“Of course, it is not possible to escape hindsight. We cannot but look at the world of 1913 through the prism of what happened after it – indeed part of the interest of that year is our knowledge of what happened next. But we can at least attempt to look at the world in 1913 as it might have looked through contemporary eyes, in its full color and complexity, with a sense of the future’s openness. We can do this, in part, by looking at what individuals were writing about at the time and what newspapers were reporting. We can do this by reading the confidential reports put together by diplomats on the spot in Tokyo or Buenos Aires to inform their superiors as to the situation in a particular country at a particular time. We can do this too by looking at those parts of the world which tend to receive less attention from Western historians…because they were less obviously and directly involved in the lead-up to what started as a European war…”
- Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War


There is something absolutely fascinating about the world that exists on the eve of great and unexpected change. What is it to awake in one era, and to go to bed in another? What were people thinking about, talking about, worrying about, just before all their expectations for tomorrow were shattered?

Those are the questions posed and explored in Charles Emmerson’s 1913, a marvelous book about the First World War that never gets close to a battlefield.

***

Call me a pessimistic pragmatist, but the idea of time travel repels me. I can’t think of anything worse than being transported into the past, where I’d almost certainly get run over by a horse, fall into an outhouse, or die from blood poisoning after touching anything.

That said, if some mad scientist lured me into his DeLorean and punched in a date, I’d be tempted to ask for 1913. It was an era of marked contradictions, where peace and prosperity held hands with international tension and preparations for catastrophic war. Technological innovations such as airplanes and automobiles hinted at recognizable modernity, yet for the majority of people on earth, life continued as it had in the 19th century. There were democratic movements, emerging market economies, and globalization. But there was also colonialism, autocracy, and centuries-old empires still holding sway over vast populations.

And up ahead, beyond the hopes and gloom, the enlightenment and repression, there loomed a cataclysmic reordering that started with gunshots in Sarajevo, and ended in stripped fields of churned mud, stinking of blood and rot and mustard gas.

There is a tendency – when looking back on this time – to gild the final antebellum years with nostalgia, a gold-tinted memory of World Fairs and monarchs and holidays on the continent. In 1913, Emmerson tries to scrub away both the myths and melancholies of that vanished yesterday, and replace it with a truer vision of the globe as it unknowingly teetered on its axis.

***

Emmerson’s conceit is not entirely new. Barbara Tuchman, for example, packaged together a series of essays published as The Proud Tower, which attempted a “portrait” of the world before the Great War.

Emmerson doesn’t attempt to paint any kind of portrait, since that implies that such a thing is possible. Instead, he takes us on an ambitious tour, so that 1913 somewhat resembles the old Baedeker’s guide books that are often quoted within the text.

***

1913 has impressive breadth of coverage. Emmerson divides the book into four sections, each containing a number of chapters devoted to individual cities. He begins with the usual suspects of Europe, such as London, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg.

From there, however, the stops become a bit more eclectic and varied. He drops into Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Tehran, Jerusalem, and Tokyo. The diversity of viewpoints is refreshing. My past readings on the First World War have given me a pretty good idea of the mindset of Londoners. It’s interesting, therefore, to see 1913 through the eyes of folks in Bombay or Durban.

***

What you get with breadth, of course, you must sacrifice with depth. My paperback version is 457 pages of text, which is not exactly short. But it’s not long enough – no book is long enough – to fully cover all corners in any kind of detail.

Emmerson deals with this challenge rather idiosyncratically. Before each section, Emmerson gives you a short essay on the associations between the cities included under that particular heading. For example, when introducing Europe, Emmerson dwells on the interconnectedness between nations, observing that when war broke out, many people found themselves on the wrong side of the borders.

For Europe’s leisured classes – and increasingly for the professional middle classes, or at least those who had money and time to spend it – the continent might be experienced as a succession of train journeys from spa town to seaside resort, periodically interrupted, if at all, by the polite enquiries of differently plumed customs officials. These Europeans inhabited a continent of palace hotels, from the newly opened Carlton in St Moritz…to the gold and marble gaudiness of the Negresco in Nice. Those seeking a health retreat might travel to the Radium Kurhaus of St Joachimsthal, where Marie Curie had acquired pitchblende for her studies of radioactivity. Those seeking sun and inspiration might repair to the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Venetian Lido, the setting for a popular German novel of the previous year. In Monte Carlo, say, it would not be surprising to find an English gentleman conversing with an Austrian surgeon in French while he observed the losing streak of a Russian general at cards.

After the forward, Emmerson dives into the cities themselves. Each of his city-chapters are a bit different, thematically speaking. Sometimes the chapter is about the city itself. It puts you on the ground and shows you around, pointing out places to have a drink or meal, and commenting on the architecture. More often, though, the chapter focuses on a single important or illuminating aspect, or simply what’s happening at a particular moment. The chapter on Washington, D.C., for instance, discusses Woodrow Wilson and segregated federal employment. At other times, Emmerson gives a broader historical overview, as in the chapter on Peking, where he talks about the Chinese city in light of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

It should be noted that while 1913 is centered on cities, it’s not constrained by their limits. When we are in Algiers, we learn about the French architectural influences in the city. The larger discussion, though, is about French colonialism itself.

***

The downside to this approach is that not all topical discussions are created equally. Some are more interesting than others. There are chapters that easily could have been removed entirely without harming – and perhaps improving – the overall quality. Of course, I can’t really tell you what those are, since they are going to be different for every reader.

***

Anyone who picks this up hoping for a bottom line is going to be disappointed. This is not a book where a thesis is clearly delineated and then argued to a conclusion. Emmerson gives a vague mission statement about historical perspective, but he isn’t out to hammer down. 1913 is more of a vibe than anything else.

I should also stress that 1913 is not about how the First World War began. Anyone hoping to learn about naval arms races, entangling alliances, the Schlieffen Plan, the Moroccan Crisis, and all the rest, would do well to pick up one of the many books devoted to these subjects. World War I shadows everything, but is very rarely dealt with directly. There are some rumblings, perhaps, in the European cities. Not so in far off Detroit or Mexico City.

I enjoyed 1913 on the terms it set for itself. At the risk of sounding the inspirational poster that is hanging above your desk right now, this is about the journey, not the destination. It is a trip through time to a time when time was running out.world-war-i175 s Anthony241 66

Before Disaster.

The First World War will remain one of the most important events in history. Without it there would have been no revolution in Russia, no collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 and subsequent unrest in the Middle East and Balkans, no world wide rise of communism, no Mussolini, no Hitler and no Stalin. It is because of the First World War that there was a Second World War, holocaust and distraction of European cultural heritage and lives on a scale never seen before. The First World War caused the decline of the British empire, broke up two of the largest continental powers in Europe, Germany and Russia and allowed the growth of Japan and the USA as great powers. Monarchy and the old world fell and from its ashes dictators and brutalism rose.

1913 is the world before this great change in history. It shows how the world was one of progress and confidence. But at the same time one of contrasts and anxiety. Charles Emerson takes the reader on a geographical journey around the world, stopping at all of the major powers to look at the government in power, the economic situation, the cultural landscape and also the underlying social and political issues and unrest. One can read this from cover to cover or pick up a chapter of interest and equally enjoy this book. It’s a book that can be returned to for reference over and over again. It something to offer to most people as I’m sure no one is an expert in China, Japan, India, Australia , the USA, Persia, Argentina or the European powers all at the same time. The scope is impressive.

For me it is a look into what could have been, how the world should have carried on, on track, without the disasters of the early 20th century. Of course it was not a perfect or ideal place, with its many contradictions and paradoxes, but neither is the modern world and humans will never achieve this utopia. However, it was the natural path of development of over 1000 years before. The world was on a precipice of change and the great question is, did anyone feel this?

My criticism of the book may feel petty. But it did annoy me when reading. The book is clearly meant for American readers as there is adequate information on each country, which is dealt with with enough pace and depth for understanding, but also to not get bogged down in gritty detail. Except for America which the author goes on and on and on about, as if it is significantly more important what was going on there. To pass over Germany, the UK, France or Japan at the time in less than a third of that time is clearly bias on the significance of the USA at the time. It is a small gripe, but annoying non the less as I just wanted to get through this at a certain point. Other than that the book is fascinating and worth a read.wwi15 s Jamie Smith500 79

The years before the start of World War I were a tumultuous time. The Balkans were aflame, having fought wars in 1912 and 1913. The German General Staff was warily eyeing Russia’s rearmament program, scheduled for completion in 1916, and discussing ways of using a crisis, or even provoking one, to force war before the Russians were ready. Meanwhile, the Austrian army chief was pestering the Emperor to strike Serbia, knowing that the army was not prepared and knowing that Russia would come its ally’s aid, but hoping to precipitate some sort of Götterdämmerung that would ring down the fading empire in a blaze of war and glory.

There are a number of books that discuss the geopolitical situation just prior to the outbreak of the war, but this is not one of them. As the author makes clear on the first page of the introduction, he is leaving politics to others, and will concentrate on the life of the world’s great cities just before the catastrophe which would spawn two world wars, the rise of communism, the Great Depression, nuclear weapons, and the modern world we know today. When British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey heard the drums of war in July 1914 he understood what was happening and said, "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

How do we make sense of that long-ago world? It would be well to keep in mind Leslie Hartley’s quote that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” We must be mindful of reading our own impressions into those times, but if we are careful we can see echoes of our emerging world in things urbanization, the spread of new technologies, mass communications, and new political ideologies. This book looks looks at the world of 1913 from the perspective of major cities, but for a long-term view of Europe following the fall of Napoleon, I recommend Richard J. Evans’s highly regarded The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914.

The Europeans of 1913 were no better at foreseeing the future than we are today. There had been no major wars on the continent for a century, and many thought there would be none in the future. The Grand Illusion, a best-selling book by Norman Angell, published in 1910, argued that globalization (though he did not use that word) had coupled the world’s economies together so tightly that war would be suicide. It is well to keep that thought in mind when we hear people say that nuclear war is also unthinkable because it would also be suicide.

On the other hand, talk of war was was everywhere. In 1888 the newly crowned Kaiser Wilhelm II had dismissed Otto von Bismarck as chancellor and foolishly allowed a treaty with Russia to expire. The Russians had sought allies elsewhere and formed an alliance with France, so Germany had potential enemies to both east and west, and the Kaiser’s aggressive naval building program had alarmed Britain to the point where it went from being Germany’s closest ally to signing military understandings with France about potential joint action in the event of war. Germany could count on the Austro-Hungarian empire for support, but it was famously the “sick man of Europe,” slowly dissolving under the pressures of rising nationalism among its dozens of ethnic groups.

There had already been war scares before, and many people wondered whether conflict was inevitable. On New Year’s Eve 1914 England’s Daily Graphic newspaper wrote that “while welcoming the fact that European peace had weathered the storms of war in the Balkans, problems in Mexico and the Middle East are particularly worrying. ‘With every opportunity of doing otherwise’, the newspaper noted, ‘1913 has spared us Armageddon.’ But for 1914: ‘wherever we look we see the grim apparatus of war, ever growing, ever squandering the fruits of peace. Well may we pray for a Happy New Year!’” (p. 454)

This book looks at twenty-two cities around the world, in Europe (London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, St. Petersburg, and Vienna), North America (Washington, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Winnipeg), and other parts of the world (Buenos Aries, Algiers, Bombay, Durban, Tehran, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Peking, Shanghai, and Tokyo). Some of the chapters are Baedeker-style travel guides, looking at art and architecture, and others give brief synopses of the social or political events going on, such as the plans for Irish independence or the state of race relations in Washington D.C., where President Woodrow Wilson rolled back decades of progress since the Civil War by resegregating the federal government.

There are also some thumbnail appraisals of key political figures of the time, which give insight into the personalities involved. For instance, “Kaiser Wilhelm II had invested heavily in memorials and monuments to emphasise Prussia’s historical claims to greatness, and to give the place some gravitas. ([Theodore] Dreiser termed the resulting sculptures ‘a crime against humanity’.” (p. 80-81) The Kaiser’s need for adulation seemed silly to other nations, as it does to us today, but he embodied the sentiments of many Germans who felt that their country, which had only come into unified existence four decades earlier, needed to assert its place in the world and be treated with appropriate respect. In a memorable line, the author describes Wilhelm II as “a man who sought to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” (p. 84)

Russia was also a wildcard in Europe’s political calculations. It was useful as an ally, and everyone remembered the essential role it had played in thwarting Napoleon’s ambitions, but its backwardness and hostility to democracy and reform alienated many other nations, which kept it at arm’s length. It was still recovering from the revolution of 1905 that had followed the disastrous war with Japan, and its situation was not helped by the fact that the Tsar, the Kaiser, tried to hide his weakness and indecisiveness behind an aura of bellicosity. “The Tsar’s own theory of government, as one former Russian premier described it in 1912, was positively infantile, ‘I do what I wish, and what I wish is good; if people do not see it, it is because they are plain mortals, while I am God’s anointed.’” (p. 138)

Across the globe the spread of technology was having big social and economic impacts. The airplane was in its infancy, but the telegraph allowed rapid communications between far-flung cities, ships were making the change from coal and reciprocating engines to the more efficient oil fuel and steam turbine propulsion, and, of course the automobile was starting to leave its mark. “Endless innovation in the manufacturing process led, by 1913, to the world’s first fully-fledged production line. Six years after the first prototype Model T had been built at the Piquette plant in Detroit, a single nine-hour shift at the much larger Highland Park plant assembled one thousand cars. The company estimated that it now produced one-third of all American cars.” (p. 199) As an aside, in Henry Beston’s 1928 book The Outermost House, he uses “Ford” as a generic term to refer to any truck or automobile.

How valuable is this book for the student of World War I? It is useful, but not essential. It fills in some helpful details about the world at the time and the men who ran it, but its focus is not on the political calculations that were to lead to disaster. A book such as Max Hastings’ Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, is probably a better introduction to the players and circumstances that were to lead to the first global conflagration.
history-military-ww110 s Marks541,421 1,175

2014 is the hundred year anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war. As a result, history buffs will be treated to a windfall of new books on the wars, many of which appear to be quite good. This is a natural prelude to those books, focusing on the year prior to the outbreak of war.

I enjoyed the book, but it was a bit odd. The plan is for Barbara Tuchman (The Proud Tower) to meet the Baedeker guides for the major cities of the world in 1913. The usual suspects are covered - Londen, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Washington - as well as a variety of cities in the Western hemisphere, Asia, and the British Empire. Each chapter is a separate portrait of a given city in 1913, that profiles its social and political life, recent history, and other events, along with trends needed for the prewar narrative. The material combines general history with accounts from memoirs, travel books, and local shopping guides. The portraits are well done and all very engaging. I found myself surprised by the range of factoids offered about which I knew fairly little. It is a well done tour of the broader world before the war.

OK, so why is it odd? Well, I do not really think the author establishes the discontinuities that are hinted at in the title. The world of 1913 appears at times closer to the world of today than one might expect and in some areas -- for example globalization -- 1913 was well developed and the war was less a discontinuity than a setback. The chapters reveal a series of developments that were well under way by 1913 -- civil rights issues in the US, globalization in world trade, the beginnings of decolonization, the rise of a European consciousness, etc. Sure, the European civil war was a huge interruption between 1914 and 1994 (when the Russians left Poland), especially given the overlapping military, economic, and political conflicts. These have all been written about, however. What is surprising is that in a book looking at 1913 as the year before the war, the picture that emerges is more one of continuity than the author may have intended. He hints at this in his epilog in that the supposed discontinuity between 1913 and the war may be more of a construction and nostalgia than real.

The concluding chapter, by the way, was far too little to add much to the book. It is hard to cover the interwar period and afterwards in a few pages, so perhaps discretion was the better part of valor.

These chapters provide nice journalistic accounts, but it would have been good for the author to provide more guidance. After all, the pictures in each chapter were chosen after the fact to make some points. I don't think anything would have been lost by putting more cards on the table. The history is well done and the author is an excellent writer. The book, while a bit long, is a quick read and is worth the time.7 s Liam Ostermann2,452 58

I read this book in response to that praised Mr. Emmerson's for giving a better more global examination of the year 1913, particularly in contrast to Florian Illes book about 1913, but was disappointed to discover that while it chapters cover cities around the globe from Winipeg, Beunos Aires, Tehran and Tokyo as well as the expected European capitals Mr. Emmerson's book has all the depth of a a 1913 Baedeker guide listing events and places as if they were important monuments or paintings for the dedicated tourist to check off their to do list. Mr. Illes book in contrast although Eurocentric and largely, though not exclusively, looking at the interconnectedness of pre World War I literary and artistic circles, gave a much more, for the reader, thoughtful look at the inter-connectedness of European cultural life and, because it arose unsignposted from the text, allowed readers to discover rather then be told, what was lost in WWI.

My overall judgement is that this book is a great disappointment and, rather then read it, I would recommend you go to many of the excellent works he draws on, such as Frederic Morton's 'Thunder at Twilight' about Vienna on the eve of WWI or Philip Mansell's wonderful 'Constantinople, City of the World's Desire' - to name but two, as ways of understanding the rich and bewildering complexity of the world before WWI. Compared to them Mr. Emmerson's book is simplistic and shoddy and ultimately a let down and disappointment.

I want to apologise for shelving this in such a noncommittal way but it doesn't really fit into my far to numerous categories and didn't want to create a new one for just one history book I wasn't very keen on.disappointing history-europe5 s JohnAuthor 5 books6

Written by Charles Emmerson, an Australian-born scholar connected to London's Chatham House, "1913" is an engaging and fresh take on world affairs on the eve of the First World War. Instead of interpreting or re-interpreting the period through a modern lens informed by what happened during and after the First World War, Emmerson attempts to describe the world as it might have appeared to the people alive at the time--people blissfully unaware of the "Great War" and its destructive consequences. To that end, Emmerson offers a series of chapter-length sketches of different cities in 1913. Besides discussing the major European capital cities (London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, St. Petersburg, and Vienna), Emmerson also considers cities in North America (Washington, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Winnipeg) and in the wider world (Buenos Aries, Algiers, Bombay, Durban, Tehran, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Peking, Shanghai, and Tokyo). These city profiles generally are tightly-written and informative, although a few were too short for my taste, particularly the chapter on Rome. Taken together, the city profiles attempt to demonstrate that war in no way was inevitable or even seemed inevitable to the people alive in 1913. In that sense, the book is a reminder that the future is something that human beings make through their choices and actions. 5 s Carlos Wang288 149

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???????????????????????W. ???(Barbara W. Tuchman)??????????????????????????????????????????????????1913????????????????????????????4 s Nate BriggsAuthor 25 books5

Publishing this book in 2013 gives the author a tidy, 100-year yardstick between today and 1913: which might be considered the last "innocent" year. The last year before most people knew how effective modern technology would be at killing people.

The typical task for the historian is to build a skein of meaning from a list of events. But this is less History than just Inventory: a snapshot of life in many different cities during the year in question.

Essentially just long newspaper dispatches from different parts of the globe.

We spot famous names here and there: Hitler is painting houses in Vienna (where Trotsky is also hiding out) - Einstein gets a job and moves to Berlin - etc.

But there is no synthesis here. No greater vision. No deep analysis.

You'd probably get more insight into pre-war culture by rerunning early episodes of "Downton Abbey".

A decent book to take traveling, though. There's no real linkage between the chapters, so you can dip in, and out, at your leisure. Also not particularly compelling (if you have something else you need to be doing)....4 s Kirsty Darbyshire1,091 56

It took me four months to get from end of this book to the other and I feel I could quite easily reread it straight away and get even more out of it. It filled in some gaping holes in my knowledge. Taking a different approach to many histories it stays at the same point in time, on the eve of the First World War, and goes round the world looking at the situation in many different cities. It starts off in London, goes for a jaunt across the various old cities of Europe, on to the New World cities, out to the rest of the world, stops off to look at the "Twilight Powers" cities Constantinople and Peking, and briefly pops back to London to consider what the next hundred years will bring for the British Empire. I feel a lot of the detail probably went over my head but I still got a lot out of the book. paperback4 s Genni246 41 Read

Emmerson writes a book that seeks the world before World War I as it was actually experienced as opposed to through a retrospective lens. He covers major cities from every populated continent, whether or not they were a major player later. He briefly sketches their past, their contemporary supposed trajectory, the realms of both “high” and “low” politics, as well as the various artistic scenes. There are contemporary quotes that really capture how optimistic some were and how the war was not necessarily inevitable. It is especially interesting to read excerpts from assessments by The Economist. It would not be good to take this work as a single source for pre-war information, but it makes a unique companion.

Something to ponder for today?
“The consequences of militancy, it contended, were that ‘enthusiasts become apathetic and apathetic people become strong opponents’”.
-Charles Emmerson quoting The Economisthistory3 s Nicholas Whyte4,889 187

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3236402.html

The author worked alongside me in the International Crisis Group back in the early years of this century, and went on to greater thinktanky things; in this book, he looks at 1913, the last year before the first world war, from the perspective of twenty-three great cities, starting and ending with London, but visiting the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and the rest of Europe en route. It's a masterly synthesis of what was going on in global politics, pulling together loads of primary sources - newspapers, diaries, etc - to build a clear picture of human politics as it was experienced by the people of the day. It was particularly interesting to get the perspective of cities from outside the European cultural space, such as Bombay, Peking, Shanghai, Tokyo, Tehran. It's quite a long book but a refreshingly quick read.

The concentration on individual cities does mean that two aspects of the world in 1913 are underplayed. First, most obviously, the countryside is seen only in relation to the city. Sure, the cities were where change was taking pace most quickly, but the politics of land ownership and agricultural technology are also fairly crucial drivers and are largely not included. Second, of course you can only pick so many cities; Brussels is not listed in the index, though there are a couple of paragraphs on the World's Fair in Ghent; Ireland's impact on England is described, but not from Ireland's pint of view; we hear from Algiers and Durban, but little from the continent they fringe. And third, there is little space for transnational phenomena - for instance, there is a throwaway remark about the meeting of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, which the Persian delegation was unable to attend; Lenin and Stalin pop up very briefly in the chapter on Vienna, as does Adolf Hitler.

But I guess you have to take your framing devices where you can find them, and I must admit I d this a lot more than the last such book I read.2 s Logan Crossley68 3

I always hated Sundays as a kid because I knew something was ending despite my efforts to prolong it. My dad's asleep on the couch with golf on the TV, and I'm staring up at a ceiling fan trying to absorb the last gasp of the weekend. I kinda shudder to reinhabit the quiet malaise that accompanied that sense of vaguely perceptible loss. It's associated with images and feelings: the crawl of the afternoon sun, a cool sweat inside my house, and a disappearing window for finishing homework too long delayed.

1913 brilliantly captures this feeling, exploring its manifestations across a world whose darker character would be shortly revealed. I find myself currently in a legal academic bubble that yearns for concise, specific, authoritative, and narrow writing; this book provided a welcome break where the historical is allowed to play uncritically with the moral, philosophical, and emotional. Emmerson tries to and succeeds in whisking the reader through a global kaleidoscope, but the mind and heart of both book and author always return to London. It's a fitting angle, because the ultimate symbol of 1913 is an Edwardian midsummer's picnic, a soiree of pomp and circumstance whose revelers preside over a heaving global empire with cracks beginning to show. 1913 (the year, not the book) was Sunday for a long-lost world; I think, in 2019, we're still somewhere in the middle of the week that came after.2 s Adam Balshan571 17

2.5 stars [History]
Writing: 3; Use: 3; Truth: 2.5.

Emmerson writes a decent and unusual work, which presents a blimp's view of 22 international cities in the year before the first World War. The writing was above average. A few of the truths were notable (3.5 stars), but enough material made its way into the book to counterbalance to a 2.5. These include what seems an outsider's view of economics, particularly in the realms of capitalist theory and the practice of monopoly. Class and race concerns became so over-represented in the middle of the book that it almost merited being included in the book's subtitle. We understand that a macro-history this cannot cover all concerns, but Emmerson's treatment of several areas was too superficial, including simplistic representation of colonial attitudes towards the indigenous, Sun Yat-Sen in China, and British Suffragetism.history2 s Milton Soong244 5

A good overview about the vanished world on the eve of the great war. This is similar in scope to Tuchman's Proud Tower and a much more accessible work. It also covers the entire world. There are interesting tidbit about Mexican revolution, the Young Turks, and the end of the Chin Dynasty in China. There are of course the standard coverage of the European and American powers.
Nothing deep or original, but if you are looking for a none-depressing historical survey of the 20th century (all the depressing stuff starts after this), it's a good place to start.
There are a lot of mispronounced foreign words here (the narrator definitely butchered all the Chinese names), even my high school French recognized messed up French pronunciation...history2 s Sally136 5


I wanted to love this, get deep into the world on the precipice of war and "modernity." Unfortunately, I got bored. Maybe more about me than the book. I was looking for something that would knit politics and culture together. The author starts with segmentation by major city. I dropped out.suspended2 s Connor Veitch10

The book "1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War" is a good attempt at trying to make a book of facts more interesting. It takes time to describe certain historical events in great detail and it does a good job at that, but some parts of the book tend to drag, and ends up becoming a pain to read through. The parts of the book that have good pacing are very good and there are many good facts presented.1 Laura?248 3

A fascinating tour of the world before WWI, covering Western and non-Western urban centres. The chapter on Peking was particularly well-written and I gained a greater understanding of what was happening in Asia, Africa, India, and South America which is often overlooked. 1 David Bisset657 6

This is a fascinating study of life in capital cities on the verge of the Great War.1 Rachel Stevenson355 15

A tale of twenty-two cities, moving eastwards across old Europe (London to St Petersburg), north-south along the Americas (New York City to Mexico City), all around the British empire (Winnipeg to Durban, Melbourne to Bombay) and then eastward again across the declining empires (Turkey to Tokyo). Emmerson doesn’t go to Sarajevo: this isn’t a tale of war or even the run up to war but a snapshot of these places, their self-image and place in the world during one year and the effect that these cities, capital or otherwise, had on 1913 – and the effect 1913 had on them. 1 Nancy Ellis1,415 45

Outstanding representation of the world as it was in 1913. Not a history of the causes of the war, but a picture of the world as a whole as it marched towards the Great War. An amazing read! 1 Barbara StonerAuthor 4 books10 Read

"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 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.1 Tamara262 77 Read

Neither here nor there, I'm afraid. I was intrigued by the conceit of examining a dozen or so major world cities in 1913, particularly the fairly broad global selection, but unfortunately the book tends to stray too wide to be really interesting, at least for my tastes. There are snapshots of each city, and those are great, but they're far too brief. Mostly it becomes just a jumping off point for short, tip-of-the-iceberg, ho-hum political histories. So the Tokyo chapter spends a lot of time on the Meiji restoration, Constantinople on the Young Turks, Durban on Ghandi's career, etc. It is a bit of a rock and hard place - for the stuff I was already familiar with, it was just treading water. For the stuff I was unfamiliar with, it was just a dense mess of names and dates I was unly to absorb in any meaningful way.

The political focus also seems to me to undermine the stated premise of the book, which is to try and look at 1913 not through the lense of what was to follow, but the books can't seem to entirely shy away from the things we know would turn out to be important, Ghandi or the mass produced car. Secondly, while there's an admirable attempt at global reach, in practice it still often remains a story of the way other places interacted with Europe, again mostly politically.

So it's an interesting attempt but ultimately fell flat for me because there just wasn't enough of the kind of daily information about these places, in this time, that I find interesting. There was some, and that made it all the more frustrating when the book segued away from discussing technology, culture, fashion and landscape for another half-hearted account of some major political/military crisis. author-male global history ...more1 Ray Minjares15

The book attempts to characterize the goings on in 2013 of various cities around the world. London is the capitol if finance. France is the capitol of pleasure. Berlin is the Capitol of industry. Tokyo is a westernized Asia. Shanghai is a westerner's island in an Eastern world. And we get snapshots of Constantinople, Bombay, and several cities in the United States.

The choice of cities is not particularly well explained. The focus on cities is not quite adhered to. We get mostly a survey of national domestic politics several years before 2014. The characterization of cities and their role in the world is oversimplified.

The author sets an interesting goal for himself, but he fails the reader by not connecting the goings on in these cities to the terrible events to follow. Why, for example, is Durban or Bombay included in his survey other than to illuminate the complicated trappings of British colonialism? Sure, the British empire needed resizing, but the author does not go on to connect this need to the events that followed in the Great War.

The portraits of the cities were themselves rather banal. We get details of life in each of the cities that are probably too much information for a global survey. What is more interesting is how life in each of the cities is different. But the author focused on one city at a time and does not undertake any kind of deliberate comparison.

The book did give me a short history lesson, and made me reflect on the origins of the Mexican revolution or the Great War. But I don't come away from this book terribly enlightened about World War 1.1 Ron253

This is my first foray into a yearlong project, to read about the runup to the Great War, its execution, and its aftermath, in observance of the centenary of that great conflict.

The year 1913 is an interesting year, coming as it did just before things went to hell in 1914. The intent here was to take a picture of the world before WWI ushered in mechanized warfare, the rise of dictatorship, and persistent economic unrest. Despite its many flaws and weaknesses, 1913 was a time of relative peace, prosperity, growing social reform, and technological advancement, especially in the West.

The chapters look at either a city or region and chronicle the chief economic, social, and political issues of the day. And here is where the book stumbles; in avoiding placing the world in the context of imminent war, the author is left with little context at all. The chapters read summaries, without much to unify them or even a unifying concept for each chapter. What I ended up with was a series of snapshots, by region, rather than a portrait of the whole world.

The writing sometimes becomes tedious, and some of the chapters are overlong. Overall, without a narrative to unify the entire piece, it turned into a difficult read, even for a history book. But there is a lot of excellent information there; I'd recommend reading this as you might a collection of short stories, rather than as a cover-to-cover project. This is just one of several books covering 1913; I might check out one of them, just to round out reading on the subject.

ww-i-centenary-reading1 David Shane175 30

A fascinating book - and I think I can say that the author accomplished his purpose, which was to look at the year 1913 *on its own terms*. Most histories, knowing that WWI was about to begin, would see the events of the year as a natural lead-up to that great war - but one of the major points the author is trying to drive home here is that most of the world in 1913 had no idea what was just around the corner. Indeed many of them were celebrating inevitable progress and peace and the unity of mankind. And so perhaps there is a lesson here - many illustrations in our own time as well - that civilization is more fragile than we'd care to believe, and could be lost in a moment.

That may be the forest - the trees are interesting too. Looking at only one year allows the reader to "discover" a lot of history that they probably passed over in their one-semester-for-the-whole-history-of-makind class in high school. In retrospect we also have a habit of making men into clear villains or heroes - in truth, many of their contemporaries, even well-meaning contemporaries, weren't sure how history would judge them (Ghandi is a good example here). (And that is a lesson for our own time as well - perhaps the world was always this confusing.) A recommended book, for sure.1 Matthew Griffiths241 13

This is quite an unusual one really. A brief summary of what the book aims to do is paint a snap shot of several major cities, some up and coming and others well established, before the eruption of the First World War. In this the book definitely succeeded in painting some very interesting scenes. However the thing that confused me slightly is that I feel a better title would have been "In search of the world before the wars". While many of the cities discussed within the book are those that were most affected by the first world war, namely Paris, St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna the author also discusses several other cities that so far as I can tell were far more caught up in the storm that was the Second World War. My confusion isn't intended as a criticism in any way as this was a thoroughly enjoyable read but it did seem weirdly limited at times. Would gladly recommend for anyone interested in a slightly different approach to the history of WW1.1 Norman64

This was an interesting book. Most history focuses on war, this book looked at an age that preceded the abyss that was WWI. It did this from the perspective of the major cities throughout the world.

Of particular interest for me was the background on the activities in Persia at this time; the assassination of Nassar al-Din Shah in 1896. The activities of his son Muzaffar, who died in 1907 and finally, the mismanagement of Ahmad Shah Qatar (the sweet eater) who caused so much trouble for Persia/Iran leading into the century. I also learned some of the earliest decisions that led to much of what took place later...that it was Churchill's "controversial" decision to convert the British fleet from coal to oil that led to the initiation of the organization we now know as BP...and all the problems it created for Iran.1 Norman Metzger74 1 follower

The key to the book's intentions are in the vary last sentence: "At the stroke of midnight 1913 died. The year was 1914." That the world of 1913 did not in the least prepare us for the disaster that come is sharply and wonderfully drawn through sketches of events in 1913 in cities around the world: London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Shanghai, Washington.... It was a remarkable task the author set for himself, driven by his obvious determination not to be superficial but to offer exacting and well-researched detail and do it in a highly readable but hardly glib fashion. 1 George5

As most books describing the immediate time before the Great War do, the parallels between then and now are intriguing. The waining of one empire and the ascension of a new one, internal conflicts of another and increasing nationalism - not to mention a globalised world in the knowledge that international confrontations can have devastating consequences for all.
To choose to portray cities instead of single politicians of the time might seem strange at a first glance, but knowing that in most cases it was the society which forced politicians to act the way they did it makes sense. history1 Lauren Albert1,815 170

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