memecucker:

A really big history pet-peeve of mine is people saying the Russo-Japanese War was the first time in the modern era where Europeans were defeated by non-Europeans in a way because not only is that incredibly false (eg; the spectacular failure of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia had already happened and even then there was the First Anglo-Afghan War which ended in British humiliation, Alaungpaya founder of the Konbaung dynasty of Burma crushed a joint Franco-Mon force (supplanted by Dutch and Portuguese mercenaries) during his war of Burmese unification an act which expelled the French from SE Asia until their entrance to Vietnam a century later, the British defeat at Islandwanda is also notable because while the Zulu war ended in a British victory at Islandwana it was shown that Europeans were not invincible even when their opponents were armed largely with spears) but at the same time if people would just add the word “naval” to the sentence it would become accurate and more fully capture the uniqueness of that historical moment because Westerners in the 19th century were seen as invincible at sea and it wasn’t until Tsushima that European capital ships were sunk by non-Europeans.

Another thing that is actually exceptional about that was was that it wasn’t simply a European defeat because those happened plenty of times before but rather that it was a defeat where the non-Europeans were imperialistic in their victory. There was no illusion that the territories Russia was forced to give up as well as custodianship over Korea was a “restoration” of traditional Japanese territory, it was understood that this was Japan seizing foreign territory for imperialistic reasons and that it had joined the club of imperialist nations.