Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that capitalism is a fundamentally unstable economic system. Without external parameters such as wars, it produces constantly increasing inequalities in wealth and income. The first part of this article explains this central feature, considering in particular the historical significance of the long period of the New Deal (1930–1980), marked by the Second World War and economic policies attempting to limit social disparities. In its second section, the article focuses on the economic reasons for these inequalities and the mechanisms of income distribution.

Since the 1970s, most historians in the anglophone world have worked on time-scales of between five and fifty years. This narrow focus represented a retreat from the longer periods generally covered before the late twentieth century and served not only to cut them off from wider reading publics but also to deprive them of the influence on public policy and global governance they had once had. This article surveys the causes and the consequences of this retreat and proposes a solution for the crisis of confidence and of relevance it has created. A return to what Fernand Braudel classically termed the longue durée in the Annales in 1958 is now both imperative and feasible: imperative, in order to restore history’s place as a critical social science; feasible, due to the increased availability of large amounts of historical data and the digital tools necessary to analyze them.

David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s arguments about the crisis of history depend on assertions that have little or no factual basis; they misread their own data. Since the nature of the crisis is in doubt, it follows that the authors’ narrative of its causes must also come into question. Armitage and Guldi confuse microhistory with cultural history and mischaracterize the work of cultural historians. An alternative to their misreading and mischaracterization is to look at previous moments of perceived “crisis”: historians have been worrying about similar issues for nearly a century. To understand the distinctiveness of the present crisis, it would be useful to consider the effects of the relentless democratization of higher education rather than to blame certain historians for pushing history off course.

Thomas Piketty’s monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century has transported us to a higher understanding of the historical evolution of inequality. This essay attempts to inventory the different avenues of research, more or less promising, that scholars might usefully pursue when building on his work. The most important path to follow is the history of inequalities in income that Piketty and his team have flagged up so well, supported by the book’s history of the great shocks of the twentieth century and the political responses that they elicited. Less promising is the book’s emphasis on wealth, capital, and the rate of return. The best predictions of future inequality can be achieved by merging Piketty and his team’s history of those who hold the top 10 percent of income with works dedicated to the history of inequality within the lower 90 percent. It is also necessary to integrate other scholarship that has demonstrated that the sort of democratic system Piketty calls for would have positive effects on growth.

David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s History Manifesto has sparked an important debate in the United States. This article criticizes three specific aspects of their work. First, it takes issue with their description of a “moral crisis” of history, which they postulate without any discussion of serious epistemological and political issues. Second, it calls into question their enthusiasm for technological solutions, an ideological stance highlighted by their call for a return to long-term history and large-scale syntheses relying on the crunching of vast quantities of digitized data. Finally, it interrogates their conception of the utility of history, a notion that reveals serious confusion between research, teaching, and popularization and supports their unquestioning acceptance of the direction taken by institutions of higher learning. Although the scientism and positivism expressed in their manifesto illuminate their lack of attention to, and perhaps simply awareness of, the slow construction and transmission of accumulated knowledge, they do reflect the prevailing intellectual nonchalance and philosophical regression. The authors’ vision would see the replacement of “history” by “e-story,” the dissolution of historicity and scholarly critique and their substitution by techno-chronology and marketing.

Like many other historians and economists before him, Thomas Piketty includes money in his definition of capital (wealth). This obliges him to distinguish between real and nominal assets, notably to understand the distributional effect of inflation on capital. This article draws comparisons between this approach and other theories of the difference between money and capital, before going on to show, from a historical point of view, why the role and the share of money within total capital cannot be neglected. Potential substitution effects between monetary and non-monetary assets must to be taken into account in order to understand the historical dynamic of capital and the effects of its taxation.

This article engages with some of the questions raised by David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s “The Return of the longue durée: An Anglo-American Perspective” and their resonance among readers of the Annales. In particular, it challenges the authors’ classification of a variety of different historical studies of short periods of time under the rubric of “microhistory.” It also questions their argument that such studies are evidence of a “moral crisis” that supposedly dominated anglophone historiography from the cultural revolution of 1968 to the global financial crisis of 2008. Furthermore, the article contrasts the less conventional meanings that Fernand Braudel originally attributed to the longue durée with the ways that Armitage and Guldi interpret this expression. Finally, it asks how, in practice, historians are supposed to follow the authors’ invitation to move beyond specialized training and knowledge to produce sweeping new and original interpretations of millennia of human history.

The interaction between economic analysis and political action is one of the major issues raised by Capital in the Twenty-First Century and by any work of political economy. However, the way this interaction works and changes over time is not always clear in Thomas Piketty’s book. This critical review, informed by history and political science, aims to open up three areas of discussion. Are redistributive tax policies a mere accident, produced by the chaotic history of the twentieth century, and, if so, what might their future be? On what grounds could capitalism’s tendency to create inequality be regulated in the absence of any alternative system? Finally, can deliberative democracy offer any solution, or has it already been profoundly weakened by the very economic processes that Piketty’s brings to the fore in his book? A political history of capital seems more essential than ever.

Thomas Piketty’s book has the great merit of implementing a global analysis of inequality that compares countries and periods. However, he adopts a definition of social class that overlooks the importance of cultural capital. Furthermore, the role of social movements is relatively marginalized in his account, which also focuses on fiscal tools to the detriment of other forms of regulation. Nonetheless, this innovative and important book opens up new avenues of research in the field of political sociology.

According to David Armitage and Jo Guldi, digitized sources and quantification almost naturally lead to the sort of longue durée history that they seek to promote. This article questions that assertion on the basis of the long tradition of quantitative history, open to exchanges with the social sciences and revived, not annihilated, by microhistory. The digitization of numerous historical sources does not call for less caution in our analyses—quite the contrary, as it creates new biases. More importantly, it does not solve the crucial question of controlled anachronism, that is, the need for carefully constructed categories in any quantification based on the longue durée. The article also addresses the implications of choosing the longue durée as the exclusive basis for reflections on historical processes and causality. Is the longue durée purely a scale for description? If not, can it escape a simplistic vision, a monocausal path dependency? If we are to avoid such pitfalls, the wider debates within all the social sciences on time-scales and causality must be taken into account.

This short contribution seeks to place David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s article within a broader historiographical context, enlarged to include the history of China. From the outset, Fernand Braudel was careful to link his vision of the longue durée with the new “area studies” exploring international cultures. By studying social and economic history and more generally by using approaches drawn from the social sciences, European and American specialists of China have deconstructed the overly longue durée of Chinese history and shed light on its dynamism, previously repressed and concealed by the notion of a so-called “civilization.” This process facilitated a successful specialization, which can today be supported by the “big data” being compiled in circles close to the two authors.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is based on the author’s choices concerning the definition of capital, the inequalities of its distribution, and the social state policies he recommends to address them. In line with Thomas Piketty’s proposal to encourage a dialogue between economics and the other social sciences, this article sheds light on the implications of those choices. It traces the political genealogy of “human” and “intellectual” capital, and the subsequent development of other capital-variables used to measure different types of inequality and to evaluate the policies designed to cope with them. Differentiating the modes—which are not exclusively market-orientated—of investing in and valorizing these various types of capital, it clarifies the kind of power associated with each, its claim to legitimacy despite the inequalities it causes, and the domination it exercises. This calls into question the delimitation that Piketty has chosen for a basic set of capital-goods that are used in very different ways, along with his understanding and evaluation of them according to market valuation alone.

Thomas Piketty’s analysis of the way that neoliberal economists use false meritocracy to justify growing economic inequality invites historians to reconsider the representation of workers in the economic thought and administrative politics of preindustrial Western Europe. This renewed focus on those termed mercenarii in theological, economic, and legal texts, namely salaried workers, shows that since the thirteenth century the literate elites of Christian Europe have interpreted manual labor as the sign of a competence that was useful but also socially and politically devalorizing. The ancient Roman conception of wages as auctoramentum servitutis, or evidence of servitude, reemerges at the end of Middle Ages in the guise of a complex theological, legal, and governmental discourse about the intellectual incompetence and necessary political marginality of salaried workers as manual laborers. At the dawn of the early modern era, the representation of salaried labor as a social condition corresponding to a state of servitude and lack of intellect characterizes both literary works and the economic rationality embodied by the first “scientific” economists.

This article responds to a variety of criticisms of our thesis that the longue durée is returning after a period of retreat, and that this return provides a necessary means to revive the discipline of history as a critical human science. We argue that the longue durée has different meanings in distinct historical traditions and that its importance for non-academic audiences will not be the same as for an academic readership. We also suggest that the longue durée should be combined with other historical time-scales (including those covered by microhistory), and that this combination can help us all to better understand the present in light of the past and then orient ourselves toward the future. In sum, we argue that the revenant longue durée can be one means, among others, to address the widespread “crisis of the humanities” that has been discerned by scholars around the world.

Historians generally account for the dynamics of asset accumulation and the concentration of wealth in early modern societies by invoking systems of inheritance, matrimonial strategies, political distribution, and market transfers of property. Thomas Piketty emphasizes a more significant factor: higher returns on inherited capital. This article considers the ways in which early modern history might make use of such a hypothesis.

What kind of history is the history of science? To what extent does the academic research labeled as such delineate a homogeneous field? What are the current challenges that it faces? The recent translation of Simon Schaffer’s works into French, along with the publication of his 2014 Marc Bloch Lecture in the Annales, provides the framework for this article’s historiographical reflection on the profound changes that have taken place within the discipline over the last thirty years, particularly within a French context. The analysis is twofold. First, it aims to trace how new approaches to the sociology and anthropology of science have reconfigured the boundaries of the discipline. Second, it considers the effect of the abandonment of one of its major historiographical paradigms by most of the scholars currently working on early modern science: the scientific revolution as the rise of scientific modernity, underpinned by a Eurocentric vision of the production of knowledge. Although most research on the early modern period now strives to distance itself from this narrative, it must also face new challenges and questions—in particular the role of science in the processes of globalization and the multiplicity of sites and social configurations that participate in this change of scale. These challenges point towards new methods and styles in the history of science and, more broadly, the social sciences.

This article discusses the specificity of Western economies and, within this framework, of inequality as envisaged by Thomas Piketty. To this end, it considers the relevance of national, regional, trans-regional, and above all imperial scales of analysis, particularly in regard to the historical dynamics of development (the “Great Divergence”), the fiscal state, and welfare.

The practices of measurement have long been taken as authoritative technologies that travel unusually well and easily across cultural boundaries, and as a sign and cause of the apparent dominance of Western modes of science. Attention to the rituals of measurement and to the emergence of the forms of knowledge that accompanied measurement, notably the sciences of metrology, helps challenge these assumptions. Stories of the silent trade, often located in western Africa, and of the ritual origins of measurement, developed within anthropology and conjectural history, can be used to explore how measurement practices traveled and changed. In particular, the work of Marc Bloch as the preeminent historian of ceremony and power can help illuminate the relation between the historical geography of metrology and the scope of the sciences. His brilliant analysis of the royal ritual of “cramp rings” and its fate provides an important example and precedent for comparably ceremonial and culturally significant episodes in the long history of the science of measurement.