Nobody believed a modern war could last so long—but by 1917, Europe had already been at war for three years. The fabric of the continent had unraveled and now, just as the first American troops docked in European ports, the continent began to collapse from the inside: first Russia, then Austria-Hungary, soon Germany, then the Ottoman Empire.Historians have long divided World War I into neat divisions of conflict—1914 to 1918—and peace, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Yet in his new, remarkable history, Charles Emmerson reveals that Europe had already begun its metamorphosis long before the war's end—and that the finale was longer, bloodier, and more complex than we've previously been told. As Russia spiraled into revolution with the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks, Germany was violently combatting communism within its own borders. As civil war fomented in Ireland, Mustafa Kemal was reinventing himself as father of the...

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, violence in the Balkans.In this illuminating history, Charles Emmerson liberates the world of 1913 from this “prelude to war” narrative, and explores it as it was, in all its richness and complexity. Traveling from Europe’s capitals, then at the height of their global reach, to the emerging metropolises of Canada and the United States, the imperial cities of Asia and Africa, and the boomtowns of Australia and South America, he provides a panoramic view of a world crackling with possibilities, its...