Through the stories of cities from Detroit to Bombay, Winnipeg to Durban, Tokyo to Algiers, the author reveals a year in which a truly global society was emerging for the first time in human history. He proposes a different and more expansive portrait of 1913, returning this world to its contemporary freshness.

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,...