Out of Chaos
How the Nation State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II
Contributors
By Jon Wilson
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Sep 1, 2026
- Page Count
- 432 pages
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- ISBN-13
- 9781541701649
Price
$19.99Price
$25.99 CADFormat
Format:
- ebook $19.99 $25.99 CAD
- Hardcover $34.00 $45.00 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $31.99
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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.
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“A magnificent history of how concepts of territory, political power, and national identity were molded 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 Global Cold War
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“A thrilling account of the state-making frenzy which followed 1945—and a genealogy, therefore, of the simultaneous exultation and horror with which we live today.”Rana Dasgupta, author of After Nations
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“This is a brilliant, very necessary rethinking of global history not as globalization 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
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“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
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“Jon 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, author of Landscapes of the Jihad
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“Out of Chaos is a sparkling political history of the nation state as a political form. With lightly carried erudition, Jon 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
