After Nations: the Making and Unmaking of a World Order

With a background in international relations/political science, I was naturally drawn to Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations, and I’ve found it to be a really helpful way to make sense of our current global moment. In particular, his analysis provides a vital historical foundation for an argument recently made by Cory Doctorow on the CBC Ideas podcast. Doctorow contends that our widespread anxiety over future, all-powerful AI is somewhat misplaced because society is already dominated by artificial life forms known as limited liability companies, that engage in the exact rogue behaviors we fear (@ 46:28, Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, CBC Ideas, Aired: April 21, 2026, https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor). He describes these corporations as "immortal colony organisms" that engage in "goal hacking," relentlessly pursuing a profit mandate to the detriment of society, entirely independent of the human executives who supposedly run them.

When read alongside Dasgupta, it becomes clear that AI is not a sudden technological rupture, but rather the technological optimization of a legal blueprint invented centuries ago. Dasgupta reminds us that as early as 1600, the East India Company was chartered as an entity engineered specifically to outlive its human members and "know no inherent limit to its expansion" (p.107). The nation-state itself, Dasgupta argues, developed as a "commercial engine" designed to provide the legal apparatus to protect these property claims and trade agreements (p. 436).

By tracing this trajectory, we can see that the radical expansion of corporate personhood, as originally accelerated by the US ascribing full legal personality to corporations (p. 238), was the true birth of the "artificial life forms" Doctorow warns about. Today, this has culminated in a global "empire of law" where Bilateral Investment Treaties allow corporate entities to sue sovereign states in private tribunals, and modern tech giants act as "rival political organizations" that manage populations larger than countries (p. 287).

This continuity is legally and politically important because it reveals that we are entering a period of "contemporary legal pluralism," where the Westphalian monopoly of the state is being dismantled by the overlapping jurisdictions of these non-human, immortal entities. Doctorow’s ultimate conclusion is highly persuasive: the challenge of governing future AI is inherently tied to the challenge of regulating corporate power. If our legal systems are already failing to control the existing "colony organisms" that finance and deploy these technologies, rewriting corporate law is the first and most critical step in surviving the AI era.

After Nations: the Making and Unmaking of a World Order Dasgupta, Rana 2026, Book , 488 pages; 9780008639747