After Nations

From a prizewinning writer, this sweeping global history charts the rise of nation-states in order to explain their multiple failures today - and to lay out what we may expect in the future. For readers of Yuval Noah Harari, Thomas Piketty and Timothy Snyder.
The system of our nations is in convulsion. As American hegemony unwinds, anxious Western countries slide into xenophobia and debt. The liberal ideas and institutions which once made them great are losing their prestige; autocracies like China, Russia and the UAE, by contrast, are rising. Wars and imperial ventures re-emerge as viable solutions for national failures, and - so degraded has it become - few even bother to invoke "international law". 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 nation-state's early formation, and its rise to world domination, to find out why things have turned out like this. Taking us from the fall of ancient empires, and the expansion of European concepts of money and law, right up to the emergence of 21st-century tech firms - a dangerous new form of competition for nation-states - and the restoration of China as global economic centre, Dasgupta shows that the new sternness of states is no aberration, but arises inevitably from their historical purpose. Through astute political and historical analysis, he posits that the time has come to imagine a re-design of the nation-state system -one that corresponds better to our globalized economy and reality.
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.

Rana Dasgupta was born in the UK in 1971 and grew up in Cambridge. As an adult he lived in France, Malaysia and the US before moving to Delhi in 2000.
His first book, Tokyo Cancelled, was published in 2005. Narrated by travelers stuck for a night in an airport, Tokyo Cancelled is a cycle of folktales about our contemporary world of globalization, corporations, film stars and illegal immigrants. It was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Vodafone Crossword Award.
Solo came out in the UK in 2009 and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Set in Bulgaria, Solo follows the life and daydreams of a melancholy centenarian, so embarking on an epic exploration of science, memory, music and failure. Solo has been translated into twelve languages and will be available in the US in February 2011.
Capital: the Eruption of Delhi, his most recent book, is a non-fiction portrait of Rana Dasgupta's adopted city.