E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, 1987
Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 2002
Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918, 1997
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, 1988
Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, 2011
Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920, 2009
Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War, 2001
Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 2012
Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922, 1996
Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918, 2010
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography, 2011
Michael Neiberg, Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, 2011
Gary S. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, eds, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914, 2010
Sevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and Production, 1987
John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation, 2005
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1994 edition
David Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany, 1982
Norman Stone, Europe Transformed, 1878–1919, 1983
Jay Winter, ed., 1914–1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, 2001
Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II, 2006
Culture and Society
Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914, 2008
Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul, 2010
Julia Boyd, A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking’s Foreign Colony, 2012
Liliane Brion-Guerry, ed., L’année 1913: Les formes esthétiques de l’æuvre d’art à la veille de la première guerre mondiale, 1971 (volumes 1 and 2), 1973 (volume 3)
Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay, 2011
Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century, 1999
Vincent Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 1900–1914, 1989
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, 1999
Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A Portrait of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933, 2002
Felix Driver and David Gilbert, Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, 1999
Martin Evans and Amanda Sackur, eds, Empire and Culture: The French Experience, 1830–1940, 2004
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, illustrated edition 2012
Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones and Mary Roberts, Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, 2005
Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization, 1998
Florian Illies, 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts, 2012
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 1973
Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century, 1999
Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1923, 1995
Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914, 2001
Jean-Michael Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism, 2007
Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, 2008
Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City, Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake, 1867–1923, 1983
Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 2004
Mark D. Steinberg, Petersburg: Fin de Siècle, 2011
Solomon Volkov, St Petersburg: A Cultural History, 1997
Memoirs, Biographies and Selected Contemporary Writing
G. F. Abbott, Turkey in Transition, 1909
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage, 1913 edition
E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, Annals & Memoirs of the Court of Peking, 1914
Mendel Beilis, The Story of my Sufferings, trans. Harrison Goldberg, 1926
Henri Borel, The New China: A Traveller’s Impressions, 1912
Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925, 2009 edition
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, 1914
Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918, 1939 edition
Georges Clemenceau, South America Today: A Study of the Conditions, Social, Political and Commercial, in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, 1911
Price Collier, Germany and the Germans from an American point of view, 1913
Theodore Dreiser, Traveller at Forty, 1913
H. G. Dwight, Constantinople: Old and New, 1915
George Dobson, St Petersburg, 1910
S. M. Edwardes, Byways of Bombay, 1912
William Elliot Griffis, The Japanese Nation in Evolution: Steps in the Progress of a Great People, 1907
Paul-Henri d’Estournelles de Constant, Les États-Unis d’Amérique, 1913
Guglielmo Ferrero, ‘The Riddle of America’, The Atlantic, November 1913
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or, Indian Home Rule, 1921 edition Harold H. Fisher and Laura Mateev, Out of My Past: Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov, 1935
John Foster Fraser, Australia: The Making of a Nation, 1911
——, The Amazing Argentine: A New Land of Enterprise, 1914
Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 1913
Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Water H. Page, 1924
Alex Hill, Round the British Empire, 1913
Rachel Humphreys, Algiers, the Sahara and the Nile, 1913
Jukichi Inouye, Home Life in Tokyo, 1910
Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Al Quds Al Othamaniyah Fi Al Mutakrat Al Jawhariyyeh, eds Issam Nassar and Salim Tamari, 2001
Richard Jebb, Studies in Colonial Nationalism, 1905
——, The Britannic Question: A Survey of Alternatives, 1913
R. P. Karkaria, ed., The Charm of Bombay: An Anthology of Writings in Praise of the First City in India, 1915
Harry Kessler, Das Tagebuch, 1880–1837, vol. 4, 2004
Laird McLeod Easton, The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler, 2002
W. Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia: Story of the European Diplomacy and Oriental Intrigue That Resulted in the Denationalization of Twelve Million Mohammadans, A Personal Narrative, 1912
Joseph Henry Longford, The Evolution of New Japan, 1913
Pierre Loti, Les derniers jours de Pékin, 1902
——, Turquie agonisante, 1913
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, 1966
Bernard Pares, Russia and Reform, 1907
Simon Nelson Patten, A New Basis for Civilization, 1907
Antony Phillips, ed., Sergey Prokofiev Diaries, 1907–1914: Prodigious Youth, 2006
Mary Poynter, When Turkey was Turkey: In and Around Constantinople, 1921
Paul S. Reinsch, An American Diplomat in China, 1922
D. Sarason, ed., Das Jahr 1913: Ein Gesamtbild der Kulturentwicklung, 1913
Karl Scheffler, Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal, 1910
J. A. Spender, The Indian Scene, 1912
Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, 2007 edition
Solomon Tshekisko Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa before and since the European War and the Boer Rebellion, 1916
John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico, 1911
Fredrick McCormic
k, The Flowery Republic, 1913
Bertha Spafford Vester, Our Jerusalem: An American Family in the Holy City, 1881–1949, 1951
Luigi Villari, Russia under the Great Shadow, 1905
Dorothy de Warzée, Peeps into Persia, 1913
Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century, 2005
Henry Wickham Steed, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1913
Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, ed. Arthur S. Link, 1956 (originally published 1913)
Sergey Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, trans. Abraham Yarmolinsky, 1921
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Anthea Bell, 2011 edition
Picture Credits
Images have been reproduced by kind permission of:
Deutsche Fotothek: p. 67; Getty Images: pp. 11 (Popperfoto), 73 (Universal Images Group), 82 (Roger Viollet Collection), 85 (DEA/M. E. Smith/De Agostini), 187 (Fotosearch/Archive Photos), 283 (Leemage/Universal Images Group); Guildhall Art Gallery: p. 27; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC, USA: pp. 97, p. 103 (Sigmund Freud Collection), 132, 155, 167, 195, 199, 209, 216, 268, 310, 326, 346, 359, 375, 387, 417, 421; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne: p. 25; The New York Public Library: p. 151 (General Research & Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/Aston, Lenox and Tilden Foundations); Scala: pp. 46 (Kunstmuseum, Basel/© White Images/Scala, Florence), 55 (© White Images/Scala, Florence); TopFoto: p. 40 (© Roger Viollet); Topham Picturepoint: pp. 301, 322; University of Alberta Libraries: p. 254; University of Ghent: p. xvi.
Acknowledgements
1913: The World before the Great War has been a labour of love, a book idea rattling around my head for years but which took a lot of other people’s guidance, patience, wisdom and research to make into what you are holding in your hands today.
After a couple of false starts, Jennifer Joel at ICM and Melissa Pimentel at Curtis Brown helped me get the ideas from my head on to paper. Will Sulkin and subsequently Stuart Williams bought the book at Bodley Head, Lisa Kaufman for Public Affairs. It has been excellent to return to two wonderful publishing operations that still believe in good, serious, nonfiction books. Kay Peddle was at Bodley Head at the outset. Since then, Gemma Wain has been with me in the trenches throughout the writing and production – hopefully without any resulting shell shock. Her expert guidance, occasional cajoling, preternatural calmness and forbearance is tremendously appreciated. This book would not exist without her work. The wonderful cover to the book was designed by Kris Potter. Bernice Davison copy-edited the text to perfection (with the sorry consequence that any remaining errors are entirely my own). Anna Cowling has been in charge of production. Emma Young and Sophie Mitchell at Bodley Head and Jaime Leifer at Public Affairs have been responsible for getting the book out there to the public and to our friends in the media. I was fortunate enough to undertake most of the writing of this book while on (an almost complete) sabbatical from the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), with particular thanks due to Robin Niblett, Bernice Lee and my colleagues there, who universally flourished in my absence.
I owe an extraordinary number of historical debts, too many to list here, more amply accounted for in the bibliography and footnotes. But there are a few which might slip through the cracks if I do not give them particular mention here. The historical profession has produced great researchers, great polemicists, and great writers. I am a great believer in the value of history as an aid to contemporary reflection, and in the necessity for history to have eloquent exponents. I have always been deeply inspired by the awesome narrative skill of the late Eric Hobsbawm, the humanity of the late Tony Judt, the endlessly engrossing writing of Simon Schama, the historical exposition of Norman Stone, the sheer verve of Niall Ferguson.
I remember reading Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers one summer holiday when I was really far too young to be interested in such things, and beginning to dimly perceive the vistas that a great history book can open on to our own times, and the really big questions of power and politics. Timothy Garton Ash’s ability to bring historical perspective on the present, and contemporary perspective on the past – and all this with wit – is a model for how a historical frame of mind can inform our understanding of contemporary politics, interests and ethics. If Britain does such things as ‘public intellectuals’ he must surely be one of the most eloquent and elegant of the breed. At Oxford University, I was lucky enough to be taught by Martin Conway – with a black-and-white photograph of Atatürk brooding permanently on one wall – Robert Gildea, Katya Andreyev, Ruth Harris, Jan Palmowski, Christopher Haigh, Patrick Wormald and W. E. S. Thomas. Studying history at Oxford is probably the single most intellectually exciting thing I have ever done.
Occasionally one reads a history book so sparkling with insight and intelligence, so definitive, or so massive – Margaret Macmillan’s Peacemakers, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, John Darwin’s The Empire Project, Chris Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World – that one is left rather terrified at the prospect of attempting anything oneself. 1913 is necessarily a more impressionistic endeavour than these works. I hope, nonetheless, that it is able to throw a sidelight on the works of other historians, provide their ideas with a different frame, and hopefully lead the reader gently down the garden path into deeper thickets of historical scholarship.
I am indebted further to a number of people who have helped me more directly with the research for this book, either by spending time poring over the newspapers for a particular city in the year 1913 in the British Library Newspaper Reading Room in Colindale, or through looking at diplomatic and other documents, or in other ways. The extraordinarily capable Angus McLaren helped me conduct research on Buenos Aires and Durban (and with the infinitely tricky business of pictures), Rhiannon Evans-Young looked through pages and pages of newspapers for Melbourne and Winnipeg, George Moore attacked Constantinople and helped me get to grips with Japanese politics, while the ever-thoughtful Tom Smith took on Shanghai, Peking and Tokyo. Many thanks to Hugo Service and Martin Conway for sending a number of these historians my way. In between learning Turkic languages, Thomas Welsford guided me to Crowning Anguish by Taj al-Saltanah. In Los Angeles, Walter Dominguez pointed me towards Whitewashed Adobe by William Deverell and the fascinating California Vieja by Phoebe Kropp. Dr Thalia Kennedy helped look through documents on Tehran and Bombay, bringing her eye for the Indo-Saracenic and uncovering hidden gems from the India Office archives in the British Library. (My favourite single line in the book, from a British diplomatic dispatch about Ahmad Shah Qajar, was found by her.) On the recommendation of Tommy Wide, Scott Liddle in Algiers helped translate extracts from Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s diaries from Arabic. Dr Maria Mileeva helped me to fill out and stamp the necessary forms in order to gain access to the wonderfully antique National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, and then talked me through the Russian newspapers for 1913, the originals of which one can still look at. The memoirs of Dmitri Smirnov, the priest from Tobolsk, were found, lost and re-found by her. The first person I outlined the whole book to, in a London pub, was Masha. I am yet to discover where she gets her energy from to be so actively involved in working on European and Soviet art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and still to have some enthusiasm left to impart to me for my own projects. Masha has been my comrade-in-arms on 1913. Her love has sustained me throughout.
Though the last words of this book were sent back to Bodley Head from a motel in Wickenburg, Arizona, most of 1913 was written at my sister’s house in Lyme Regis, in Melbourne and the British Library – a great institution and a fabulous working environment. Having spent so much time there I now rather consider it (worryingly) as a home from home. But I have also benefitted from access to a number of other libraries and archives, and to the helpful staff who make them work so effectively: the Central Zionist Archives, Israel State Archives and Center for Jerusalem Studies in Jerusalem, the US National Arch
ives at College Park, Maryland, the Morgan Library Archive and New York Public Library in New York City, the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Benson Ford Research Center in Dearborn, Michigan, the Los Angeles Public Library, the India Office records at the British Library, the Archives of Manitoba in Winnipeg, the National Library of Russia and the extraordinary resource that is www.archive.org – where you can watch Raja Harishchandra (India’s first feature film, from 1913) and read digitised versions of an extraordinary number of travel books of the era – hugely helpful in working on this book. The organisation and dissemination of knowledge and memory which these institutions represent is of huge value.
In addition, I am lucky enough to have a wonderful group of friends, who inspire me by all the interesting things they are doing and who are very good to talk to about the book – some are BL regulars and have an assiduous record of attendance at The Last Word – but also about pretty much anything else. In one way or another, a huge number have helped me to write this book. They know who they are, and I cannot list all of them, but let me list a few, or even a few more than a few: Alex Burghart and Hermione Eyre, Teresa Drace-Francis and Ronald Grover, Ed Sebline and Cicely Fell, Jacky Klein, Alex von Tunzelmann, Leo Tomlin and Sarah Bryce, Anna Morgan, Judy Fladmark, Zoe Flood, Michael Shaw, Andrew Harrop, Matthew Morrison, Naureen Khan, Nick and Bel Davis, Henry Hitchings, Tannaz Banisadre, Maya Mailer and Dan Vexler, Jasper Goldman, Alison and Jamie Carpenter, Alissa de Carbonnel, Dario Thuburn, Maria Sanchez, Séverine Hubert, Reg Otten, Aurélie Vandeputte and Richard Osman, Keith Campbell, Nina Hobson, Victoria de Menil, Michael Byers, Joanna and Rob Gray, James and Camilla Smith, Phoebe and Ric Clay, Caroline Boon, MK and Hamish Gilder, James Skidmore, Rob Lilwall, Joey Bryniarska, Daphna Jowell, Hugo Service and Anita Hurrell, Alex Hurrell and Clemmie Franks, Victoria Mackay, James Fox, Victoria Elles, Sophie and Ian Irvine, Anna and Mike Palmer, Emma Castagno, Alex Nash, Alix Duff, Toby Stone, Esra Bulut, Pelin and Tom Luff, Galia Rybitskaya, Natasha White, Nick de Mestre, Jesse and Lisa Fahnestock, Alena Mileeva, Nina Butslova, Hema Kotecha, Will MacNamara and Naomi Wood.
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