After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order

by Rana Dasgupta

What has happened to the nation-state? From a prizewinning writer, After Nations offers a sweeping history of this most unquestioned of modern structures and a bold speculation about its future.

Until recently, the system of nation-states appeared settled and eternal. Not anymore. As American hegemony unwinds and Western countries slide into anxiety and debt, there is a resurgence of tyranny, imperialism and war. It is no longer clear that states can continue delivering ‘normal’ services, let alone defeat inequality and climate change. Even in rich countries, many feel they are being progressively neglected; in some parts of the world, populations are entirely abandoned by nation-states and must build systems of their own.

Rana Dasgupta traces the formation and rise of the nation-state system to explain 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 – the first significant new geopolitical actors to emerge since the inception of 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 globalized and ecologically fragile condition.

Richly detailed, urgent and told with remarkable clarity, 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.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

Audible Audio

Expected publication February 26, 2026

About the author

Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian writer. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He lives in Delhi, India.

His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), was an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization. Billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales, thirteen passengers stuck overnight in an airport tell thirteen stories from different cities in the world, stories that resemble contemporary fairytales, mythic and surreal. The tales add up to a broad exploration of 21st century forms of life, which includes billionaires, film stars, migrant labourers, illegal immigrants and sailors. [1] Tokyo Cancelled was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Dasgupta's second novel, Solo (2009) is an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man. Having achieved little in his twentieth-century life, he settles into a long and prophetic daydream of the twenty-first century, where all the ideological experiments of the old century are over, and a collection of startling characters - demons and angels - live a life beyond utopia.