1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. By Charles Emmerson. PublicAffairs; 528 pages; $30. Bodley Head; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

VIEWED from the capitals of Western Europe, the world looked pretty good in 1913. There were many, it is true, who heard rumblings of war; but this was so often the case in Europe, even after two decades of peace. The Economist was not alarmed. In June 1913 it described the recent entente cordiale between Britain and France as “the expression of tendencies which are slowly but surely making war between the civilised communities of the world an impossibility.”

We got that wrong. Yet the coming slaughter, which would leave 35m dead or wounded, was not inevitable. Europe was not only peaceful but also richer, healthier and arguably more stable than it had ever been. It was also more interconnected. Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George V and Tsar Nicholas II were cousins and socialised together. The latter two monarchs looked very much alike, and the societies they presided over were also close kin.

A hybridised elite travelled the continent, patronising its hybridised music and art. A swelling European middle-class went shopping for the same luxuries in London as in Vienna. And Europe’s workers at least had the consolation of socialism—as preached by the 553 delegates from 23 countries who gathered in Switzerland in November 1912 to rededicate themselves to peace. Despite expressions of nationalist fervour, in Europe a multi-tiered continental identity was emerging.

Charles Emmerson, a young British historian who has previously written a fine study of the Arctic, provides a grand tour of Europe at this fateful time—and then proceeds to Detroit, Buenos Aires, Tehran, Bombay and Tokyo, to 23 cities in all. With barely a nod to the impending calamity, he aims not to explain what caused or was lost to the war, but to retrieve from the partial glare of hindsight the world in which it erupted.

This is no modest undertaking. Mr Emmerson draws from a wide range of sources, including memoirs, billboards and newspapers, to recreate a year that was fairly uneventful. 1913 saw the opening of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and New York overtake London as the world’s busiest port; it was a caesura before great events. Yet Mr Emmerson makes no apology for the geopolitical verisimilitude he describes. Not unlike Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, the first instalments of which were published in 1913, his narrative finds coherence in the unremarkable. It can similarly drag; but what emerges is a rich portrait and an important set of ideas.

Humanity was less shaped by the Great War than is often supposed. Rather, the world of 1913 was quite like that of 2013: modern, substantially urbanised and, even as Woodrow Wilson set about slashing import tariffs, thriving on global trade. The report of a bad harvest in Canada could mean a fall on the London stockmarket the next day, and the arrangement of imports of Russian wheat by the end of the week. The European empires augmented these linkages; advertisements in one London paper recommended holidays in Sudan, with travel by “express steamers and sleepcar trains-de-luxe”. Yet challenges to colonial rule in India, South Africa and elsewhere, were becoming louder, partly due to the same global forces.

Though some features of the world in 1913 seem strange—including the riches of Argentina—most are familiar. Yet with that comes a troubling corollary. In the current testing of European unity, the reassertion of the nation state and insecurity engendered by rising powers, the world in 2013 looks a bit discomfitingly like that of 1913.