Out of Chaos: Jon Wilson on how the Second World War led to the Nation-State

At the beginning of the twentieth century many thinkers, activists, and politicians would have been astonished if you told them that at the end of that century the nation-state would be the prevalent form of government throughout the world. After all, the previous fifty years had seen a revival of empires, and by 1900 everyone was living in a world of empires. The nation-state was not an obvious next step.But following 1945, argues my guest Jon Wilson in his new book  Out of Chaos: How the Nation-State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II, the nation-state was the only kind of political organization that could gain universal support and become a vehicle for national liberation. The nation-state transcended postwar ideology: communists, capitalists, and nationalists of every stripe could agree to a world of sovereign states. “One can’t understand the political crises and tendencies from the late 1960s to the early 1980s,” writes Wilson, “without understanding the history of the nation-state and the very particular way it emerged.”Jon Wilson is Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. A historian of empire, decolonization, and South Asia, he is the author of The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. His latest book, Out of Chaos: How the Nation-State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II, offers a sweeping reinterpretation of the emergence of the modern nation-state after the Second World War.

Peter J. Ortiz was one of the most decorated United States Marines of the Second World War—and he served in the European Theater. In fact, his service was almost entirely within occupied France, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services as the manager of a resistance network and later as the leader of a (sort of) Jedburgh Team. The stories of his exploits are legendary, though admittedly legendary among a much smaller circle of people than they deserve to be. One that can be verified is the time that, in a French bar, Ortiz ordered a round of drinks for a group of German officers, opened his raincoat to reveal his Marine uniform, drew two pistols, and ordered the Germans to drink toasts to President Roosevelt and the United States Marine Corps.That and many other tales of his winding career are to be found in Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, a new book by Nicholas Reynolds and Katie Sanders. 

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls,great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion feastsfor the dogs and birds,and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.Those were of course the opening lines of the Illiad, written by someone who we might as well call Homer. And since in this summer of 2027 it seems that very few people are without an opinion of Homer, or The Odyssey, or how Christopher Nolan may have violated Homer's copyrights, I thought it a good time to talk with Barry Strauss, for among his many books is The Trojan War: A New History.Barry Strauss is Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author most recently of Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, which he and I discussed in Episode 421. This is his sixth appearance on Historically Thinking.

Even that overlooked yet essential little pinprick at the end of this sentence has a history. For once upon a time, there were no stops or periods. And therefore there were no sentences, at least as we conceive them now. “Changes in punctuation,” writes my guest Florence Hazrat, “like changes in language, are normal, but they’re also important reflections of our values.”They are also, perhaps, indications of how we reframe the realities that we create with words. In her new book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Changed the World, Hazrat ranges from cuneiform and Cicero to uncial and Shakespeare, and beyond, attending to how we have chosen to shape our sentences, and why. “From neuroscience to law, colonialism to love, punctuation exerts an enormous hidden power over our internal and external lives.”Florence Hazrat is a writer, researcher, and educator fascinated by anything that has to do with language, writing, culture, and society—and by dogs. She is the author of An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! as well as On the Mark. Her research examines how seemingly small features of written language reveal larger changes in society, politics, and human thought.

YEAR of meteors! brooding year!I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds   and signs;I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;.I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair,   mounted the scaffold in Virginia;(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I   watch'd;I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal'd   wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)That was Walt Whitman, from the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass; and the 19th Presidentiad to which he refers is the election of 1860. No election in the history of the United States can come close to being more confusing, tumultuous and consequential than the election of 1860. Now Jonathan Earle seeks to disclose its mysteries. And in fact in his new book He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, he reveals that the 1860 contest was even stranger than we might have imagined it to be.Jonathan Earle is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University, where he also serves as the Roger Hadfield Ogden Dean of the LSU Honors College.

In early 1965, three executives boarded a plane in Japan, bound for the United States. “Unbeknownst to the U.S. Customs, they were carrying corporate secrets. Each man had carefully placed two vials of an isomerase enzyme into their pockets before the flight.” With it, they would change the world. For after two arduous years of nearly aerobic chemical engineering, their corporation produced what it called Isomerose 30. We know it, or its technically improved successors, as corn syrup.That’s how my guest Brian Leech begins his intricate, multi-valenced history of what went on in Clinton, Iowa, from the 1960s through the 1980s. It’s food history, it’s labor history, it’s technological history, it’s environmental history, it’s regional history—“and not any single one of them, which is to say,” to quote the great Edmund Morgan, “that it is good history.”

Most Americans remember the Louisiana Purchase as a remarkably good bargain: fifteen million dollars for an enormous tract of land that doubled the size of the United States. But that familiar cliché hides a large story. It covers over a lot of things, and suggests a few more that just aren’t so.In his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, historian Alexander Mikaberidze places the Purchase within a global struggle involving France, Spain, Britain, Haiti, and the Caribbean. The transaction that reshaped the United States was not inevitable. It emerged from failed colonial projects, imperial rivalry, slave revolution, diplomatic improvisation, crafty financing, Thomas Jefferson’s geopolitical cunning, and his willingness to set aside some of his deepest political convictions. 

Running for about 177 miles along the Welsh-English border is the remains of an earthwork, a fortification over a hundred miles longer than Hadrian’s Wall. Built sometime in the eighth century, it is known as Offa’s Dyke, one of the few surviving reminder of one of the most formidable kings in English history.“As a man,” writes my guest Roy Naismith, “Offa is effectively lost.” Winston Churchill framed the issue thus: “In studying Offa we are like geologists who instead of finding a fossil find only the hollow shape in which a creature of unusual strength and size undoubtedly resided.” Or as the historian Kenneth Sisam observed, Offa “seems to have had all the attributes of a great ruler except a contemporary historian.”But if he is effectively lost, then how can Naismith have written a new book titled Offa: King of the Mercians? Because he has, to paraphrase modern terminology, historyed it. This is a conversation about a great English king; but it’s really a master class in the careful and demanding work of historical inference.

"There was a time when the Declaration of Independence was news. Most books written about the Declaration have pursued questions about its precedence and authorship as well as its legacy. In 1776, when the Declaration was news, it was part of an ever-changing and circulating amalgam of accurate and inaccurate information, gossip, military intelligence, speculation, and opinion. At approximately one thousand three hundred and twenty words from ‘When in the Course of Human Events’ through ‘Our Sacred Honor,’ the Declaration took fewer than ten minutes to read and filled only one or two columns of a typical newspaper. This was a text that could be communicated swiftly, but it was also a text for which the context in which it was communicated mattered. The questions of who experienced the news of independence and when and how they did so reveal a critical, overlooked history of the American Revolution.”Those are the words of my guest Emily Sneff in her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News. It is a book that reframes the Declaration and enables us to see it in a new way: at a moment when the success of the Revolution was far from inevitable, and when the mere existence of the Declaration forced people to choose sides—or to reconsider everything they had previously believed about authority, loyalty, and politics.Emily Sneff is an independent historian specializing in the history and memory of the American Revolution. Her research has focused particularly on the Declaration of Independence and its transmission, reception, and preservation. When the Declaration of Independence Was News is her first book.

The Declaration of Independence has had two simultaneous lives. One is the life of its ideas, the life that scholars pay the most attention to: a life of fits and starts, surprisingly forgotten in the first years after the Revolution, then returning with a vengeance amid sectional conflict in the 1830s, during the Progressive Era, and again during the Civil Rights Movement.Its second life is as a material document. It is an engrossed parchment rushed away from advancing British troops twice in its life, carried by carriage and train across the United States, tucked away in archives and cellars, displayed in patent offices and libraries, and eventually enshrined in a helium-filled case under carefully controlled conditions.As Michael Auslin argues in National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, these two lives cannot be separated. Americans did not merely preserve the Declaration because of what it said. They preserved it because the physical document itself became a national relic—an object that connected generations of Americans to the Revolution and to one another.Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of numerous books on American and international history and writes The Pawtomack Packet, a Substack devoted to the history of Washington, D.C.