Author: charlesemmerson

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…