Out of Chaos: How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II by Wilson, Jon
Out of Chaos: How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II by Wilson, Jon

Out of Chaos: How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II

A provocative history of how nation states arose out of the ashes of World War II, showing...
$40.80 USD
$40.80 USD
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Author: Jon Wilson
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $40.80
Out of Chaos: How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II by Wilson, Jon

Out of Chaos: How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II

$40.80
Out of Chaos: How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II by Wilson, Jon

Out of Chaos: How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II

$40.80
Author: Jon Wilson
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description
A provocative history of how nation states arose out of the ashes of World War II, showing how catastrophe, compromise, and contested visions forged the fragile order we still live in today.

"A magnificent history . . . Necessary reading for all those who want to understand how the modern world came into being." --O. A. Westad, author of The Global Cold War

Nation states--self-contained territories with their own economy, population, and culture--dominate today's world. Nationalists claim the modern nation state is rooted in deep historical time, while many scholars say it was a nineteenth-century creation. In Out of Chaos, historian Jon Wilson challenges these narratives, arguing instead that the nation state emerged suddenly and unexpectedly in the years following World War II and brought order to a world in crisis.

Wilson traces how political leaders still reeling from the chaos of war debated how to partition the people, land, and economies of the world. The nation state emerged as the only form of organization leaders from different ideological positions--communist and capitalist, former colonizer and former colonized--could agree upon. But this new order never fully displaced other ways of imagining political power.

From separatist movements in Nigeria and Indonesia, to apologists for empire, to human rights activists fighting for universal justice, non-national groups continued to challenge the nation state's authority. Out of Chaos restores the history of the nation state, revealing it as a recent and contested construction that has ordered global society for the past seventy-five years and will continue to shape geopolitics in the future.

Author: Jon Wilson
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 09/01/2026
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.75lbs
Size: 9.30h x 5.90w x 1.50d
ISBN: 9781541701625

About the Author
Jon Wilson is a historian of empire and its aftermath, in South Asia and beyond. He studied at Oxford University and the New School for Social Research and taught at King's College London for twenty-five years. He is dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, and author of The Chaos of Empire. He lives in Singapore.
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