Please note that the book talk had to be cancelled and will likely be rescheduled for a later date this fall.

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.