The Race to the Future

Informationen zum Autor Kassia St Clair studied the history of women's dress and the masquerade during the eighteenth century at Bristol and Oxford. She has since written about design and culture for the Economist, House & Garden, TLS, Quartz and New Statesman, and has had a column about colour in Elle Decoration since 2013. Her first book The Secret Lives of Colour was a top-ten bestseller, a Radio 4 Book of the Week and has been translated into over a dozen languages; her second, The Golden Thread, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award. She lives in London.www.kassiastclair.com Klappentext The story of the world's most epic race you have never heard of. Vorwort The story of the world's most epic race you have never heard of. Zusammenfassung In June 1907 five automobiles, with sponsors including Louis Vuitton, Pirelli, Dunlop and Mumm Champagne, roared over a start line near the Forbidden City in Beijing. Two continents, two months and 8,000 miles later, they had changed the world. Their quest took the racers over mountain ranges, through forests and across deserts. With few roads, they drove on muddy tracks amidst donkeys, carts and people on foot. Their automobiles crashed through spindly wooden bridges and had to be floated across rivers. Rifts developed between rival participants and a global audience followed every twist and turn with bated breath, devouring reports telegraphed to journalists across the world. The Peking-Paris took place on the precipice of a new world, born out of profound social, cultural and technological change. Race to the Future is not only a gripping, immersive narrative of the race, capturing the unbelievable events that took place, but it is a kaleidoscopic exposé revealing how this overlooked moment in history shaped how we live today. From the departure of the horse economy and birth of the automobile, gendered marketing and the secret history of women in motoring, and the invention of the telegraph and emergence of global mass media, to the Communist Revolution in Russia, mass production in America, the subsequent rivalry between the countries, and the First World War, which ultimately redefined the course of history. ...

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The story of the world's most epic race you have never heard of.

Résumé

10 June 1907, Peking. Five cars set off in a desperate race across two continents on the verge of revolution.

An Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a conman and various journalists battle over steep mountain ranges and across the arid vastness of the Gobi Desert. The contestants need teams of helpers to drag their primitive cars up narrow gorges, lift them over rough terrain and float them across rivers. Petrol is almost impossible to find, there are barely any roads, armed bandits and wolves lurk in the forests. Updates on their progress, sent by telegram, are eagerly devoured by millions in one of the first ever global news stories. Their destination: Paris.

More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris provided the impetus for profound change. The world of 1907 is poised between the old and the new: communist regimes will replace imperial ones in China and Russia; the telegraph is transforming modern communication and the car will soon displace the horse. In this book bestselling author Kassia St Clair traces the fascinating stories of two interlocking races - setting the derring-do (and sometimes cheating) of one of the world's first car races against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological rush to the future, as the rivalry grows between countries and empires, building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything - the First World War.

The Race to the Future is the incredible true story of the quest against the odds that shaped the world we live in today.

PRAISE FOR KASSIA ST CLAIR

'Excellent, innovative and idiosyncratic history that will colour your thinking . . . St Clair writes with style, energy and knowledge' SPECTATOR

'Hugely ambitious, sparklingly erudite and wonderfully engaging' PETER FRANKOPAN, HISTORY TODAY