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Charles Emmerson

1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War Hardcover – May 28, 2013

by Charles Emmerson (Author)

4.3 337 ratings

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Today, 1913 is inevitably viewed through the lens of 1914: as the last year before a war that would shatter the global economic order and tear Europe apart, undermining its global pre-eminence. Our perspectives narrowed by hindsight, the world of that year is reduced to its most frivolous features—last summers in grand aristocratic residences—or its most destructive ones: the unresolved rivalries of the great European powers, the fear of revolution, violence in the Balkans.

In this illuminating history, Charles Emmerson liberates the world of 1913 from this “prelude to war” narrative, and explores it as it was, in all its richness and complexity. Traveling from Europe's capitals, then at the height of their global reach, to the emerging metropolises of Canada and the United States, the imperial cities of Asia and Africa, and the boomtowns of Australia and South America, he provides a panoramic view of a world crackling with possibilities, its future still undecided, its outlook still open.

The world in 1913 was more modern than we remember, more similar to our own times than we expect, more globalized than ever before. The Gold Standard underpinned global flows of goods and money, while mass migration reshaped the world's human geography. Steamships and sub-sea cables encircled the earth, along with new technologies and new ideas. Ford's first assembly line cranked to life in 1913 in Detroit. The Woolworth Building went up in New York. While Mexico was in the midst of bloody revolution, Winnipeg and Buenos Aires boomed. An era of petro-geopolitics opened in Iran. China appeared to be awaking from its imperial slumber. Paris celebrated itself as the city of light—Berlin as the city of electricity.

Full of fascinating characters, stories, and insights, 1913: In Search of the World before the Great War brings a lost world vividly back to life, with provocative implications for how we understand our past and how we think about our future.

Print length

544 pages
Language

English
Publisher

PublicAffairs
Publication date

May 28, 2013
Dimensions

6.75 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1610392566
ISBN-13

978-1610392563
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Writing about “a year of possibility not predestination,” Emmerson surveys a selection of cities around the world as they appeared in 1913. Portraying the European capitals of the next year’s belligerent countries, Emmerson strikes a cosmopolitan tone by noting social interconnections linking London to Paris to Berlin to Constantinople. Diarists and travelers populate his narratives, their descriptions lending eyewitness immediacy to his delineation of streetscapes, new architecture, and political issues. Above all, Emmerson seeks to evoke the economic globalization that affected, in positive and negative ways, all the cities he presents. As 1913 was, in retrospect, the apex of empires, Emmerson dwells on the imperial outlooks from Britain and France and from the empires doomed to destruction in the war ahead, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman. Turning from centers of power to cities beginning to boom from their global linkages, Emmerson enunciates the aspirations of outliers like Winnipeg, Melbourne, and Buenos Aires. Including stops in Tehran, Mexico City, Jerusalem, several U.S. cities, Shanghai, and Tokyo, Emmerson’s historical world tour emotively captures the civilization soon to vanish in WWI. --Gilbert Taylor

Review

Wall Street Journal
“[Emmerson draws] upon an impressive range of contemporary source material, ranging from travel guides and memoirs to unpublished diaries, newspaper reports and diplomatic memos. They give a vivid portrait of the rapid changes occurring in daily life around the globe….Charles Emmerson captures all the world's hope and excitement as it experienced an economic El Dorado. ‘1913' is history without hindsight at its best.”

Washington Post
“In each city the author vividly surveys the political, economic and cultural scenes. The effect is transporting; 1913 is both passport and time machine… The centenary of the Great War will no doubt see the publication of many fine histories of the conflict, but few are likely to paint so alluring a portrait of the world that was consumed by it — and that helped bring it about.”

Daily Beast
“With the looming 100th anniversary of World War I, a spate of books about the not-so-Great War have begun to emerge. Emmerson's effort stands out for several reasons. First, Emmerson ranges widely, from Germany to Paris, from Bombay to Tokyo. Second, he is a sparkling writer, his narrative rarely flags and he has amassed a startling amount of detail.”

The Scotsman
“It is an epic, sprawling panorama of a book, intended to show the moving world as it was, to bring the past to life in order to clarify the present. It's a monumentally ambitious aim. The remarkable thing is, he pulls it off.”

The Guardian (UK)
“1913 has narrative verve and insight”

The Times (UK)
“The old empires were starting to implode and the centres could no longer hold. In an ambitious book, Emmerson catches their last vital sparks in the year before darkness fell.”

New Statesman (UK)
“One of the great merits of Charles Emmerson's global panorama is to show events in the months leading up to the summer of 1914 as something other than a precursor to mass slaughter.”

The Independent (UK)
“Emmerson has done his homework. His book girdles the earth in an impressive fashion and conjures up a world we have lost.”

Sunday Business Post (Ireland)
“Emmerson's book is an ambitious effort…But there is so much that captivates, particularly the entertaining social detail and anecdote, such as the fact it took three years to assess JP Morgan's gargantuan estate, which included 138 watches in one of his houses in London.”

The Economist
“[Emmerson] aims not to explain what caused or was lost to the war, but to retrieve from the partial glare of hindsight the world in which it erupted. This is no modest undertaking. Mr Emmerson draws from a wide range of sources, including memoirs, billboards and newspapers, to recreate a year that was fairly uneventful. … Not unlike Marcel Proust's “In Search of Lost Time”, the first instalments of which were published in 1913, his narrative finds coherence in the unremarkable… [W]hat emerges is a rich portrait and an important set of ideas.”

Financial Times
“Emmerson offers an impressive sweep that marshals much detail along the way, though at times there is a sense of being on a historical package tour (Baedeker is, indeed, a frequently cited source) in which some city breaks are better rendered than others. But there are some gems. In the patchwork Austro-Hungarian empire, one could drive on both sides of the road and there were 10 official languages but no translators in parliament. Does anyone wonder that it fell apart?”

Maclean's
“An eye-opening demonstration of just how modern the supposedly premodern world was”

Galveston Daily News
“The book reveals a world both different from today's world, yet still familiar in many ways. It captures the year of 1913 in a way that is fascinating and revealing.”

Shepherd Express (Wisconsin)
“Witty and knowledgeable, Emmerson packs his account with telling anecdotes.”

The Spectator (UK)
“A masterful, comprehensive portrait of the world at that last moment in its history when Europe was incontrovertibly ‘the centre of the universe' and, within it, London ‘the centre of the world'…Charles Emmerson's 1913 brilliantly rescues [history] from the shadow of a war that would toll the end of the Old World and leave its survivors repining the loss of a Golden Age that had never been.”

The Guardian
“An ambitious, subtle account of the way the world was going until the first world war changed everything.”

Daily Mail (UK)
“This ambitious panorama of a world on the brink throws up comparisons which are constantly provocative and fascinating.”

The Express (UK)
“Where Emmerson really scores is in the nuggets of detail and contemporary quotes that sparkle from these essays.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Marvelous… Emmerson, a scholar at Chatham House, a renowned London think tank, brilliantly avoids the inevitability trap in ‘1913.' His panoramic depiction of the last year before the Great War permits us to see the world ‘as it might have looked through contemporary eyes, in its full colour and complexity, with a sense of the future's openness'…Emmerson is a superb guide and companion, whether inviting us to take a seat next to him in ‘a favourite corner' of a Viennese cafe or to survey tout Paris from the Eiffel Tower. In many ways, his book works as a ‘time-travelogue'; indeed, it frequently quotes contemporary tourist literature and travelers' accounts.”

Christian Science Monitor
“Emmerson's project would not be as compelling if he had simply focused on Europe, or on England and her colonies. The Great War was truly a global war, and the world of 1913 was truly a global society. In his book, Emmerson gives fair weight to societies around the world rather than presenting the year from a Eurocentric point of view.”

Booklist
“Portraying the European capitals of the next year's belligerent countries, Emmerson strikes a cosmopolitan tone by noting social interconnections linking London to Paris to Berlin to Constantinople.…Including stops in Tehran, Mexico City, Jerusalem, several U.S. cities, Shanghai, and Tokyo, Emmerson's historical world tour emotively captures the civilization soon to vanish in WWI.”

Library Journal, STARRED review
“A fascinating bird's-eye view of a landscape seen in what was the dying light of empire and on the brink of tragedy…An imaginatively conceived, thoroughly researched, and outstandingly written perspective that is highly recommended for both academic and general readers.”

Bookslut
“Charles Emmerson has written a book that contains much in the way of wistfulness, hope, bitterness, discord, assassinations, technological advancement, and enmity between nations and peoples… We may not ever fully know the reasons or reasoning behind the urge for war, and Charles Emmerson wisely does not bring them all out, but in 1913 his synthesis of the nervousness, striving, and strains in specific parts of the world give us a better understanding of the upheavals that led to the First World War.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ PublicAffairs; 1st edition (May 28, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1610392566
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1610392563
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.8 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,647,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13,517 in Historical Study (Books)
- #43,209 in World History (Books)

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4.3 337 ratings

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INSIGHTFUL AND ILLUMINATING

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2013

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EMMERSON, Charles. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. Public Affairs. 2013. 528 + xvi pp, illus., selected bibliog., notes, index. $30.
CLARK, Christopher The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. HarperCollins. 2013. 697 + xxxii pp, illus., maps, notes, index. $29.99.

In the space of the months, Emmerson's book in March and Collins's in May, we have two exceptional works of history, appealing to both scholars and lay readers, that mount a serious critique of popular interpretations of the origins of World War I. Both, directly rather than obliquely, are critiques of the popular (and outstanding) works of Barbara Tuchman -Emmerson takes on her The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966) and Clark the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August (1962).

Both are substantial works, by historians who are exceptionally widely read. They write like angles and spread their nets wide to capture evidence and te3lling examples to support of their arguments. And both point in the same direction: that regardless of mounting world and regional tensions at the start of the 1910s, there was substantial reason to assume that the tensions could be controlled, and if not completely controlled, that the result would simply be another of the regional conflicts that had become endemic from the late 1900s on.

Emmerson's informative and charming book is a Baedecker tour of the world in 1913: not just what was the state of affairs and of mind in the world's capitals -London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna and St. Petersburg--but in places like Winnipeg and Melbourne, Durban and Bombay, Tehran and Jerusalem, Peking and Shanghai and Tokyo. The result is a quite different picture of the world, not of one on the brink of ineluctable world war but a world going on with its business, with a reasonable hope of continued peace, and certainly not the world conflagration that was the First World War. (An example, in 12913, the three cousins -the Russian tsar, the German emperor and the British king--met in Berlin for the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter, princess Victoria Louise, and prince Ernst of August of Cumberland. "When great potentates who are near relatives can meet in public and give full rein to their natural affection," opined the London newspaper, the Daily Graphic, "it is always legitimate to assume the political horizon is clear.")

The message in Clark's magisterial history of the origins of the Great War, a book that will shape the contours of discussion for a generation to come, complements Emmerson's picture but is both more focused and more nuanced. In the introduct6ion to his long and detailed account of what actually happened step by step and actor by actor, in the buildup to this tragic catastrophe, Clark argues that (1) the July Crisis if 1914, the month preceding actual war, was "the most complex [event] of modern times, perhaps of any time so far," and (2) that it is best approached not by asking why it happened but rather how.

"Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question of how invites us to look closely at the sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invited us to go in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilization,. The why approach brings a certain analytical clarity, but it also has a distorting effect, because it creates the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure; the factors pile up on top of each other pushing down on events; political actors become mere executors of forces long established and beyond their control."

This attention to questions of how rather than why leads to a step by step analysis of what actually happened in increments, not in bloc, and who the actors were and why they behaved\ as they did at each step. Along with that, Clark shows how attitudes changed during the two decades leading to the war, provoking a final break between old allies and invoking an acceptance of military means as the final, though not always desired, end to international confrontations.

A book this detailed could be deathly boring but it isn't, not at all. This is a book filled with peoples -the story it tells is rife with agency--and Carlson (like Emmerson as well) writes a vigorous and engaging prose.

Emmerson's is a very good book and a welcome addition to the literature of pre- and World War I. Clark's book should prove to be a classic. Both are great reading, not just for the scholar but for any enthusiast of good history writing.

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Kindle Customer

Later chapters are worth it

Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2023

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If you've read anything like Sleepwalkers or the Proud Tower, the first couple chapters retread old ground, but it really picks up later. The snapshots of Latin America and the Middle East in 1913 were particularly fascinating.

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Barbara Stoner

1913: A Cautionary Tale

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2016

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"A European could survey the world in 1913 as the Greek gods might have surveyed it from the snowy heights of Mount Olympus: themselves above, the teeming earth below. To be a European, from this perspective, was to inhabit the highest stage of human development."

So begins Charles Emmerson’s 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War .

1913 attempts to paint a picture of each of 20 world capitals in the year before the great war. How did they view the world? What were their expectations for the future? How did 1913 produce the guns of August? What happened to the promise held out by the previous years of the world’s first brush with globalization?

Europe is still, in 1913, the “Center of the Universe”: London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. These are the powerhouse cities, linked by history, culture, blood ties, and relatively easy access. Most importantly, they are linked by trade, exemplified by the 1913 Ghent (Belgium) World’s Fair. War, to these nations, was a practical impossibility. Why would anyone, they asked themselves, impede the march of progress?

It’s a sober reflection to read how much Americans of that time resemble us. For example, America in 1913 worried about the "overweening power of a money trust of Wall Street squeezing out Main Street in favour of large companies controlled by the banks."

A few more illustrative quotes from American cities:

Washington, DC –
"At a press conference in May, [President Woodrow} Wilson raised another familiar and related gripe. ‘This town is swarming with lobbyists,’ he complained, ‘so you can’t throw a brick in any direction without hitting one …

New York –
"As America became more citified, observers worried, was it to become more dandified, more greedy and more individualistic – more like New York?"

Los Angeles – A reader of the Los Angeles Record declared,
"IF you question the EMPLOYERS regarding the continued changing in their staff they will tell you that Los Angeles has a ‘floating population’, apparently failing to realize that the population would be permanent if living wages were paid."

Winnepeg, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Algiers, Bombay, Durban, Tehran, Jerusalem – all of them rising cities of the future in 1913. Constantinople, Peking, Shanghai, and Tokyo – old cities trying to adapt to the new century.

"'We live in a time of suprises,' wrote an American observer in 1913, 'Turkey is reforming, China is waking up, the self-satisfied complacency of the white race has received a shock.'"

The next four years would see all of Europe standing with both feet in a water-filled trench and both hands clutching the lightning bolt of war. Nothing would ever be the same.

"For if the Great War had shown one thing, was it not the European civilization, once hailed as the most progressive and most advanced in the world, was really nothing more than a thin veneer for barbarism? Chinese intellectual Yan Fu noted that 'the European race’s last three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to nothing but four words: selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness and corruption.'"

On December 31, 1913, in London, Emmerson relates, the Daily Chronicle published its poem of the year:

I do not mourn your passing, shed no tear,
As you are whelmed in shadows of the past:
I only sigh and say – Please God next year
Will be more fruitful, fuller than the last …

"From me no heavy burdens of farewells;
I turn to watch the year dawn that shall be."

"At the stroke of midnight, 1913 died. The year was 1914."

How will our future look on December 31, 2016? What are the chances that another year, perhaps 2017, will resonate down the ages as the year when everything changed? Few in 1913 saw anything coming. And no one knew, no one was able to know, all that the future would hold.

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Dave the Rave

Good product

Reviewed in Canada on December 14, 2022

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A quick read without too much new information.

Keynes

Esperaba algo más

Reviewed in Spain on September 3, 2013

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No puedo pasar de está bien. El planteamiento parece original con esa visión a través de diferentes ciudades, pero falla, se dispersa. Uno espera una visión cotidiana de la vida en esas ciudades, de su fisionomía, de sus habitantes, de lo que realmente ocurría entonces, pero el autor se pierde mucho en los contextos históricos anteriores y de los países y ciudades circundantes. En todo caso está bien escrito y es una visión interesante del mundo antes de la Gran Guerra

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bananas

Excellent review and fascinating perspective on the world immediately prior ...

Reviewed in Canada on August 24, 2015

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Excellent review and fascinating perspective on the world immediately prior to the first world war. Offers an excellent context for other WWI reading.

Susan Ennis

A+++Seller

Reviewed in Canada on July 8, 2014

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Excellent documentary!

Lance Grundy

Unearthing a World on the Eve of Disaster

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 2, 2013

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Starting in July 2014 and continuing until 11 November 2018 the world will remember The Great War . During that period, right across the globe, numerous memorial services will take place, books will be published, documentaries will be aired and films will be shown as the world remembers the more than nine million, mostly young men , who lost their lives in that terrible conflict. However, because the events of the First World War were so appalling and overshadowed everything which came after, there is a tendency for us to overlook what came before. What was the world like just before the Great War? This perfectly-timed book, written by Charles Emmerson, a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs, aims to provide the answer.

Divided into four parts and covering twenty-three of the world's major cities this fascinating book takes its reader on a whirlwind tour of the globe in 1913. Starting and finishing in London and crossing five continents in between, Emmerson uses contemporary sources [including newspaper reports, diaries, memoirs and extracts from Baedeker guides] to paint a vivid portrait of a world on the cusp of enormous change. While Europe still dominated much of the world in 1913 and monarchical and aristocratic government prevailed across most of the continent, the forces of change were on the march.

Further afield, new powers were rising and a new trend, 'globalisation', was beginning to deconstruct the existing order, unleashing enormous political, economic and social change in its wake. Emmerson's "1913" captures this zeitgeist perfectly, conveying both the sense of optimism and uncertainty which pervaded global society on the eve of the Great War. It seems that right across the globe there was a feeling that life was changing and mostly for the better. All sorts of new technology and consumer goods were becoming widely available and living standards were rising across much of the 'old' and 'new' worlds. Then "bang"...

I thought this was a fantastic book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Easy to read and informative, it combined three things which interest me: history, travel and politics [even if you're only interested in one or two of these things I'd imagine it would still be a worthwhile read]. Although it runs to over 500 pages it's a book you can dip into and out of at your leisure as each chapter, at around 20 pages, can be read as a stand-alone essay on the featured city. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Great War of 1914-1918 and we commemorate those who were killed, we need to ensure we remember them not just as soldiers but also as people. To do that we need to understand the world which formed them, the culture they came from and the times they lived through. Welcome to 1913, the world as it was before the Great War.

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