A First Look At 'Out of Chaos' By Jon Wilson

Photo by Daniela Denyer Malo

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with studying international relations: the more you learn, the more you realise how much of the story you were never told. Most world history is written from one vantage point and then generalised outward, the West explaining the world to itself. Out of Chaos, Jon Wilson's new book out on August 27th, is the first text I have read that genuinely resists that gravitational pull.

At 368 pages, it is not a light read, and it does not pretend to be. There is no single narrative thread to follow - instead, Wilson moves across empire, decolonisation, ideology and conflict, with the density of a reference work and the clarity of a good lecturer. What struck me most, reading it as someone who studies History and International Relations, is how evenly the book distributes its attention. Most world history books have a centre of gravity, which is usually the US, Russia, China, and Western Europe. Wilson's does not. Colombian and Azeri history sit in the same frame as British imperial policy and the partition of India or Yugoslavia. That is rarer than it should be, and as someone from Latin America, a region routinely treated as a footnote in "world" history, it did not go unnoticed.

But the book's real strength is in the details that overturn the assumptions we walk around with. Three stayed with me:

The first is the 1947 partition vote on Palestine. The alliances read almost backwards from a contemporary lens: the USSR and Czechoslovakia backed the creation of a Jewish state, largely disregarding the Palestinian majority's opposition to partition, a position hard to square with how Communist-aligned states frame the conflict today. Britain, meanwhile, opposed partition, abstained at the UN, and used its troops in the region to obstruct the two-state process for months, arguing that Palestinians alone had a claim to the land. None of it maps onto the alliances we take for granted now.

The second is Indonesia. The first nation to win independence from a colonial power after the Second World War did so with British and French support, the same empires that were simultaneously trying to hold onto their own colonies elsewhere. Wilson's explanation is sharp: with public opinion newly enshrined as a legal force at the UN, appearing pro-independence in Indonesia was a way for crumbling empires to look reasonable to their own restless territories. It didn't save their empires, but it tells you how thin the ideological consistency of imperial power really was.

The third: the Cold War produced more consensus than the standard narrative admits. The US and USSR clashed openly in Korea and Vietnam, but at the UN they frequently agreed on how borders should be redrawn, including Yugoslavia, Greece, the Iran–Kurdistan boundary, and, most significantly, the creation of Israel as a state separate from Palestine. Two superpowers defined by opposition were, in these moments, arguing from the same script.

Wilson is just as good at overturning assumptions and educating on the unknown of the Nazi period, largely because he refuses to treat it as a closed, fully-understood subject. He traces how Hitler's imperial ambitions were explicitly modelled on the British Empire, and how the Reich Protector's own background as a former ambassador to Britain shaped that vision. He shows the strange asymmetry in how Hitler treated Western versus Eastern Europe, sparing Western borders out of a belief in shared "Aryan" superiority while redrawing Eastern Europe wholesale, a distinction that helps explain why Western Europe emerged comparatively less devastated. And he doesn't shy away from the movement's self-defeating principles: an ideology so committed to racial exclusivity that it refused the military volunteers, including Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian recruits,who might have helped sustain it. As Wilson notes, Britain's own war leadership treated Dominion aircrew "as resources within a single imperial system", a framing that eroded Canada's relationship with the empire for a generation.

There are smaller, stranger facts too: that by 1944, Germany depended on eight million foreign workers - roughly the same proportion as today - even at the height of a regime built on ethnic exclusion. That half a million Mexican citizens fought for the US in the war. That in the two years after liberation, thousands of camp survivors simply stayed where they were, because no one - not the Allies, not the fledgling UN - had a plan for where "home" was supposed to be.

Nonetheless, none of this is delivered as trivia. Wilson's project is bigger: to make the case that world history has never actually been optional reading for anyone, because everyone's history is world history. That is not a small ambition for a single volume, and it is genuinely rare to find a writer who treats it as a legitimate commitment rather than a preface disclaimer.

If you want one book that gives you the connective tissue between colonialism, the two World Wars, the Cold War and the borders we now take as fixed, without asking you to already know the material, Out of Chaos is the closest thing to it that I've read. It rewards slow reading, and it will change which questions you think to ask next.

Out of Chaos by Jon Wilson is out August 27th.

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Edited by Ainhoa Aron, Literature Editor