1895 - Political Events

Political Events

Former Spanish general Manuel Pavía y Rodríguez de Alburquerque dies at Madrid January 4 at age 67, having ended Spain's first republic by his coup d'etat of January 1874.

France's President Casimir-Perier resigns in disgust January 17 and is succeeded by Félix Faure, 53. A new government takes office January 26, with former premier Alexandre Ribot reassuming that position while retaining his portfolio as minister of finance, but a financial scandal will force his resignation once again.

Former Russian minister Nikolai Karlovich Giers dies at St. Petersburg January 26 at age 74, having allied his country with France.

Russian Marxist Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, 25, travels in late April to Geneva, meets with Georgi Plekhanov, goes on to Zürich, Berlin, and Paris, returns with illegal literature in a false-bottomed trunk, organizes strikes and prints antigovernment leaflets and manifestoes, is arrested in December, and will be exiled to Siberia for 3 years in 1897 after a year in prison. His older brother Aleksandr was executed in 1887 for plotting against Czar Aleksandr II. The younger Ulyanov will adopt the pseudonym Lenin (see 1900; Plekhanov, 1883).

Friedrich Engels dies at London August 5 at age 74; he has spent his final years editing and translating Karl Marx's Das Kapital and other works establishing the materialist interpretation of history.

Britain's Tories regain power in the general elections, and a third Salisbury ministry begins June 25. It will continue until 1902.

Former Bulgarian prime minister Stefan N. Stambolov dies at Sofia July 19 at age 41, having been brutally assaulted in the streets of the city and received mortal wounds.

The Treaty of Shimonoseki April 17 ends the brief Sino-Japanese war that has destroyed the Chinese Army and Navy (see 1894). Gen. Iwao Oyama, now 52, is made a marquis for his role in capturing Port Arthur. Diplomat Count Tadasu Hayashi, 45, has played an active role in negotiating the treaty and becomes ambassador to China, whose government recognizes the independence of Korea, and cedes Taiwan (Formosa), 90 miles off the Chinese coast, to Japan, which also receives the Pescadores Islands and the Liaotung Peninsula; China agrees to pay 200 million taels in indemnities and open four more ports to foreign commerce. Russia, Germany, and France force Japan to return the Liaotung Peninsula, but Tokyo agrees May 5 only on condition that it receive another 30 million taels (see 1898). France obtains territorial and commercial concessions in China's southern provinces, while Britain, France, Germany, and Russia all make huge loans to China with customs revenues as security (see commerce, 1896; Boxer Rebellion, 1900).

Tokyo appoints German-educated physician Hakushaku Goto Shimpei, 37, director of civil administration on Taiwan; he quickly restores order by establishing a modern police force and integrating it with a reestablished Chinese baojia (pao-chia) system of mutual responsibility. The Japanese will occupy Taiwan for 50 years, forcing the island's inhabitants to learn Japanese and strictly regulating all phases of the people's lives, but Goto Shimpei will reorganize the colony's taxation system, introduce a unified currency and measurement system, introduce public health measures, sponsor construction of railways, roads, and seaports, help to develop sugar mills and other light industry, and reorganize land ownership.

The name Rhodesia is given to the territory of the South Africa Co. south of the Zambezi River to honor the prime minister of the Cape Colony, Cecil Rhodes. Southern Rhodesia will become a British crown colony in 1923 (see 1965).

A runner sent by British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain tracks down colonial administrator F. D. Lugard in the semidesert of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, where Lugard has gone at the behest of the private British West Charterland Co. that is prospecting for diamonds. Chamberlain offers Lugard his first official government appointment, charging him with the creation of a British-officered African regiment that is to protect British rights from the Niger to the Nile from French designs on the territory (see 1894).

Britain annexes Tongaland June 11 to block any possible access of the Transvaal to the sea via Swaziland, and Bechuanaland is attached to the Cape Colony in November.

The Jameson raid that begins December 29 is an attempt to foment rebellion against the Boer government of the Transvaal's president Paul Kruger, now 70, whose major political opponent is Piet (Petrus Jacobus) Joubert, 64 (see 1893). Leander Starr Jameson leads 600 men in a 140-mile dash across the Transvaal (see 1896).

Argentina's president Luis Sáenz Peña resigns in January after 3 years in office and is succeeded by his vice president José Evaristo Uriburu, now 63, whose diplomacy helped in 1884 to end the War of the Pacific between Chile and the combined forces of Bolivia and Peru. Uriburu will serve until his retirement in 1898, reorganizing the armed forces and reforming public finance so that the country may resume payments on its national debt.

Cuban insurgents begin a revolution against Spanish rule February 24 in the eastern part of the island (see 1894; human rights, 1886). Spain has imposed more taxes and trade restrictions, increasing economic distress on the world's richest colony, and the rebels have obtained a steady flow of arms and money from sympathizers at New York. Havana-born poet and independence leader José (Julián) Martí (y Pérez), 42, has left for the Caribbean January 31 (he moved to New York in January 1880 after escaping from prison in Spain, has been working from an office at 120 Front Street to end slavery and Spanish rule on the island, editing a weekly newspaper, Patria). Former rebel commander-in-chief Máximo Gómez y Báez, now 58, returns to reassume command of rebel forces, and Cosmopolitan publisher John Brisben Walker uses his magazine to offer Spain $100 million for Cuban independence, but Martí invades Cuba with a small expeditionary force April 11 and is killed while fighting the Spaniards May 19 at Dos Rios. Former provisional president Tomás Estrada Palma, now 59, has headed the rebel junta at New York and becomes the leader of the revolt, ragged guerrilla forces under the command of Gómez and Antonio Maceo gain control of the eastern region and proclaim the Republic of Cuba in September. Maceo invades the western provinces, and Madrid dispatches Arsenio Martínez Campos to deal the rebels as he did in 1878, but he fails to win them over, forces most of the rural population into "reconcentration camps," and employs brutal measures to suppress the revolution, leaving the island in turmoil. Some Americans have substantial financial holdings in Cuba, and Cuban émigré societies spring up in Florida (there will soon be 61 in Key West alone) (see 1896).