The United States: an unequal regime born of slavery and colonization

In Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, the United States have an important place in the description of inegalitarian regimes, not only as part of a Western, North Atlantic space shared with Europe, but also because of its slave and colonial heritage. Slavery is considered in the book as an extreme form of inequality, which also underlines the sacralization of property, but above all perhaps as an institution intrinsic to the construction of modern capitalism. The territorial expansion of the United States, on the other hand, was possible through the deportation of pre-existing populations or the restriction to their access to land and other resources. The seizure of these resources allowed a large number of American settlers, but also European immigrants, to gain access to the ownership and exploitation of the land, while at the same time, through their sale, the budget of the State was bolstered, a state that was also strengthened by the means necessary for the war against the natives. Taking together the question of slavery and that of the territorial expansion of the United States has the potential to better account for the unequal regime of this country and to note resonances with the other national, colonial and post-colonial terrains studied in the book. This perspective also makes it possible to show that the problem of inequality, presented as a kind of universal, comes into tension with the question of sovereignty, of decisions related to access to and management of resources, which is crucial in the world in transition that we know today.