Charles Emmerson

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,...