The first oil discovery in the region…

The Australasians serve in the Great War as the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) troops, participating in some of the bloodiest battles of a thoroughly bloody war and suffering a disproportionately high casualty rate.

Sun Yat-sen is succeeded after a few months by late-Qing military strongman Yuan Shika, who soon dissolves parliament and attempts to restore the monarchy.

US Navy and ground troops initiate a continuous thirty-year occupation of portions of China.

Japan evicts Germany from China’s Shandong Province during the Great War.

In December 1915, ibn Sa'ud meets Sir Percy Cox, the British political resident in the Persian Gulf, who offers him British military protection in return for ceding superintendence of his foreign policy, an agreement incorporated in the Anglo-Saudi friendship treaty.

Britain receives trading privileges and supervision of Saudi foreign policy.

A guarantee of British military protection and arms supplies ends the Khaleefah's authority in central Arabia.

Although recognized by Britain as 'Sultan of Nejd and its Dependencies,' ibn Sa'ud can expand no farther, as the entire Persian Gulf coast from Oman to Kuwait is under the exclusive influence of Britain.

The Great War had begun with an unprecedented outpouring of love and goodwill towards the United Kingdom from within the mainstream political leadership, contrary to initial British fears of an Indian revolt.

India has contributed massively to the British war effort by providing men and resources.

About 1.3 million Indian soldiers and laborers served in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, while both the Indian government and the princes have sent large supplies of food, money and ammunition.

However, Bengal and Punjab remain hotbeds of anti colonial activities.

Nationalism in Bengal, increasingly closely linked with the unrests in Punjab, is significant enough to nearly paralyze the regional administration.

Terrorist bombings continue to harass officials, despite numerous “reventive detention” arrests made by Indian Criminal Intelligence Division police under the tough martial-law edicts promulgated at the war's inception.

The ANZAC force is involved in the disastrous Churchill-planned Gallipoli invasion of April 25, 1915, which devolves into horrific trench warfare.

The defending Turks take an estimated 251,000 casualties, while the Allied forces suffer about 252,000 casualties, most of whom are the soldiers of Australia and New Zealand.

The Ottoman Empire, considering its resident Christian Armenians sympathetic to traditional Turkish enemy Russia, deport them en masse from Anatolia in the “first genocide of modern times”.

In the massacres and hardships that ensue, between 600,000 and one million Armenians die.

Einstein, after a number of faslse starts, publshes the general theory of relativity in late 1915.

He numbers among a very few German professors who remain pacifists and do not support Germany’s war aims.

German forces employ chlorine gas on the battlefield against French and Algerian troops in 1915.

The Germans uses a form of tear gas, T-Stoff, on the Russian front.

The Russians, in 1915, apprehend German spies reportedly attemting to spread plague bacteria.

As fighting in the Great War escalates, Jan Smuts gives his support to the notion of a league of nations as a way to prevent future wars.

Britain, apparently desirous of having a trusted Muslim agent in the Hejaz in which Islam's holy cities lie, cultivates Sharif Hussein ibn Ali , the Ottoman-appointed wali (governor) of Mecca, with money and guns.

Promising Hussein leadership over all the Arabs in return for his help in overthrowing the Ottomans between July 1915 ...

The Turkish governors of Palestine, their suspicions aroused by the Zionist activities of David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, arrest and deport them from the Ottoman Empire in 1915.