A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty. Thomas is a French economist and Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics. In addition, he is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.
Thomas previously taught as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a French economist, Thomas documents a global progress regarding equality by tapping into historical data.
This book is certainly addressing wealth redistribution, and is a continuation from his books Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and Capital and Ideology (2020).
However, the most interesting discoveries for Americans is how Thomas addresses colonialism. This obviously brings America’s slavery into a world view within Chapter 3: The Heritage of Slavery and Colonialism. In fact, we see that Europeans began their colonial rule around 1450–1500 with Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. This was the initial Portuguese trading post on the coast of Africa. Thomas includes Columbus’s expedition to America. However this all ended in the 1960s with the French defeats in Indochina (Vietnam) and Northern Africa (Algeria). Yet, Thomas certainly brings South African apartheid into focus as these are not so long ago transformations.