19132013

Most retrospective accounts of the world in 1913 reduce it to either its most frivolous features - last bright summers in grand aristocratic residences - or to its most destructive ones: the rivalries of great European powers, rumbling social unrest in Russia and the angst of Viennese coffee houses. Proposing a different and more expansive portrait of 1913, Charles Emmerson reveals a year in which a truly global society was emerging for the first time in human history.