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." ( )

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 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. ( )