1913: Globalization year (Argentina was very rich) - book review, Charles Emmerson, 1913

Uma informação retirada de minhas pesquisas: exatamente cem anos atrás, em 1913, a Argentina era um país muito rico. Medindo pela escala dos Estados Unidos, já então o país de mais alta renda per capita do mundo, os argentinos exibiam nada menos do que 73% da renda dos americanos, à frente da França e de vários outros países europeus. O Brasil, coitadinho, era muito pobre, apenas 10 ou 11 % da renda americana, ou seja, muitas vezes atrás dos americanos.
Atualmente, depois de mais ou menos 80 anos de decadência, a renda argentina não alcança 30% da renda dos americanos, e se situa apenas um quarto ou um terço acima da média brasileira . Isso é decadência para ninguém botar defeito.
Um livro para mostrar como o mundo era globalizado e pacífico, antes da guerra, e para mostrar como tudo pode degringolar num instante. O problema, em 1913, eram os belicosos europeus e os novos imperialistas agressivos japoneses. Cem anos depois, temos americanos e chineses como protagonistas quase exclusivos do grande jogo geopolítico. Creio que a coisa não vai degringolar desta vez, pelo menos não em proporções catastróficas como em 1014.
Mas, isso não exclui outros processos de decadência: a Argentina de maneira continuada, e o Brasil de maneira acentuada. A degradação moral do Brasil e no Brasil é muito mais avançada, e mentalmente perturbadora, do que a decadência material. Esperamos que não dure 80 anos como no caso argentino.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida


Charles Emmerson:
1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
(Public Affairs, 526 pages, $ 30)

The Year of Globalization

The year before World War I, the world enjoyed a peaceful productivity

 so dependent on international trade and cooperation that general war seemed impossible.

The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2013

Enlarge Image

David McMacken

By MARK ARCHER

Charles Emmerson's book anticipating next year's centenary of the beginning of World War I is ambitious in scope. Each of "1913's" 20 chapters is dedicated to a different city and not just to future belligerent capitals like Berlin, Paris and London but also to Beijing, Buenos Aires, Detroit, Tehran, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Algiers and Mumbai. Mr. Emmerson's aim is "to paint a truly global picture of the world in 1913," and he asks that we resist seeing it "through the prism of what happened after it."

In this, "1913" contrasts with the best-known account of the period, Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914" (1966), in which she argued that the drumbeat of war sounded increasingly loudly in the decade up to 1914. Written not long after the Cuban missile crisis, "The Proud Tower" more closely reflected the Cold War anxieties of her own time than the general optimism of the prewar years. Had a "hot line" existed between the European powers in 1914, as was installed between Moscow and Washington after Cuba, it is very likely that war could have been avoided during the five weeks of diplomatic crisis that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on June 28, 1914.

In reality, when war came, it came out of a sky that had seemed cloudless to most people in the world, who knew almost nothing of war of any kind and had been raised to doubt that it could ever trouble them again. This is the world Mr. Emmerson describes—"as it might have looked through contemporary eyes, in its full colour and complexity, with a sense of the future's openness." He does this by drawing upon an impressive range of contemporary source material, ranging from travel guides and memoirs to unpublished diaries, newspaper reports and diplomatic memos. They give a vivid portrait of the rapid changes occurring in daily life around the globe.

"Thank God for Now!" Mr. Emmerson quotes one enthusiastic Winnipegger in May 1913, "these present times are the greatest and the best the world has ever seen." This is not the war-haunted world that Tuchman portrayed, but it too bears the uncanny imprint of the time in which it is written. Like today, the world in 1913 enjoyed a peaceful productivity so dependent on international trade and cooperation that the impossibility of general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms. Mr. Emmerson points out that the volume of world trade reached a share of global output in 1913 that it was not to surpass until the 1970s. He quotes an advertisement for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. in "The China Yearbook 1913"; it listed its branches around the world and promised a global banking service to facilitate the lives of its globe-trotting customers. "Plus ça change," Mr. Emmerson remarks.

Thanks to intercontinental telephone cables, transcontinental railway lines and faster oil-fired ships, the world had never seemed more connected and more frontier-less. Globalization, Mr. Emmerson writes of 1913, quoting the economist John Maynard Keynes, was considered "normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement." Travel, previously a pastime of the rich, had become a middle-class pleasure as well, thanks to the railway revolution and the hotel industry it fueled. Annual world trade fairs, such as the Exposition Universelle et Internationale held in Ghent in Belgium in 1913, and the proliferation of international trade associations and standards committees were a sign to many that the commercial interdependence of nations made war unprofitable as well as unthinkable. Indeed, the willingness of the great powers to act together had been shown as early as 1900 in the response to the Boxer Rebels surrounding the Western embassies in Beijing. An international relief expedition comprising soldiers from Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Japan and the U.S. successfully lifted the siege.

Two peace conferences in 1899 and 1907 had sown the seeds for an international court to arbitrate between states, and in August 1913 it found a home in the newly built Peace Palace in the Hague, funded by the U.S. steel magnate and peace activist Andrew Carnegie. The detail that Mr. Emmerson fails to add is that its convening was to be voluntary. It was expected that states would choose the court over the battlefield. Yet when localized disputes arose, as they did in Morocco between France and Germany (in 1905 and 1911) or in the Balkans between Austria and Serbia (in 1912 and 1913), none of the great powers invoked the ideal of supranational peacemaking enshrined at the Hague. They instead settled for side treaties with other states that, while temporarily preserving peace, proved the catalyst for the greater conflagration in 1914.

Population growth, Mr. Emmerson explains, was the major impetus for world trade. In the 30 years to 1913, he notes, Britain's population increased to 45 million from 35 million and Germany's to 68 million from 50 million. France's population, on the other hand, only grew by two million to 41 million—a fact not lost on German military planners or, he says, on the French president, Raymond Poincaré, who successfully campaigned in 1913 to extend conscription from two to three years to maintain the nation's fighting parity with Germany.

The growing demand for foodstuffs and commodities in developed nations wrought many an economic miracle in less developed countries. Winnipeg in the Canadian prairies grew rich on exported grain, Melbourne in Australia boomed from sheep and gold. Argentina was importing wheat in 1870, but, by 1913, was one of the world's largest exporters of grain and frozen beef—shipments of which (largely to Europe) increased five times in the first decade of the century.

To get grain and beef to the coast from its large inland estates, Argentina needed railways, for which the City of London was happy to provide the financing. In 1913, nearly half of the world's foreign direct investment came from Britain, "as much," Mr. Emmerson notes, "as the United States at its peak in 1960." Indefatigable in his references, he even mentions that the Buenos Aires "Baedeker" recommended that tourists visit the La Negra slaughterhouse to marvel at the efficiency of its system of slaughter and refrigeration, which the guidebook considered every bit as impressive as Henry Ford's world-famous automobile plant in Detroit.

When, in 1913, Britain's Royal Navy stole a march on Germany by switching its fleet's fuel from coal to oil—so as to build bigger, faster ships that could re-fuel at sea rather than at coaling stations around the world—it led directly to the British government buying a share in the fledging oil concession in Persia to secure its long-term supply. That company eventually became BP. In 1912, Mr. Emmerson explains, China had overthrown its emperor, whose forebears had ruled for 4,000 years, and in the space of four months established a modern democracy. In 1913, the U.S. became the first of the major powers formally to recognize the Republic of China amid much hope of growing trade opportunities. Plus ça change?

In 1913, Ford's Model T became the world's first global consumer brand. It was being driven in Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand and even Mongolia. Mr. Emmerson describes a cartoon showing a startled Martian looking through a telescope at Earth—to see it swarming with Model T's. Industrial and personal efficiency had become the "all-American cult," in Mr. Emmerson's words. The 1913 Sears catalog, he writes, was "eloquent testimony for the emergence of a society of mass consumption, with new and varied tastes." Its hair-care products included "Gervaise Graham's Hair Color to dye hair, Princess Hair Tonic to grow it and De-Miracle Non-Irritant Depilatory to remove it."

Huge income inequalities existed in society, of course, and Mr. Emmerson's chapter on New York describes how the city was already being criticized as the "New Babylon," a place where prodigious economic and demographic growth had given rise to an out-of-touch ruling class and a vast underclass of working poor. Urban sanitation systems had improved around the world, but cholera outbreaks were not uncommon in cities such as St. Petersburg, where Mr. Emmerson tells us the death rate was higher than in Constantinople and where in 1913 the czar's own daughter contracted the disease. New laws restricting Japanese immigrants from owning land in California or resident Asians from trading in South Africa were a foretaste of racial tensions that were to intensify after World War I.

After 1918, Mr. Emmerson explains in the book's epilogue, world-wide trade atrophied, not least because countries tried to re-adopt the gold standard:

Internationalism had been a fact of life before the Great War. Now it became a cause in itself. . . . Worse, as countries re-entered the Gold Standard at pre-war rates of exchange which no longer reflected their true economic and financial position—forcing themselves onto a financial straitjacket which no longer fitted—the Gold Standard came to be seen as a mechanism for generating economic insecurity rather than one for generating financial stability. In 1931, in the face of the Great Depression, Britain left. The principles of liberal free trade—and of the economic interdependence which this implied—were replaced with aspirations to economic self-sufficiency. . . . Somehow, somewhere, the world of 1913 had gone.

The reader seeking an explanation for the World War I will not find it in Mr. Emmerson's book, something he readily acknowledges. Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" is a much better guide to how geopolitical rivalries and an arms race based on advances in weaponry and the widespread introduction of mass conscription were almost bound to result in cataclysm, and Christopher Clark's recent "Sleepwalkers" is a superlative account of the path to European war in 1914. And yet World War I was not inevitable, and the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms. Charles Emmerson captures all the world's hope and excitement as it experienced an economic El Dorado. "1913" is history without hindsight at its best.

—Mr. Archer is a writer living in London.

A version of this article appeared June 15, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Year of Globalization.