In his recently published book Out of Chaos. A Global History of the Nation State (OUP, 2026), Jon Wilson shows how the nation state emerged, quickly and unexpectedly, from a world previously governed in empires and federations, after World War II. In this talk, Jon Wilson will discuss the implications of the argument for how we think about the history of knowledge and science. Before 1945, knowledge about human societies rarely took the nation as its natural unit. But the sudden triumph of the nation state made national cultures, national economies and national statistics seem the obvious objects of study, and reorganised universities, funding bodies and institutions like UNESCO around them. But the rapid triumph of the nation state meant its epistemological victory was only ever partial, with other units and approaches surviving, sometimes flourishing, to form multiple counter-narratives to national science.

Jon Wilson is a historian of South Asia and beyond. Since 2025 he has been Tan Tah Kee Professor and Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. Before moving to Singapore, he taught at King’s College London for 25 years. His work includes The Domination of Strangers. Modern Governance in Eastern India and India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire.