Out of Chaos. Rethinking the Emergence of the Nation State from Asia

What does the history of the nation state look like from Asia? In this talk, drawn from "Out of Chaos," Jon Wilson argues that the nation state was not produced in and then exported from Europe; it was improvised everywhere at once, in a single crisis of world order in the 1940s felt most of all in Asia. The nation state dominated as alternative ideas of world order, imperial, federal, pan-Asian, collapsed. It emerged, and has survived since, because it requires no ideological consensus, only a shared acceptance of the limits of national power.

About the Speaker

Jon Wilson is a historian of South Asia and beyond, author of "The Domination of Strangers and India Conquered." He is Tan Kah Kee Professor, and Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University Singapore.