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 essential 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.