After Nations

From a prizewinning writer, a sweeping global history of the birth of nation-states and the consequences of their failure, for readers of Thomas Piketty and Timothy Snyder

The system of nation-states is in convulsion. As American hegemony unwinds, anxious Western countries slide into xenophobia and debt. Liberal ideas and institutions are losing their prestige; autocracies like China, Russia, and the UAE, by contrast, are rising. For those most completely abandoned by nation-states, meanwhile, there is no future except through life-threatening migration. All in all, the global political order offers human beings ever fewer securities—and ever more threats.

Rana Dasgupta traces the formation and rise of this system in order to explain the cause of its multiple failures today. He takes us from the fall of ancient empires and the expansion of European concepts of money and law, right up to the emergence of twenty-first-century tech firms—which present formidable competition to nation-states—and the epochal restoration of Chinese power. He posits that the time has come to develop a new conception of citizenship, law, and economy—one that corresponds to our own globalized and ecologically fragile condition.

An urgent work of astute political and historical analysis, After Nations is an essential text for anyone looking to understand why we seem to be losing our political hold on the world, and how we might try to restore it.