In the early ‘90s, when I was an editorial assistant at Scribner, I worked on The Twilight of Sovereignty by Citicorp’s legendary (and ruthless) CEO, Walter B. Wriston. By “worked” I mean grunt tasks: I trafficked rivers of paper, typed catalog blurbs, and oversaw the production cycle, from copyediting to page proofs to drafts of jacket art, which I’d walk over to his suite of offices in the slanted-roof tower across East 53rd Street. A secretary sat at a sleek desk in a spacious anteroom whose wood-paneled walls and minimalist lines conveyed mid-century chic. (We went with a “type only” design for a “big book” look.) The Twilight of Sovereignty was tycoon boilerplate on the majesty of unfettered markets and the evils of government, ideas that still thrive at the Manhattan Institute and Stanford’s Hoover Institution — yet one argument has stuck with me. As the most celebrated banker of his generation, Wriston recognized that emerging technologies were transforming the flow of capital while eroding the notion of the nation-state, itself a construct of modernity, born of empire and exploitation.
Now comes Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations, an eloquent, furious, essential study as the long American Century gives way to a multipolar future. It shares the same intellectual frame as two recent landmark volumes, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History, as well as Dasgupta’s earlier Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. (An Oxford graduate residing in France, Dasgupta is also a prize-winning novelist who wrote portions of After Nation as a visiting scholar at Yale.) The author structures his narrative in thematic sections, exploring how four nation-states have molded globalization in their own images: France (titled “God”), Britain (“Money”), “Law” (United States), and China (“Nature). He teases out the religious underpinnings of the nation-state; the missionary zeal of the U.S. in particular falls beneath his withering gaze. The book couldn’t be timelier: the wars in the Middle East signal the folly of American Empire, seeking to entrap other countries, an historical inflection point — an “unraveling of political cultures built up over many decades,” Dasgupta calls it.
After Nations opens with God, manifested in the person of Louis IX, who in the 13th-century laid the foundation for imperial France. Dasgupta scampers across chronologies and continents, sprinkling anecdotes about Christ’s crown of thorns and the Reformation as a catalyst for change. His erudition shines in these chapters, plumbing the theological character of the nation-state as it borrowed from divine-right monarchy. Hence Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and imposition of French administrative norms on Muslim societies. Dasgupta gathers an array of prominent figures, among them Sayyid Qutb, the father of political Islam, and Marine Le Pen, the French reactionary. This author knows how to tell a rich story amid his graphs and maps, permitting himself ample space for detours.
Next up: the United Kingdom and the height of European empire. Dasgupta’s global reach pops from the page. As trade routes grew and ports flourished, Europe benefitted from China’s appetite for silver, pumping up Spain and Britain’s New World colonies, engendering the Middle Passage and dispossession of Indigenous lands, horrors that kindled the Industrial Revolution and paradigm shift. (Within four months in 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations and British colonials in North America declared their independence.) As Dasgupta notes: “Britain’s 18th-century elites were open-minded radicals, who might have felt quite at home in today’s Silicon Valley. They had no sentimentality about the political order — cutting the head from one king, for instance, and sending another into exile. They could invent financial and legal structures capable of releasing unprecedented capitalist energies; their coordination of global resources—of silver and slaves, of American land, British military power and Asian industry—was extraordinary as it was savage. They loved fashion and technology … their mines and plantations would supply the capital for the Industrial Revolution.” Their ideology girded the 19th-century, even after Parliament abolished slavery; an 1883 manifesto by James Lorimer, a Scottish lawyer, divided the world into a trio categories —“civilized,” “barbarian,” and “savage” — influencing Western thought to this day.
In “Law” Dasgupta pivots to the United States, his strongest material. There’s a cast of familiar faces — Christopher Columbus, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger — and less familiar thinkers like the Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, Giuseppe Mazzini, an advocate of “cosmopolitanism,” and a Civil War-era lawyer, Franz Lieber. All enhance the narrative. Dasgupta spares no venom in his critique of American empire, formed in the crucible of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech (1918). One core tenet, national self-determination, became the U.S.’s template, but it failed to encompass the complexities of the Balkans, say, or the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. It succeeded as a template for American dominance. The author charts the country’s postwar meteoric ascent, tying it to property as an organizing principle of a “society of nations.” Here property covers everything from a few paltry acres to entire villages of abducted Africans.
The republic, then, was fertile soil for imperial ambitions, a CEO to the world, its motives unscrupulous. A shrewd student of its predecessors, Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands, the U.S. didn’t need to colonize territory when it could colonize governments, exporting its democracy (and industries) into fledgling nations amid Africa and Asia, overthrowing elected officials, often at the tip of a sword. This led to the first re-entrenchment of American Empire in the 1970s: “Countries which had been colonized, which therefore lacked a political culture, and which needed decades of peace and stability to establish themselves, instead were undermined and ravaged. In many places, American military aid was the most significant source of liquidity.” (Flash forward to 2026: Donald Trump’s threat to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age repeats verbatim vows by the Kennedy Administration’s Air Force Chief of Staff, Curtis LeMay, and, later, Senator Ted Cruz on the Middle East — plus ça change.) As Dasgupta observes, “Our world is enormously shaped by the immense failure of these decades.”
Much of the real action unfolded in shadow, gamed out by the CIA and spooks like Allen and John Foster Dulles, who planned coups while sitting around their sister’s suburban pool on Sunday afternoons. The Cold War was its own anomaly: “America was an empire that pretended not to be one,” Dasgupta opines. The U.S. “felt like a conspiracy because it was,” keeping its machinations shrouded in secrecy, lulling its citizens with fairy tales of progress and prosperity. The State Department, too, joined in, raining down misery on tens of millions: “The many civil wars, pogroms and genocides of the post-war era, some ongoing — these arose not from ‘ancient hatreds’ but from the winner-takes-all architecture of the nation-state itself.” (The Soviet Union is scarcely visible in this otherwise incisive summary.)
The 21st– century, analysts suggest, will belong to China and its brand of “authoritarian capitalism,” marvels of engineering and technology stemming from ecological crises across centuries. “Nature” composes a primer on the Communist regime’s roots in an imperial past. During the Han dynasty, for example, “agriculture was catastrophic for the region’s biodiversity,” spiraling into famine and disease. Dasgupta layers in sumptuous cultural history; this section reads like a novel. He offers a glimpse of coming attractions. “The main risk of Chinese hegemony was not military conflagration but implosion: political, and above all, ecological,” he notes. “China was turning many states into open funnels for raw materials; as a result, the industrial system was becoming even more efficient and comprehensive in its exploitation of nature than when Western corporations were still the main players.”
The ancient Greek noun for “rage” is mēnin; it’s literally the first word in Homer’s Iliad. Fueled by a cosmic if restrained rage, Dasgupta exposes the slaughter and displacement of vulnerable peoples. Neoliberalism deserves most of the blame, destabilizing regions, widening inequalities, forcing millions from their homes into foreign, often hostile countries. “Nor was there any political remedy — especially not from liberals, who asked the expelled masses simply to continue to place their faith in democracy and capitalism,” he writes. “The political right spoke more usefully, therefore, to the trauma.” This legacy, along with climate change, will challenge us in ways we can’t yet imagine.
The book is not just a gloomy jeremiad. It’s also the invaluable “big ideas” nonfiction we need amid the rise of despots such as Trump, Putin, and Viktor Orbán. After Nations illuminates the many arcs of the nation-state, a reckoning, much like Beckert’s work, with modernity’s heart of darkness. The future may not be dystopian. Dasgupta looks backward to look forward, a dazzling intellectual mastery that brings us full circle to his Introduction: “Here is a guiding principle — the essential principle behind all political creativity: hope, not despair.”
[Published by Viking on April 28, 2026, 496 pages, $38.00 hardcover]