David Charlwood

1920: A Year of Global Turmoil by David Charlwood is structured primarily as a narrative of the year rather than taking a singular look back at it and assessing it. This approach works surprisingly well as both history and narrative.

First, what this book is not. Though the word global is in the title, this is not part of the broad approach sometimes called "global history." That area is concerned with including long excluded voices, whether colonies or countries long considered as merely pawns or even citizens of major powers who are marginalized within their own borders. A large part of that inclusive and largely recovery work is social and cultural history, inserting ideas and reactions to events that we in the "west" never saw or heard. Those contemporary voices were drowned out at the time and are just now being made more readily available to western, and particularly English reading, people. But this book is a look at what happened during that year with respect to the countries that had imposed the Peace Treaty and who believed that they were indeed in position to control even more of the world than they already did. This is not a heavily reflective book that analyzes all of the events of 1920 from multiple perspectives, not even from all of the perspectives within the countries covered most heavily. To criticize the book for such an oversight is to criticize the book for not being what it never set out to be. Disingenuous at best, self-serving at worst.

With that little disclaimer out of the way, lets look at what the book actually is. It offers a quick chronological trip through the year, illustrating the ways in which the powers that were were blind to many of the issues that had not been settled and had not even been addressed. Taking any one of these areas (Asia, whether India and Pakistan or China, the Middle East, Armenia) would be a great place to examine more closely what happened and do so more inclusively with multiple voices included. But that would be a separate lengthy book for each national and/or geographic area examined in that nature. Here, we are skimming across the year and watching, with the benefit of hindsight, all of the things that would later cause so much death and destruction.

I highly recommend this work to any history reader who wants to consider what keys might have led to such a chaotic century. Charlwood makes a strong argument for 1920 being pivotal rather than simply World War I in general. How the powers acted, or didn't act, how the expected revolutions and revolts that result from major armed conflict were either misunderstood or completely ignored. There is plenty here to propel the story and make the argument, and there is also plenty of pointers for interested readers to delve deeper into whatever aspects of 1920 most interest them.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (meer)