After Nations by Rana Dasgupta traces the rise and unraveling of the global nation-state system, exploring why American hegemony is declining, liberal institutions are losing credibility, and autocracies are on the rise. Dasgupta moves from the fall of ancient empires through the spread of European law and money to the emergence of tech giants and the restoration of Chinese power. Ultimately, he argues for a new conception of citizenship, law, and economy suited to our globalized and ecologically fragile world.
Speakers:
Rana Dasgupta is a British writer born in Canterbury who has lived in the US, India, and France. He is the author of Tokyo Cancelled (2005), the Commonwealth Prize-winning novel Solo (2009), and the acclaimed nonfiction work, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014). His latest book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order (2025) won the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction in 2025. This book examines the decline of the nation-state in the era of globalization. Dasgupta’s articles have also featured in The Guardian, The New Statesmen and BBC etc. He has taught as a professor at Brown University and delivered lectures including the Berggruen Institute and the Serpentine Gallery. He is also a recipient of the Commonwealth Prize, and the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award.
Daniel Kent Carrasco is a historian interested in the past, present, and future of the Third World. He teaches at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas at UNAM in Mexico City. His work spans the history of India, Mexico, South Asia, and Latin America in the twentieth century, with a focus on anti-colonial radicalism, the Cultural Cold War, and socialist thought in the Global South. His articles have appeared in Global Intellectual History, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Historia Mexicana, and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, among other journals, and his book chapters feature in The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Global South (2025) and South Asian Migrations in Global History (2021), among other volumes.
Kristin Plys is Associate Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Toronto. Her expertise is in political economy, dictatorship in the 1970s Global South, art and politics in the 1970s Global South, labour history, histories of café culture, and historical method. From 2023–24 she was the J. Clawson Mills Scholar in the Director’s Office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of two award-winning books, and is currently writing a book on the intersection of politics and visual art in Lahore, Pakistan from 1971 to 1988, funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Moderator:
Anubha Anushree is a historian and teacher at the Department of English, Rajdhani College, University of Delhi, and Editor of the Review of Democracy. She holds a PhD in History from Stanford University, where she also taught in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program. Her dissertation examines political trust and public mobilization in colonial and independent India, and her research has been supported by the Prime Minister’s Memorial Library Fund, New Delhi and Edmond Safra Center of Ethics at Harvard University and Tel Aviv University (2025–27). Her work has appeared in Itinerario, Economic and Political Weekly, and the Journal of Asian Studies, among other publications. She is currently working on a second project on the history of disability in South Asia.
