heavy equipment besides ships. By 1921, machinery, just 3 percent of total Japanese manufacturing output in 1880, had soared to 14 percent. Generation of electric power, virtually nonexistent before 1910, rose sevenfold between 1910 and 1920. Whereas Japan’s first industrialization period in the 1880s and 1890s had featured the displacement of human and water power by steam engines, in this second growth period electrification replaced steam engines. These successive developments—first the widespread adoption of steam power, and then the rapid conversion to electricity—occurred much more rapidly in Japan than in other industrial countries, including Russia and the West….

The overall problem was obvious. Despite rapid industrial growth, Japan depended heavily on machine and raw-materials imports from the West. As a result it needed to earn foreign exchange. In this respect, too, Japan’s situation differed considerably from that of Russia. The Japanese worked hard on the problem, trying to limit imports to basic industrial necessities. They developed internal production to replace imports relatively quickly. And they rapidly extended international shipping (and shipbuilding) operations to prevent a loss of earnings to foreign traders—a key move that already distinguished early industrial Japan from many nonindustrial areas. But still, there had to be goods to sell abroad to win the needed foreign earnings. The early answer was silk, a traditional Japanese industry that with government assistance was quickly modernized. During the 1870s the state introduced mechanical reeling, developed in Europe, which allowed a higher output of silk production per worker. Silk looms were not expensive (small businesses thus dominated the sector), and technological demands were not high, but the rewards were considerable. Mechanized silk production enabled Japan to capture export markets from China, which still relied on manual silk-making methods. Silk output rose from 2.3 million pounds around 1870 to 16 million in 1900 and to 93 million in 1929. A full two-thirds of this production was exported and gave Japan vitally needed foreign exchange. The labor force in textiles expanded rapidly as a result, doubling between 1909 and 1930 and vastly overshadowing the number of workers in machine building and heavy industry.

Lacking several obvious ingredients for an industrial revolution, Japan had compensated by means of government direction—converting prior habits like group solidarity into industrial assets and fostering an active export sector. Inevitably, the same thrust brought tensions and vulnerabilities to Japanese society. Rapid industrialization had many familiar consequences, but it also had several special features resulting from the speed and the precise emphases wrapped up in the Japanese surge.

Many results of Japan’s industrial revolution followed conventional patterns. Work was redefined. Preindustrial Japan had featured an urban artisanry with rich traditions. Artisans had substantial skill and a considerable penchant for leisure—”wine, women, and gambling” were entertainments characteristic of this group when resources permitted. Individual crafts had important rituals and guild organizations. The rise of factories, many of them government-run at first, cut into these traditions. High wages were offered to skilled workers, whose attraction was essential, but the work was far more strictly regulated than in the past. Rigid timetables for starting and stopping work and for taking breaks were imposed. Japanese management strove to create a new definition of work habits. In return, some benefits were offered at the start, including compensation for job injuries. Such government involvement made Japanese programs more systematic at an earlier stage than comparable efforts had been during industrialization in the West. Private factories, however, established lower wages than those in government enterprises….

Leisure decreased notably, in part because of low wages, in part because work days increased to twelve hours or more, in addition to commuting time. Going to public baths, drinking sake, and occasionally visiting brothels or gambling establishments constituted the recreation of many skilled workers. As one contemporary noted: “They returned home, and after eating and drinking they read about half the paper, and if they took a bath it was past ten. If they didn’t get up the next morning, they would be late to work; they could barely rest their bodies.” Middle-class critics, as in Europe earlier, lambasted wasteful habits, but in fact, outlets for leisure declined even as work became more arduous. Workers found protest organization difficult. Although some observers claimed to find close camaraderie among factory workers—”because each has experienced difficulties of his own and thus has become considerate of others”—in fact, early unions were small. An ironworkers’ union in 1899 boasted only 3,000 members. 

Coal miners suffered unusually poor conditions. Most were drifters from the villages, and they had low status in society’s eyes and their own. Many employers hired subcontractors, who had an interest in getting as much work for as little pay as possible, and who supervised the miners literally twenty-four hours a day. Some miners ran away. Others were beaten by thugs the employers hired. Labor turnover was high; in 1906 one survey showed that 45 percent of the coal miners had been on the job less than a year. Few unions developed.

Japan’s early industrialization was also marked by its unusual reliance on female workers. This was the result of the prominence of textiles and uneven levels of mechanization, along with the drumming need for low wages in order to ensure export sales….. Most of these women worked in small shops. They were young and usually unmarried. Many were imported from distant farm villages, where a father or brother signed them into what often amounted to industrial servitude. They had very low social status. Most were housed in dormitories entirely under their supervisors’ control. They worked at least twelve hours a day, sometimes much more. After electrification in the 1920s, which illuminated the factories at night, hours often increased. Factories had full say over when and how wages were paid, and workers were often cheated. Managers argued that women wasted their money, so their wages were saved up by the factories; in fact, the managers worried that if the wages were paid out, the women would run away. Ill health was rampant, not only because of low pay but also because of dusty conditions in the plants. An 1897 report revealed that 84 percent of all the young women working in the cotton industry were either sick or suffering from injuries. Virtually no leisure activities were possible. Many workers developed irregular sexual liaisons, and some became prostitutes.

The problems female workers (and low-paid workers in general) encountered were not unique to Japanese industrialization. The sheer numbers, however, were startling, for women formed the majority of the factory labor force. Most intended to work only a short time, and transience was very high. Almost half of all cotton textile workers in 1897 had served in their current job for a year or less, and the figure grew worse with time. Japan’s female labor force was more unstable than that of other industrial countries. Indeed, an unusual number of women simply ran away. 

The toll of forming an industrial labor force showed in Japanese family life around 1900. The industrial revolution had a familiar impact in forcing families gradually to separate home and work. Many metalworkers left their wives at home, though because of low pay the latter often had to do some cheap craft production in the household. Workers’ frequent movement disrupted family life still more directly. So, too, did the confusion surrounding women workers. Although many women hoped to return to village life and a traditional marriage, their lowered status and their removal from key local traditions often made this goal difficult to achieve. For a time Japan had the highest divorce rate in the world, particularly in the lower classes. In a society with strong traditions of family life, this instability was profoundly troubling, not least to those directly involved. 

Formal labor protest, however, was infrequent. Because workers were strangers to each other and changed jobs often, organizing potential was reduced. Women thought more of escaping factory life than of protesting to improve it. Employers showed some talent in treating skilled workers separately, such as enrolling them in benefit societies that provided funds in case of illness or accident. The government also moved quickly to suppress any signs of unrest. …Nevertheless, strikes were not unknown. In 1914 the male workers in a Tokyo cotton factory voted to strike after half their number had been dismissed and the rest received a pay cut of 40 percent in reaction to a decline in sales. The company rescinded its measures in response to the general walkout, but female workers continued their protest, demanding shorter hours and better food. A union was formed, and although its charter proclaimed goals of mutual aid and “progress for the company,” the company fired the twelve union leaders and the police arrested the leader of a mass meeting. The workers’ resolve crumbled, and the union disbanded. Shipyard workers struck several times early in the twentieth century, often appealing for social respect and self-improvement in addition to making other demands; commonly heard was a call for more dignified titles of address. Again, however, the organizational efforts failed. The Public Order Police Law, though it did not ban unions outright, gave government wide policing powers against leaders, and these powers played a major role in failure of unionization attempts. 

Japan’s modern transformation soon registered internationally. By the early twentieth century, its economic growth, openness to trade, and embrace of “civilization and enlightenment” from the West persuaded the Western powers to revise the unequal treaties in Japan’s favor. This had long been a primary goal of the Meiji regime, and the Anglo-Japan Treaty of 1902 now acknowledged Japan as an equal player among the Great Powers of the world

Not only did Japan escape from its semi-colonial entanglements with the West, but it also launched its own empire-building enterprise to compensate for the relative poverty of its natural resource base. A successful war against China (1894-95) established Japan as a formidable military competitor in East Asia and established Japan as the dominant power in the region. Ten years later in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), which was fought over rival imperial ambitions in Korea and Manchuria, Japan became the first Asian state to defeat a major European power. Through those victories, Japan also gained colonial control of Taiwan and Korea and a territorial foothold in Manchuria.