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Charles Emmerson

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

by Charles Emmerson (Author)

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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.”

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ PublicAffairs; 1st edition (May 28, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1610392566
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1610392563
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.85 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,345,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,598 in World War I History (Books)
- #15,576 in Historical Study (Books)
- #51,391 in World History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
215 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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Thomas M. Sullivan

What a Difference a Year Makes

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2014

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We WWI buffs were looking forward to the 2014 centennial of the war’s beginnings with the expectation that it would bring forth a host of new treatments of the conflict. And we haven’t been disappointed. What’s arguably new and different among these works, however, is the fact that several historians have chosen the new (if not unprecedented) and refreshing approach of examining not the just the immediate causes and conduct of the war, but the one or few years before 1914’s “guns of August.”

Charles Emmerson has chosen the year 1913 and styles his work as “in search of the world before the Great War,” and, boy, does he deliver. To this purpose, he uses his extraordinary writing skills and obvious mastery of his subject matter to craft a series of what I would call historical essays treating with a wide-ranging group of cities around the world as a means of portraying their own and their respective countries’ social, economic, and geopolitical situations. It is in my experience a novel and insightful approach which yields a wonderful composite view. And in doing so, he eschews the natural temptation to demonstrate how this or that event or characteristic presaged the subject’s contribution to, or involvement in, the war, and rather lets readers make their own judgments. How well does he succeed? Let me put it this way: if one of these portraits appeared as a stand-alone article in a history or political science magazine, I guarantee the reader’s first reaction would be to wonder how to round up more of the same.

As I finally, and regrettably, finished “1913,” I thought that despite all the world’s troubles portrayed therein, there were also many reasons for hope of a better world, hope that was extinguished by the actions of a frightened young man with a small-caliber pistol in an obscure European town. However well you think you understand the causes and course of World War One, I believe you’ll have a finer and deeper appreciation after reading “1913.”

15 people found this helpful

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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.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

L.W

Highly readable account of the world as it was in 1913.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

The book while leaning towards a European focus also makes sure it includes North America, Africa, Asia and South America. The focus is on various capital cities from Brussels to London to Washington to Buenos Aires to Toyko to St Petersburg.
The build up to WWI has often framed purely in terms of rising nationalism and xenophobia across Europe, the truth however is more complex as the book extensively explores. Middle-class Europeans often travelled and mixed around Europe with ease, as Emmerson points out there were 100,000 Germans living in London alone in 1913, European monarchies were also often closely related. On the day Austria declared war on Serbia many key figures on both sides found themselves on the wrong side of the frontier. The book is a wonderful window into the past and the issues which troubled domestically at the time, often involving women's suffrage, workers rights, empire and trade. Europe was very much the centre of the world at the time, artistically, culturally, financially and militarily, the USA, Russia, China were not yet the superpowers they later became. This one continent controlled much of Africa and the Middle East and the amount of trade backwards and forwards was staggering. Emmerson also does a fine job balancing the presentation of first hand sources with analysis and also balancing facts and figures with individual sentiments and impressions of the time.

Paris is next, Emmerson focusses mostly on negative material about the decline of Paris in many observers eyes, fitting this into a wider pessimism about the future of France in a country with falling birth rates and a powerful new neighbour on it's doorstep. French art is also discussed at some length.

Berlin is portrayed as a city of paradoxes, a representation then of the Kaiser himself in that sense. Prusian militarism is every in the background.

Rome while dismissed by many at the time as simply a city of beauty and history is revealed to be a centre of Italian ambition for a greater modern Italy. The movement of futurism is also explored.

Vienna next is described while focusing more on the wider contradictions and problems plaguing the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. To many it's very existence is seen as a mystery given it's ethnic and linguistic mixtures.

Other favourite chapters for me were New York, Detroit, Algiers, Mexico City and Shanghi.

Don't buy this book expecting a detailed analysis of the factors leading up to the Great War, instead think of it as a collection of impressions of the world as it stood in 1913. I thought some of it was a bit disjointed though and it's hard to do justice to a country's culture and political problems on just 10-15 pages. All in all though a good effort and an interesting read.

4 people found this helpful

Teemacs

Fascinating read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2014

Verified Purchase

The Europeans of 1913 had the world all sussed out - continuing progress and prosperity on all fronts. Sure, there were minor hiccups here and there, things that weren't going quite according to plan, things perhaps posing vague threats to the Established Order one day (in the case of the UK, the Irish Home Rule question, the suffragette movement, the clamour of organised labour for a fairer deal, the commencement of grumbling among the colonies), but nothing really to worry about. And then the ceiling fell in. This book looks at that world, how it felt, what it was doing, how it saw itself progressing and how ill-prepared it was for What Came Next.

In such a book, knowing What Came Next, there is the temptation to hindsight, to be smarter than they were, to see the omens of the train wreck to come in the way they didn't. Thankfully, Mr. Emmerson resists the temptation to do do this, but in a couple of excellent chapters at the end, he does look at how it all evolved and changed, and how what emerged in 1918 was far different from what seemed to be promised as 1913 changed into 1914.

I think this book captures very well a world that was about to change forever and the repercussions of which change are with us to this day.

One person found this helpful

colinr

Fascinating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2018

Verified Purchase

Very interesting and informative: Emmerson confirms that globalisation is a phenomena that should be placed at the beginning of the 20th century, and not its end. While he points out that world events leading up to the Great War didn't mean that the war was inevitable, I think it's extremely difficult to look at the past without being influenced to some degree by what we have subsequently learned or lived through, hence the four stars. A fascinating read nevertheless.

2 people found this helpful

benthespaniel

An interesting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 16, 2018

Verified Purchase

Not my usual type of reading but after a recommendation I decided to try. I quite like a good bit of history in my holiday reading but this is a period of history that I know little about and had a massive impact on many generations. One could also argue that there is a real risk of history repeating given the current situation that Europe finds itself in.

C. S. D. Robertson

Enjoyable, easy read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 7, 2014

Verified Purchase

A good angle for a development economist as many of the current challenges in the developing world echo those of 1913, from the corruption scandals of the UK to the breathless pace of growth in certain cities. Some real surprises here, such as the booming city of Melbourne being one of the largest in the world. The breadth is good - from Teheran to Tokyo, and from ballet to the rise of Hollywood. Inevitably some chapters are stronger than others. Best recommendation is that I finished it

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