EMMERSON, Charles. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. Public Affairs. 2013. 528 + xvi pp, illus., selected bibliog., notes, index. $30.
CLARK, Christopher The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. HarperCollins. 2013. 697 + xxxii pp, illus., maps, notes, index. $29.99.
In the space of the months --Emmerson's book in March and Collins's in May-- we have two exceptional works of history, appealing to both scholars and lay readers, that mount a serious critique of popular interpretations of the origins of World War I. Both, directly rather than obliquely, are critiques of the popular (and outstanding) works of Barbara Tuchman -Emmerson takes on her The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966) and Clark the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August (1962).
Both are substantial works, by historians who are exceptionally widely read. They write like angles and spread their nets wide to capture evidence and te3lling examples to support of their arguments. And both point in the same direction: that regardless of mounting world and regional tensions at the start of the 1910s, there was substantial reason to assume that the tensions could be controlled, and if not completely controlled, that the result would simply be another of the regional conflicts that had become endemic from the late 1900s on.
Emmerson's informative and charming book is a Baedecker tour of the world in 1913: not just what was the state of affairs and of mind in the world's capitals -London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna and St. Petersburg--but in places like Winnipeg and Melbourne, Durban and Bombay, Tehran and Jerusalem, Peking and Shanghai and Tokyo. The result is a quite different picture of the world, not of one on the brink of ineluctable world war but a world going on with its business, with a reasonable hope of continued peace, and certainly not the world conflagration that was the First World War. (An example, in 12913, the three cousins -the Russian tsar, the German emperor and the British king--met in Berlin for the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter, princess Victoria Louise, and prince Ernst of August of Cumberland. "When great potentates who are near relatives can meet in public and give full rein to their natural affection," opined the London newspaper, the Daily Graphic, "it is always legitimate to assume the political horizon is clear.")
The message in Clark's magisterial history of the origins of the Great War, a book that will shape the contours of discussion for a generation to come, complements Emmerson's picture but is both more focused and more nuanced. In the introduction to his long and detailed account of what actually happened step by step and actor by actor, in the buildup to this tragic catastrophe, Clark argues that (1) the July Crisis if 1914, the month preceding actual war, was "the most complex [event] of modern times, perhaps of any time so far," and (2) that it is best approached not by asking why it happened but rather how.
"Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question of how invites us to look closely at the sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invited us to go in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilization,. The why approach brings a certain analytical clarity, but it also has a distorting effect, because it creates the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure; the factors pile up on top of each other pushing down on events; political actors become mere executors of forces long established and beyond their control."
This attention to questions of how rather than why leads to a step by step analysis of what actually happened in increments, not in bloc, and who the actors were and why they behaved\ as they did at each step. Along with that, Clark shows how attitudes changed during the two decades leading to the war, provoking a final break between old allies and invoking an acceptance of military means as the final, though not always desired, end to international confrontations.
A book this detailed could be deathly boring but it isn't, not at all. This is a book filled with peoples -the story it tells is rife with agency--and Carlson (like Emmerson as well) writes a vigorous and engaging prose.
Emmerson's is a very good book and a welcome addition to the literature of pre- and World War I. Clark's book should prove to be a classic. Both are great reading, not just for the scholar but for any enthusiast of good history writing.
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Reviews with images
Great book, but print too small to read
Well written historical anology for history buffs, but the paperback edition is more than 600 pages and the typeface so small that reading more than a few pages either gives you eyestrain or puts one to sleep. If you are the author (Clark) please don't let your publisher do that too you again, or much of your efforts will go unnoticed or unappreciated.
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