Ideologies of the frontier and property. Introduction to the special issue

The introduction to the special issue of the Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine devoted to the book Capital and Ideology discusses the complementarities between the four texts in the issue and Thomas Piketty’s response. The very different fields and areas of these texts reflect the diversity and ambition of the book: the violent expansion of the United States to the West in the 19th century (Emmanuelle Perez Tisserant), post-reform China (Sebastian Veg), the French Revolution (Arnaud Orain) and British colonialism (Pat Hudson). All of them extend Thomas Piketty’s analyses and question the way in which ideologies and inegalitarian regimes are based on theories of the frontier and property. Different views emerge, however, on the role of the history of ideas and the relative autonomy of the ideological sphere from material conditions.