Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations offers a sweeping account of the rise and decline of the modern nation‑state, tracing its origins to the European transformations of the 17th and 18th centuries. The author argues that the nation‑state, built on reformation Christianity, Enlightenment liberalism and early capitalism, became a vehicle for both domestic exploitation and overseas imperialism. Britain, he contends, was the first such entity, establishing a global system that later handed over the mantle to the United States after World War II.
Dasgupta attributes the current crisis of Western liberal democracies to the erosion of the social contracts that once linked workers to the state. He describes how post‑1970s deindustrialisation, the off‑shoring of manufacturing and the rise of a finance‑driven global economy dismantled the “social bargains” that had delivered education, health care and a measure of economic security. The resulting “downsizing” of workers’ rights, stagnant wages and widening wealth gaps, he claims, have fuelled populist movements and weakened the capacity of Britain and the United States to provide the rights, freedoms and security traditionally expected of nation‑states.
The book also details America’s post‑war empire, built on the Bretton Woods financial architecture, the United Nations and NATO. Dasgupta characterises U.S. interventions—from Guatemala in 1954 to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan—as attempts to impose a liberal‑capitalist order, often at great cost to both the target societies and the United States itself. He argues that the end of the Cold War marked the peak of American hegemony, after which rising powers such as China and Russia have begun to challenge the Western model.
In the concluding chapter Dasgupta turns to a more speculative vision. He suggests that digital platforms and big‑tech conglomerates could catalyse an ideological shift toward a “planetary digital citizenship,” a universal digital currency and a new planetary law that would render the nation‑state obsolete. This futuristic scenario reads more like an eco‑technological fable than a logical extension of his historical analysis. Critics note that Dasgupta’s own work limits the crisis to liberal democratic states, while acknowledging that illiberal powers like China and Russia appear more resilient. The suggestion that these entities will simply morph into a benign, ecologically friendly order under the guidance of technology remains unsubstantiated.
Despite the utopian leanings of the final chapter, After Nations provides a detailed and compelling narrative of how Britain and America built and, in Dasgupta’s view, exhausted their global dominance. The book places the current geopolitical turbulence—exemplified by the United States’ fraught involvement in the Middle East—within a longer trajectory of empire, exploitation and internal decay.
Dasgupta’s work joins a small canon of recent scholarship that reevaluates the nation‑state’s role in a rapidly changing world. While his prognosis for a post‑national, tech‑driven order may be premature, his diagnosis of the structural weaknesses afflicting Western democracies offers a valuable lens for understanding present‑day challenges across Africa and beyond. Future developments will reveal whether digital governance can indeed reshape political organization or whether nation‑states will adapt to survive.
