Charles EmmersonCritiques

Thorough and entertainingly written. But the main problem with this book is how quickly parts of it feel dated. Although published in 2010, the state of affairs in economics, geopolitics, and climate change are moving so rapidly that book occasionally feels much older.

Lots of history I was not fully aware of. I feel as though it grounds my thoughts on future events.½

For me the main value was the overview of the not-the-usual suspect cities, i.e. Winnipeg, Melbourne, BA & etc. Emmerson is judicious if not pathbreaking in his judgments and certainly achieves his stated objective of "lead[ing] the reader gently down the garden path into deeper thickets of historical scholarship."

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 by Charles Emmerson is an extensive history about the close of World War I and its early aftermath. Emmerson is a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House working on resource security, foreign policy, and global geopolitics. He is the author of The Future History of the Arctic and 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. He was formerly a writer for the Financial Times and continues to publish regularly on international affairs.

The First World War changed the entire world dynamic. Empire waned as the British Empire began to lose control in India, leaving thousands dead. Physics changed when a German-born scientist received the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect (not relativity). Sigmund Freud changed the field of psychology with psychoanalysis. A Russian exile living in Zurich would make an almost unbelievable train trip back to Russia and lead a revolution. He would work with Leon Trotsky and meet with a Georgian bank robber who would become the General Secretary of the Communist Party and create a different revolution. The US and Woodrow Wilson would rise and quickly fall from prominence in European matters. The US had its own problems at home, including violent racism. Democracy spread in some countries and retracted in others. In defeated Germany, the army fought communists in riots, and a young Austrian immigrant and WWI veteran began his to power. In Italy, another war veteran would lead 30,000 Blackshirts to the March on Rome. With the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, a young leader would become the namesake of his country. The map of Europe was redrawn moving borders and creating and destroying countries. In the Middle East, England and France divided the land and spread their influence. It was not the same world as it was in 1914.

In most basic histories, readers are led to believe that the Treaty of Versailles was the cause of the unsuccessful peace in Europe. In reality, it was much more than that. It was the start of a different era in many aspects -- Industrialization, mechanization, nationalism, science, and worker's rights. Even in art, modernism rose in literature and art. To many, this was as great of a shock as the political upheavals.

Emmerson explores the complexities of the tail end of WWI and the beginning of the Interwar years. Dividing the book's chapters by year, the reader will see a timeline that switches between countries and people in a coherent manner. This division is practical because it shows the flow of history on the whole instead of individual nations. This is the beginning of the interconnectedness of all countries rather than just the influence of regional powers. It was the beginning of a new world, new ideas, modern science, and unfortunately the beginning of a darker side of the future. A well done, extensive history, of a significant but little-studied period.

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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 liked this a lot more than the last such book I read.

This is the kind of cultural history I just cannot engage with. The book tries to describe the culture and mood in several major European cities and a couple of American cities in 1913. Basically, O feel like the reader either has to be already familiar with the various culture trends and arts the author mentions and just want to be reminded of them or the reader would be unfamiliar with them and willing to use this as a starting point and then do a lot of outside reading, searching etc. I found it tedious.

I am reading two books about 1913, the year before the storm called WW I. The other is more a history of European culture that existed in WW I. This book is more a panoramic view of the entire world as it existed just before WW I from Vienna to Calgary in Canada. From the French Empire to the British Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
This clearly shows how WW I was such a watershed event in history. It was the true death of so many empires: Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, etc. and a fatal blow to the British and French Empires. Although the latter lingered on until After WW II.

Most books about the run-up to WWI focus on the power brokers in Europe, and in so doing, make the war sound anything but avoidable. Emmerson, on the other hand, keeps his ear to the ground trod by commoners in his survey of the state of mind in over twenty cities across the globe, drawing upon accounts in newspapers and magazines, travel memoirs and diaries. At this level, war seemed very remote indeed. European monarchs were all related, after all; vacations were taken abroad at all levels of society; food preferences were becoming global; and some cities were beginning to look interchangeable, in spite of their putative exoticism. John Maynard Keynes pronounced globalization "normal, certain, and permanent.…”

For those with little background in the history of the beginning of the twentieth century, this book provides a very good, if short, summary of what had been going on not only in Washington, London, Berlin, and Vienna, but also in such “far-flung” places as Winnipeg, Algiers, Tehran, Shanghai and other areas commonly ignored in books about the background of WWI.

We found not much new in this book, but we have read a lot of history, and it was still entertaining enough not to abandon in spite of covering familiar territory. For those who want a guide to the world before taking on The Great War, this is an excellent place to start.

This is an enjoyable book with an interesting proposition - it is an historical snapshot of the world in 1913, one year before the start of WWI. It does not attempt to set out the causes of the war, merely to give the reader a feel for the normality or otherwise of lives lived just before everything went dark. And the picture is mostly one of normality. There are clearly clouds on the horizon, but few expected apocalypse. The vignettes of the various cities of the world are telling and well chosen. The reader gains a great appreciation of the context of the times.
Of course, the great unasked and unanswered question is: how do we know that our normality is not transient and that a new dark chapter is not about to fall on us? We don't. But this book encourages you to think of the future as being something beyond more of the same.
Read July 2013

An excellent book covering many angles of the Arctic: history, politics, war, ecology, resource exploration. Most books on polar subjects concern the history of exploration; while aware of this, the book takes in the many other facets of its life now and projected into the future, both affecting the region and the wider world.½

Used - good condition