After Nations

A Foreign Policy Most Anticipated Book of the Year

“Beautifully written, based on a wealth of reading and full of sharp observations . . . Dasgupta’s book is a timely one. He is right to insist that the ‘nation-state is not natural or immutable.’ He is also right to urge that we should be responding to these challenges with fresh forms of political creativity.” —Financial Times

“What makes After Nations compelling is its range. Theology, colonial property law, climate change, [and] artificial intelligence are not treated as separate debates, but as interconnected strands of one political story. The argument unfolds with intellectual confidence. . . . It asks readers to think rather than react.” —Aaron Bastani, Novara Media

“After Nations is a brilliant and visionary book. The sweep of Dasgupta’s analysis is breathtaking, but so is its bite. He does not traffic in utopias; rather, he sees the failings of our present systems clearly enough to imagine and sketch a theological, financial, legal, and ecological revolution. A must-read for anyone who wants to choose hope over despair.” —Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America

“Simply astonishing—After Nations offers an original perspective on the recent history of world affairs, and in the process opens new vistas onto the future of global politics. Dasgupta is consistently insightful, thought-provoking, and on point. Above all, this book is a call to rediscover our species’ most basic and important form of freedom: to create new social worlds and alternative political realities.” —David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“The definitive story of the nation-state could only have been told at its end. God, money, law and nature were harnessed to forge the state—but now each force is undermining it. Fluidity is the norm of history, whether under empires of the past or—as Rana Dasgupta imagines in this sweeping narrative—through a new constitution for civilization co-created by all of us: citizens of the new Enlightenment.” —Parag Khanna, author of Connectography

“A splendid book.” —Branko Milanovic, author of The Great Global Transformation

“With After Nations, Rana Dasgupta has given us the new political breviary of our century. It is the most incisive, urgent, and necessary reflection on political philosophy I have read in decades — the first in a very long time that does not leave me with a sense of despair, but instead fills me with profound hope. A new classic, the twenty-first century’s counterpart to Hobbes’s Leviathan.” —Emanuele Coccia, author of The Life of Plants and Philosophy of the Home

“Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations is a tour de force, an astonishingly comprehensive and exceptionally eloquent, at times wry, account of how humanity has arrived at this moment of global crisis, and how we the people may yet create parallel systems that will deliver what the nation-state no longer can, and never fully did.” —Mira Kamdar, author of India in the Twenty-First Century

“After Nations is an innovative and erudite historical reflection on our contemporary crisis. Dasgupta provides a riveting global account of how the nation-state established itself. But, Dasgupta argues, this success of the nation-state was both contingent and fragile. It is increasingly ‘not fit for purpose,’ undermined by the very forces it unleashed. His book boldly sketches out a vision for what might come After Nations.” —Pratap Bhanu Mehta, author of The Burden of Democracy

“A provocative thought experiment in what might succeed the nation-state . . . [After Nations is] a novel, sobering approach to geopolitics that invites rethinking how the world is ruled.” —Kirkus Reviews