At Marcellus, we are suckers for well-researched ‘Big History’ books like Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” or Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs & Steel”. Rana Dasgupta’s brilliantly researched “After Nations” belongs to this very select set of books which make you see the world with a new pair of glasses.
For decades, the nation-state has been thought of, and treated, as the world’s natural building block. However, considering the disruptions to the global order over the last few years, it seems that the nation-state looks increasingly unable to deliver the two things it was meant to guarantee – security and prosperity. Conflict and wars in Europe, West Asia and Africa and youth uprisings in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and Nepal bear testimony to the challenges nation-states are facing.
Against this backdrop, Rana Dasgupta, a British writer based in Delhi, delivers an ambitious book which convincingly argues that the nation-state is a surprisingly recent and fragile invention, that empire was the older and more durable form of order, and that we are living through what he calls, after Antonio Gramsci, an interregnum — “The old is dying and the new cannot be born.” This provocative book has been widely, and very differently, reviewed.
In the Financial Times, the Princeton historian Linda Colley reads it as a sweeping history of empire, “beautifully written, based on a wealth of reading and full of sharp observations,” though with serious reservations about what it leaves out. In Frontline, Srikar Raghavan calls the book “as insightful as it is scrupulously researched” and its “multidisciplinary sweep” “a breath of fresh air.” In The Wall Street Journal, the historian Brendan Simms is the most sceptical of the three reviewers — he enjoys its “immense brio” but finds it “thought-provoking but rather chaotic.”
The foundational idea, as Colley frames it, is that the “nation-state is not natural or immutable.” For most of history the dominant form was empire, not nation — only about a quarter of humanity lived in nation-states as late as 1900, and almost half of today’s states were born in the three decades after 1945. Their triumph, Dasgupta writes, doomed a whole lost menagerie of older forms — “city-states, duchies, principalities, emirates, sultanates, caliphates, khanates … condominia, and protectorates.” He builds his history around four surviving archetypes, each tied to a single force — “France and God,” “Britain and money,” the United States and law, and China, “an empire shaped by nature.”
Colley savours the “cameos” (Louis IX paying a fortune in 1238 for what was supposedly Christ’s crown of thorns; Napoleon crowning himself with Roman laurels in 1804), but this is where her doubts begin. Choosing four empires, three of them Western, leaves out Russia and the Ottomans, lets Dasgupta treat the two still-standing empires, America and China, more gently than their conduct warrants. “Most Americans, and probably even a greater proportion of China’s population, do not believe that their respective nations are also empires,” she writes; “yet in many ways, they are.”
Where Colley is drawn to the book’s structure, Raghavan is gripped by the book’s moral force — its catalogue of colonial horror. He dwells on Dasgupta’s telling of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese leader assassinated in 1961, “his corpse hacked to pieces by a Belgian police officer” who kept the teeth as a family heirloom, and on a 1925 US Army manifesto that describes a bomb dropped on a temple as, to “a fanatical savage,” “an indication of the relentless energy and superior skill of the well-equipped civilised foe.” Empire’s cruelty, Dasgupta insists, was never reserved for the colonised — in eighteenth-century Britain “the same system was vampiric towards its own citizens.” Beneath the horror lies the book’s most provocative claim, which Raghavan clearly relishes: that European liberalism was designed largely to settle quarrels within Christianity, and that today’s liberals are “duped by their own language of secularism,” their commitments “every bit as religious as their opponents.”
A third idea — for Raghavan the book’s real engine — is its account of the last half-century. From the late 1970s, Dasgupta argues, “there began a set of processes which restored the autonomy of financial capital” and left the nation-state “unable even in theory to manage reality as it once did,” until “time no longer seemed to bring human betterment, and the old gospel of ‘progress’ appeared to be little more than elite self-justification.” Into that vacuum rushed religion: the Islamist revolution in Iran, the US- and Saudi-backed jihad in Afghanistan, Pentecostalism across the global south, and — as Raghavan flags for Indian readers — “the rise of Hindutva and the RSS in India post-Emergency.” “Theocracy,” in Dasgupta’s phrase, “is rising everywhere from liberalism’s fall.”
It is on the question of what comes next that the three reviewers part company most sharply. Dasgupta rejects any return to empire — he calls China’s dealings in Africa “reheated Western colonialism” — and proposes instead a “new theology” housed “outside of any state…which looks down from a great height on every parochial aggression,” a universalism grounded in ecology and in reviving “inter-religious conversations of the kind that were common in the great empires of the past,” together with digital citizenship for migrants, mutual-credit currencies and a striking faith in artificial intelligence as an instrument of government. Raghavan, for all his admiration, calls the AI optimism “perhaps the weakest link in the book,” even as he grants the stakes: “if political philosophers do not do the work of designing such government for the benefit of human beings and the planet, private corporations will design it for profit.”
Irrespective of the differing reviews, the book asks the right question, at the right time. Dasgupta’s assertion that the nation-state is “a constantly changing commercial engine, whose interests coincide only sometimes with those of human beings” is precisely the sort of thought-provoking idea that makes this an essential read.
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