Out of Chaos: A Global History of the Nation State by Professor Jon Wilson
Book Launch:
A WORLD MADE IN A HURRY: Book launch event for Out of Chaos. A Global History of the Nation State.
The nation state is far younger than we think. In this talk, Jon Wilson will argue that it emerged, from conversation and conflict on every continent, to provide order to a world in crisis after World War II; and that the legacy of its hurried origins remain with us today.
Speaker:
Jon Wilson is a historian of South Asia and beyond, and Tan Tah Kee Professor and Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University Singapore.
Commentators:
Tan Tai Yong is the President of Singapore University of Social Sciences. He served as the President of Yale-NUS College from 2017 to 2022. He is also Chairman of the Management Board of the Institute of South Asian Studies, an autonomous university-level research institute in NUS. He was a former Nominated Member of Parliament and served from 2014 to 2015.
Srinath Raghavan is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He is also Professor of International Relations and History at Ashoka University. His research areas are Indian foreign policy and India in the international context. He is the author of several books, including Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India (Yale University Press, 2025).
Kei Koga is Associate Professor at the Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Concurrently, he is a Non-resident Fellow at The National Bureau of Asia Research (NBR), the United States, and a member of RIPS Research Committee, the Research Institute for Peace and Security (RIPS), Japan. His research focuses on International Security, International/Regional Institutions (particularly ASEAN), and East Asian/Indo-Pacific security.
Swapna Kona Nayudu is Principal Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Global Asia Research Centre at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and serves on the Advisory Council of Harvard University’s Centre for Global Political Thought. Her first book The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment was published by Cambridge University Press, UK in 2025.
Date and Time: 30 September 2026, 5.30-7 pm
Register for the event: Click Here
Copies of the book will be available to purchase at a discounted rate.
We are excited to share the publication of a new book by Professor Jon Wilson, Dean, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and Tan Kah Kee Professor.
About the Book:
Out of Chaos: A Global History of the Nation State
The modern world of nation states was an accidental outcome of the chaos following World War II, and not the product of centuries of Western development. Before the 1940s, empires and federations made up the world, and few believed that nations could serve as the foundations of political order. In this book, the author shows how the postwar crisis forced political leaders everywhere to search for a workable compromise. From Montevideo to Yogyakarta, New Delhi to Jerusalem, political leaders arrived at the same unexpected solution to divide the world, territories and economies into nation states. The movement was not imposed by any single power or ideology. There was never a US-led world order. Capitalist and communist states alike agreed to the nation state model, making the postwar world multipolar from the start. The process was chaotic and improvised, with limited agreement in underlying ideas. The competing visions of political organisations did not disappear, while people continued to be attached to their local communities. Out of Chaos empowers us to read today’s conflicts in the context of the messy, unplanned emergence of nation states from postwar crisis, radically reframing twentieth-century history.
About the Author:
Jon Wilson is a historian of South Asia and the world beyond. He studied history and anthropology at the University of Oxford and the New School for Social Research, then taught at King's College London for twenty-five years. He is the author of two books on the history of South Asia, The Domination of Strangers and India Conquered. His research connects the history of political thought and practice on a trans-national scale, informed by his interest in the everyday life of politics and government. He is the Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Tan Kah Kee Professor at Nanyang Technological University.
Order your copy: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/out-of-chaos-9780192858672?lang=en&cc=fr
Oxford University Press (Academic)
Glowing Reviews:
"Wilson's magisterial study of the nation-state explores the central contradiction of its history: how did the recent, unpredictable, and even accidental emergence of this state result in its seeming permanence in our imaginations as much as reality? A crucial intervention." - Faisal Devji, Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History, University of Oxford
"This is a brilliant, very necessary rethinking of global history not as globalisation but as a global condition in which nation states became the key global actors. This startlingly original book not only forces us to rethink when the nation-state became the global norm but also shows the profound economic, political and social significance of this new form in the years after 1945, not least how it changed in the 1970s and beyond. A must-read for all historians of the twentieth century."- David Edgerton, author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation.
"Out of Chaos is a sparkling political history of the nation state as a political form. With lightly carried erudition, Wilson shows how the nation state emerged through the political contingencies of twentieth-century politics. Full of telling historical vignettes, Out of Chaos tells the story of a monumental irony: no one planned for the triumph of the nation state form, yet practically every society got it." - Pratap Bhanu Mehta, author of The Burden of Democracy
"A provocative and innovative book that draws on a very broad range of cases from around the world. Out of Chaos provides many fresh insights by re-telling a well-known narrative from an unfamiliar perspective, and it is filled to the brim with fascinating characters and their stories."- Eric Storm, author of Nationalism: A World History
"A magnificent history of how concepts of territory, political power, and national identity were moulded into nation-states. Necessary reading for all those who want to understand how the modern world came into being." - O. A. Westad, author of The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History
“What a book! Ultimately, Professor Wilson wants us to be more realistic, more flexible in our thinking. The nation states that sprang up did not resemble their neatly drawn cartographic borders, as taught to children. ‘Most were porous, lacked the power they claimed, and were vulnerable to challenging forces from the start.’ But the generative myth continues: the congruence of people, territory and power. Elusive though it may be, the nation state keeps reasserting itself.” - Richard Lofthouse, Oxford Alumni
