The beginning of the 20th century may be taken as the approximate high point of Western world domination, if not necessarily of European civilization itself. Whites made up some 30 percent of the earth’s population and directly or indirectly controlled most of its territory; white economic and technological dominance were even more complete. American writer Lothrop Stoddard describes in colorful language our race’s serene confidence at that moment:

The thought that white expansion could be stayed, much less reversed, never entered the head of one white man in a thousand. Why should it, since centuries of experience had taught the exact contrary? The settlement of America, Australasia, and Siberia, where the few colored aborigines vanished like smoke before the white advance; the conquest of brown Asia and the partition of Africa, where colored millions bowed with only sporadic resistance to mere handfuls of whites: both sets of phenomena combined to persuade the white man that he was invincible, and that the colored types would everywhere give way before him and his civilization.

But in 1905, a surprising turn of events shocked white and non-white alike. Japan gained a decisive military victory over a sprawling European empire with a population more than three times its own: Russia. No one expected such an outcome, yet it was to prove a sign of much to come.

https://www.amren.com/features/2020/01/1905-the-end-of-the-omnipotent-white-man/