The World before the Great War

1913

A portrait of a world on the precipice of war – and the brink of globalisation.

Every so often a book comes along that simply must be read. 1913 is such a work. Luminous and majestic, rich in detail and stunning in its depth of research, 1913 is a sweeping and haunting portrait of the world on the edge of the precipice… Read this book, but be prepared to stifle at the end of every page an urge to scream out a warning to those long since dead that they must take another road

Charles Emmerson explores an endlessly interesting question: How did the great glossy world of the European Empires come to grief in 1914? This is a most elegantly written book and should stand comparison with the much older classic, Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower

PROFESSOR NORMAN STONE, author of World War One: A Short History

A masterful, comprehensive portrait of the world at that last moment in its history…

If Downton Abbey still colours your impression of what Britain was like on the cusp of the First World War, 1913 could be a useful corrective

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

Presents the true nature of the time, poised in hope

For  anybody wanting to understand this time period, including individuals  with a keen interest in the events of the Great War, this is a must read  book which helps portray a rather different picture to what many might suspect

Emmerson has done his homework. His book girdles the earth in an impressive fashion and conjures up a world we have lost

With a few deft strokes, Emmerson conjures an air of looming catastrophe

A fascinating tour that reveals a truly global society emerging for the first time in human history

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

Leaves  readers with an astonishing panorama of bustling human activity in  places as different and as far apart as London and Winnipeg, Tokyo and  Detroit

Where Emmerson really scores is in the nuggets of detail

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

There is so much that captivates, particularly the entertaining social detail and anecdote

An ambitious, subtle account of the way the world was going until the first world war changed everything

A consistently brilliant survey… The conception of 1913 can thus be described as a smart idea. Its consummation is, frankly, astonishing… A world that was about to embrace death is brought to life with wit, sharpness and occasional delicacy

This ambitious panorama of a world on the brink throws up comparisons that are constantly provocative and fascinating

1913 has narrative verve and insight

What emerges is a rich portrait and an important set of ideas

[Emmerson]  takes the reader on a fascinating trip to the brash, bustling cities of  North America, before heading off to places as diverse as Buenos Aires  and Bombay

[Emmerson’s] entertaining tour d’horizon is both witty and charming.

A wonderful portrayal of a world before it was cataclysmically changed, a world very different from ours but with some frightening similarities

Brings the fantasies, anxieties and passions of city-dwellers immediately prior to the First World War eloquently to life

Emmerson provides a real sense of 1913 by combining details of individual lives with sweeping international trends: one of the great pleasures of this book is to see parallels between then and now

Unique... A high-definition snapshot of the world as it stood a century ago

A series of vivid vignettes... Offers fascinating glimpses of everyday life

A wonderful portrayal of a world before it was cataclysmically changed by war

CHARLES EMMERSON was born in Australia and grew up in London. After graduating top of his class in Modern History from Oxford University he took up an Entente Cordiale scholarship to study international relations and international public law in Paris. The author of The Future History of the Arctic (2010), he writes and speaks widely on international affairs. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs).

‘If Downton Abbey still colours your impression of what Britain was like on the cusp of the First World War, 1913 could be a useful corrective’ Scotsman 
 
2018 marks the centenary of the end of the Great War. What was the year before the war really like? 
 
1913 is usually seen as little more than the antechamber to apocalypse. Our images of the times are too often dominated by last summers of upper-class indulgence or by a world rushing headlong into the abyss of an inevitable war. 
 
 1913: The World before the Great War proposes a strikingly different portrait: told through the stories of twenty-three cities – Europe’s capitals at the height of their global reach, the emerging metropolises of America, the imperial cities of Asia and Africa, the boomtowns of Australia and the Americas – Charles Emmerson presents a panoramic view of a world crackling with possibilities, from St Petersburg to Shanghai and from Los Angeles to Jerusalem. What emerges is a rich and complex world, more familiar than we expect, connected as never before, on the threshold of events which would change the course of global history. 
 
‘A masterful, comprehensive portrait of the world at that last moment in its history…’ Spectator

How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North and Why it Matters to the World

The Future History of the Arctic

A vivid, visionary exploration of the Arctic, the forces that have shaped it, and its emergence onto the main stage of global affairs.

As reviving as a blast of polar air, bringing the Arctic into wonderfully clear focus; one of the most impressive accounts of the contemporary Arctic I've read

An excellent primer to the economic issues of a region so recently and rudely thrust into the geopolitical limelight

It's rare to find books that treat [the Arctic] as something other than a chilly adventure playground or an excuse for reams of purple prose. Thank goodness, then, for Charles Emmerson... Ruthlessly efficient

A fascinating, personal and visionary book.  Splendid

Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, author of A Blueprint for a Safter Planet

An expert on geopolitics, he writes with insight and authority

Explores and greatly extends the issues ... insightful analysis

Commended for [its] crisp, easily digestible prose...clarity...avoidance of sentimentality  or over-obsessive attention to detail

Required reading for anyone who wants to know more about this increasingly important region

This engrossing book will fascinate would-be explorers, foreign policy buffs and all those who care about our global environment. Charles Emmerson shows why the world's ice cap is where much of our world's future history will be written

Chris Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University, Chairman of the International Crisis Group; Former European Union Commissioner for External Affairs

Deeply insightful... His account is always clear-headed and elegant, weaving an extraordinary range of subjects into a compelling narrative

Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum

CHARLES EMMERSON was born in Australia and grew up in London. After graduating top of his class in Modern History from Oxford University he took up an Entente Cordiale scholarship to study international relations and international public law in Paris. The author of 1913 : The World Before the Great War, he has also written numerous articles for a variety of newspapers, as well as speaking widely on geopolitics to university, literary, government and business audiences.He is a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs).

Long at the margins of global affairs, the Arctic now finds itself at the frontline of issues which will challenge and define our world in the twenty-first century: climate change, energy security and the struggle for the world's resources, the return of great power competition and the remaking of global trade patterns. 
 
In The Future History of the Arctic, geopolitics expert Charles Emmerson weaves together the history of the region with reportage and reflection, revealing a vast and complex area, loaded with opportunity and rich in challenges. Travelling from the oil-fields of Prudhoe Bay and the Russian port of Murmansk to the shores of Greenland and the militarised borderlands of northern Norway, he brings the contemporary Arctic to life and explains why what happens there matters to the world.

Charles Emmerson

Ricochets the reader around the globe, providing a visceral sense of the power and pace of the whirlwind that in the wake the Great War birthed the world as we know it. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait, brilliantly curated and elegantly executed, of a world on the cusp of modernity

A remarkable book… An amazingly audacious and completely innovative way of writing history … immediate and gripping

An ambitious, original, seductive and important work

Brings this extraordinary time to life with great vividness by evoking key moments from the daily lives of a dazzling variety of people

Emmerson skilfully tells the story of this lingering end to the Great War and Europe’s subsequent and dramatic transformation

Emmerson… vividly bring[s] out…the sheer unpredictability of events, the role of personality and pure chance…that lay behind the tidier narrative which…we label ‘history’

In its intimate details and its grand overviews, Crucible is a compelling patchwork depiction of an era

The fragmented form of Crucible matches its content… Though never formless, Emmerson’s book dramatises that variegated chaos, dodging to and fro across the globe and veering between tragedy and farce, high politics and low culture

Writing in the present tense, the author hops and skips around the capitals of Europe…giving us short, erudite and often colourful snatches of the lives of a series of individuals which when taken together describe the crucible in which the world is changed

Crucible… somehow metastasises into one’s consciousness… The reader is…thrown raw, wet entrails and left to divine them. It’s unsettling, entertaining, aggravating and intriguing

The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917–1924

'Gripping . . . An amazingly audacious and completely innovative way of writing history' WILLIAM BOYD 
 
An enthralling narrative history with an international cast of characters that captures this definitive period after the close of the Great War. 
 
Lenin and Hitler, Einstein and Hemingway, Josephine Baker and Rosa Luxemburg, Marcus Garvey and Mustafa Kemal: key players and participants in a world on the cusp of modernity, at a moment when anything seemed possible. 
 
As the First World War reaches its awful climax, a shockwave of creative destruction is released. Europe is torn apart by revolution. America is in flames. A deadly pandemic stalks the globe. The curtain rises on a dangerous and exciting new era not unlike our own: of populists and prophets, freedom fighters and fascists, radical new ideas and clashing ideologies contesting an uncertain future. 
 
Crucible is the collective diary of this era, filled with vaulting dreams, dark fears, grubby ambitions and the absurdities of chance. Encompassing both tragedy and humour, it brings immediacy and intimacy to a moment of deep historical transformation - with consequences that echo down to today. 
 
'Dazzling . . . A compelling patchwork depiction of an era' TLS 
 
'This buoyant study of life after the Great War illuminates the part that chance plays in history' Observer

Charles Emmerson

Praise for Crucible

Ricochets the reader around the globe, providing a visceral sense of the power and pace of the whirlwind that in the wake the Great War birthed the world as we know it. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait, bri ...

A remarkable book… An amazingly audacious and completely innovative way of writing history … immediate and gripping

An ambitious, original, seductive and important work

Ricochets the reader around the globe, providing a visceral sense of the power and pace of the whirlwind that in the wake the Great War birthed the world as we know it. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait, bri ...

A remarkable book… An amazingly audacious and completely innovative way of writing history … immediate and gripping

An ambitious, original, seductive and important work

Ricochets the reader around the globe, providing a visceral sense of the power and pace of the whirlwind that in the wake the Great War birthed the world as we know it. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait, bri ...

A remarkable book… An amazingly audacious and completely innovative way of writing history … immediate and gripping

An ambitious, original, seductive and important work

Books by Charles Emmerson

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