All the World’s Empires Became Nations in Less Than 100 Years, and What That Means for the Next 100
About this episode
The episode discusses the transition from empires to nation-states and the implications for future governance.
For the last 5,000 years, empires ruled the world — Rome administered hundreds of languages across three continents, and the Ottomans governed Christians, Jews, and Muslims under a single legal canopy. The nation-state as we know it is barely a century old for most of the world's population. In 1900, maybe 25 percent of humanity lived under nation. Today, 99 percent live in nation-states — and almost all of them were created in a single, compressed rush after 1945. And this world order could already be giving way to the next. Amazon has a larger GDP than most countries, the Bitcoin network operates outside any central bank's reach, and a 19-year-old with a smartphone can reach more people than most governments. The monopoly is gone. The question is what replaces it. Today’s guest is Rana Dasgupta, author of After Nations . We trace how different nations came into existence and the reasons their nations formed the way they did. France built its national identity through theology, Britain through property, the United States through law, and China through controlling its massive rivers and sidestepping local rulers in the process. We see why all four models…
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