After Nations - by Rana Dasgupta (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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, and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London

"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 and MOVE

About the Author

Rana Dasgupta developed the concepts for After Nations while teaching at Brown University, and wrote the book as a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. His previous books have been awarded the Windham Campbell Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award. He lives in France.