Abstract:

What does the history of the nation state look like from Asia? In this talk, drawn from Out of Chaos: A Global History of the Nation State (OUP), 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.

Speaker’s Bio:
Jon Wilson is a historian of South Asia and beyond, whose books including The Domination of Strangers 和 India Conquered. He is Tan Kah Kee Professor, and Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at NTU Singapore.