By 1900, a spirit of competitive expansion had gripped EuropesEurope’s leaders, while most Europeans behaved as if ever-increasing prosperity was certain. Each of the great powers were stockpiling arms, forming military alliances, and scrambling for territory in Africa. Hostilities erupted in South Africa as the Boers, that were descendants of Dutch settlers, rose up against British rule. The war that followed revealed the first cracks in the vast British Empire, which had been at the height of it'sits power in the nineteenth century. Rival ambitions also sparked a fiercelyfierce war between Russia and Japan, which ended with that Japan defeateddefeating Russia; this was the first time in the modern era that a European power lost a war to an Asian one. This age of high hopes and recklessness ended abruptly in 1914, when national rivalries plunged the world into a war unlike anything ever seen before.