About the years that ended the Great War and launched Europe and America onto the roller coaster of the twentieth century. Filled with tales of exuberant dreams, dark fears, and the absurdities of chance. Lenin and Hitler, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rosa Luxemburg and Mustafa Kemal - these are some of the protagonists in the panorama of a world in turmoil
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.
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.