ARGONAUT BOOKS

Our present-day world of nation states was born by accident. Nation-states haven't been ever present; nor were they the inevitable outcome of nationalism. Instead, from Indonesia to Iran to the United Kingdom—all new nation states in the late 1940s—they emerged out of the chaos which followed World War II.The nation state, we are told, was created in the West hundreds of years ago. It grew, so the story goes, from the steady development of national identities and as a triumphant product of Western political order and progress. Such oft-told stories are wrong.They are based on a fundamental mis...Read More