piketty history of unequal societies

Ternary societies: trifunctional inequality The objective of the first two parts of this book is to place the history of unequal regimes in a long-term perspective. In particular, we will attempt to better understand the complexity and the multiplicity of processes and trajectories that led former ternary and slave societies to the triumph of the landlords' societies and colonial post- slave societies in the nineteenth century. The first part examines the case of European order companies and their transformation into owners' companies. The second part examines that of slave and colonial societies, and how the evolution of tri-functional extra-European societieswas affected by their meeting with the European powers. The third part will then analyze the crisis of the landlord and colonial societies in the twentieth century, under the blows of the world wars and the communist challenge. Then the fourth part will study the conditions of their regeneration and their possible transformation in the postcolonial and neoproprietary world.late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The logic of the three functions: clergy, nobility, third estate We will therefore begin this investigation by studying what I propose to call the "ternary societies". The latter constitute the oldest and most widespread category of inequality regime in history. They have also left a lasting imprint on the world today, and it is impossible to properly examine subsequent political-ideological developments without starting with the analysis of this original matrix of social inequality and its justification. In their simplest form, the ternary societies are composed of three distinct social groups, each fulfilling essential functions at the service of the whole community, and indispensable for its perpetuation: the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate. The clergy is the religious and intellectual class: it is in charge of the spiritual direction of the community, its values ​​and its education; it gives meaning to its history and its future and provides for it the necessary intellectual and moral norms and references. The nobility is the warrior and military class: it wields arms and brings security, protection and stability to the whole of society; it thus prevents the community from sinking into permanent chaos and widespread brigandage. The third estate is the working class and commoner: it brings together the rest of society, starting with peasants, artisans and traders; through her work, she allows the entire community to feed, clothe and reproduce. One could also speak of "trifunctional societies" to designate this historical type, which in practice usually takes more complex and diversified forms, with multiple subclasses within each group, but whose general pattern of justification - and sometimes also of formal political organization - relies on the three functions. This general type of social organization is found not only throughout Christian Europe until the French Revolution, but also in many non - European societies and in most religions, particularly in the context of Hinduism and Shia and Sunni Islam, in different ways. Anthropologists have recently made the (disputed) hypothesis that the social "tripartition" systems observed in Europe and India have a common Indo-European origin, detectable in mythologies and linguistic structures . Although very incomplete, current knowledge suggests that this type of organization in three classes is actually much more general, and that the thesis of the unique origin hardly holds. The ternary pattern is found in almost all ancient societies and in all parts of the world as far as the Far East, China, and Japan, but with substantial variations that need to be studied because they are background more interesting than superficial similarities. The wonder of what is intangible or supposed to be such often reflects a certain political and social conservatism, whereas the historical reality is always changing and multiple, full of unforeseen potentialities, handicraftssurprising and precarious institutions, unstable compromises and unfinished bifurcations. To understand this reality, and also to prepare for future bifurcations, it is better to analyze the conditions of sociohistorical change, at least as much as those of conservation. This applies to both ternary societies and others. To make progress in this analysis, it is useful to compare the long-term dynamics observed in very different contexts, particularly in Europe and India, and more generally in a comparative and transnational perspective. This is what we will try to do in this chapter and the following ones. Ternary Societies and the Formation of the Modern State Ternary societies are distinguished from later historical forms by two essential characteristics, which are closely related to each other: on the one hand, the trifunctional schema of justification of inequality; and on the other hand the fact that they are old societies that precede the formation of the modern centralized state, and in which the inseparably political and economic power was initially exercised at the local level, in a territory most often small dimension, sometimes with relatively loose links with a central power monarchical or imperial more or less distant. The social order was structured around some key institutions (the village, the rural community, the castle, the fort, the church, the temple, the monastery), in a highly decentralized way, with limited coordination between the different territories and places of power. The latter were most often poorly connected to each other, especially given the weakness of the means of transport. This decentralization of power obviously does not prevent brutality and domination in social relations, but it occurs in different ways and configurations from those encountered with the centralized state structures of the modern age. Concretely, in traditional ternary societies, property rights and sovereign functions are inextricably entangled within the framework of power relations at the local level. The two ruling classes - the clergy and the nobility - are certainly possessing classes. In particular, they usually hold the majority of agricultural land (sometimes almost all), which in all rural societies is the bedrock of economic and political power. In the case of the clergy, detention is frequently organized through the many forms of ecclesiastical institutions (churches, temples, dioceses, pious foundations, monasteries, etc.) observed in different religions, especially in Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. In the case of the nobility, possession is more like a detention at the individual level, or rather at the level of the lineage and the noble title, sometimes in the framework of family indivisions or quasi-foundations to avoid the squandering of the property. heritage and rank. In any case, the important point is that these property rights of the clergy and the nobility go hand in hand with essential sovereign powers, especially in terms of policing and police and military power (this is the appanage in principle of the nobility warrior, but it can also be exercised in the name of an ecclesiastical lord), as well as in terms of jurisdictional power (justice is generally rendered in the name of the lord of the place, there also noble or religious) . In medieval Europe as well as in pre-colonial India, the French Lord as the English Landlord, the Spanish Bishop as the Indian Brahman and Rajput, and their equivalents in other contexts, are at the same time masters of the land and the masters of the people who work and live on the land. They are endowed with both property rights and sovereign rights, according to various and changing modalities. Whether the lord is from the class warrior or clerical, whether we study Europe, India or other geographical areas, we see, in all the ancient ternary societies, the importance and the extreme interweaving of these power relations at the local level. This sometimes takes the extreme form of forced labor and serfdom, which implies a strict limitation of the right to mobility of all or part of the class of workers: they can not leave their territory anymore.and go work elsewhere. In this sense, they belong to noble or religious lords, even if it is a relation of possession different from those which we will study in the chapter devoted to slave societies. More generally, it may take less extreme and potentially more benevolent, but real, forms of coaching, which can lead to the formation of local quasi-states, led by clergy and nobility, with shared roles. variable depending on the case. In addition to policing and justice, the most important forms of supervision in traditional ternary societies include the control and registration of marriages, births and deaths. It is an essential function for the perpetuation and regulation of the community, closely related to religious ceremonies and the rules concerning alliances and recommended forms of family life (especially for anything related to sexuality, paternal power, the role of women and the education of children). This function is generally the prerogative of the clerical class, and the corresponding registers are held in the churches and temples of the different religions concerned. There is also the recording of transactions and contracts. This function plays a central role in regulating economic activity and property relations, and it can be exercised by the noble or religious lord, generally in connection with the exercise of local jurisdictional power and the resolution of civil, commercial and legal disputes. estate. Other functions and collective services can also play an important role in traditional ternary society, such as teaching and medical care (often rudimentary, sometimes more elaborate) and certain collective infrastructures (mills, bridges, roads, wells). It should be noted that the sovereign powers held by the two first orders of the ternary societies (clergy and nobility) are conceived as the natural counterpart of the services they bring to the third order in terms of security and spirituality, and more generally in terms of structuring of the community. Everything is held in the trifunctional society: each group takes place in a set of rights, duties and powers closely related to each other at the local level. To what extent is the development of the modern centralized state at the origin of the disappearance of ternary societies? We will see that the interactions between these two fundamental politico-economic processes are actually more complex, and can not be described mechanically, unidirectionally or deterministically. In some cases, the trifunctional ideological schema can even succeed in sustainably relying on centralized state structures and redefining itself and perpetuating itself in this new framework, at least for a time. One example is the British House of Lords, a nobility and clerical institution directly descended from the medieval trifunctional world, but which played a central role in the government of the first world colonial empire during most of the nineteenth century and until the beginning of the 19th century. XXth century. We can also mention the Shia clergy of Iran, which with the creation of the Council of Guardians of the Constitution and the Assembly of Experts (chamber elected but reserved for clerics, and responsible in particular for the appointment of the Supreme Leader) has managed to constitutionalize its dominant political role with the creation of the Islamic Republic at the end of the twentieth century, a regime largely unknown in history, and still in place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The delegitimation of ternary societies, between revolutions and colonisations The fact remains that the construction of the modern state naturally tends to undermine the very foundations of the trifunctional order, and is generally accompanied by the development of competing ideological forms, for example, proprietary ideologies. colonialists or communists, who most often end up simply replacing and eradicating ternary ideology as a dominant ideology. Once a centralized state structure succeeds in guaranteeing the security of people and goods in a large territory, it mobilizes an administration and specific human resources (police, military, officers), less and less linked to the old nobility warrior, it is quite obvious that it is the very legitimacy of the nobility as guarantor of the order and the security which is hard tested. Similarly, from the moment that civil, academic and academic processes and institutions are developed to educate and produce new knowledge and wisdom, led by new networks of teachers, intellectuals, doctors, scientists and philosophers, less and less linked to the former clerical class, there is little doubt that it is the very legitimacy of the clergy as guarantor of the spiritual direction of the community that is gravely handed over. in question. Such processes of delegitimization of former warrior and clerical classes can take place in an incredibly gradual manner and, in some cases, spread over several centuries. In many European countries (for example in the United Kingdom and Sweden, cases to which we will come back), the transformation of European order companies into owners' companies involves a very long and gradual evolution, which starts around 1500 -1600 (or earlier) and only ends around 1900-1920; and still not completely, since there remain trifunctional traces up to the present day, if only in the form of the monarchical institution, always present in a large number of Western European States , sometimes with largely symbolic remnants of nobility or clerical power (like the British House of Lords) 2. There are also moments of brutal acceleration, when new ideologies and appropriate state structures act in concert to radically and consciously transform the organization of ancient ternary societies. We will analyze in particular the case of the French Revolution, which is the most emblematic, and also one of the best documented. Following the abolition of the "privileges" of the nobility and the clergy on the night of August 4, 1789, the revolutionary assemblies and their administrations and courts had to give a precise meaning to this term. It was necessary to operate in a short time a strict demarcation between what was in the eyes of the revolutionary legislators the legitimate exercise of the right of property (including when this right was exercised by a former "privileged", and had sometimes been acquired and consolidated in dubious conditions) and what belonged to the ancient world of the illegitimate appropriation of local sovereign powers (now the exclusive domain of the central state). This was not without difficulty, as these rights were in practice inextricably linked. This experience makes it possible to better grasp the specificity of the entanglements of powers and rights that characterize the traditional ternary society, and particularly the European order company. We will also look at an entirely different but equally instructive historical sequence, examining how the British colonial state undertook to measure and transform the trifunctional structure in force in India, notably through censuses. castes from 1871 to 1941. It is a kind of case opposed to that of the French Revolution: in India, a foreign state power undertakes to reconfigure an old ternary society and interrupts the indigenous process of formation of the State and social transformation. The confrontation of these two opposite experiences (as well as the examination of other transitions combining post-ternary and postcolonial logic, as in China, Japan or Iran) will allow us to better understand the diversity of possible trajectories and mechanisms. at work. From the news of ternary societies Before I go any further, however, I must answer a natural question: beyond their historical interest, why should ternary societies be studied? Some might be tempted to neglect them and refer them to a distant past, little known and poorly documented, and especially irrelevant to the understanding of the modern world. Are the strict statutory differences that characterize them the antithesis of our modern democratic and meritocratic societies, which claim to be based on equal access to professions, social fluidity and intergenerational mobility? It would be wrong to commit such an error for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the structure of inequalities in ancient ternary societies is less radically different from that prevailing in modern societies than is sometimes imagined. On the other hand and above all, the conditions of the disappearance of trifunctional societies, extremely variable according to countries, regions and religious contexts, colonial and postcolonial, have left deep traces in the contemporary world. First of all, it must be emphasized that even if statutory rigidity is the norm in the trifunctional scheme, inter-class mobility is in fact never completely absent in these societies, which are close to modern societies on this point. . For example, we will see that the relative size of the clerical, noble and common groups as well as the extent of their resources vary greatly over time and according to the country, particularly as a result of variations in the admission rules and strategies of alliance followed by the dominant groups, more or less open or closed depending on the case, and institutions and relationships of force regulating relations between groups. The two dominant classes (the clergy and the nobility) together accounted for just over 2% of the adult male population in France at the end of the Ancien Régime, against more than 5% two centuries earlier. They represented around 11% in eighteenth-century Spain, and more than 10% for the two varnas corresponding to the clerical and warrior classes - Brahmans and Kshatriya - in nineteenth-century India (or nearly 20%). % if all upper castes are added), reflecting very different human, economic and political realities (see Figure 1.1). In other words, far from being fixed, the boundaries between the three groups of ternary societies are the subject of permanent negotiations and conflicts, which can radically alter their definition and outlines. It should also be noted that, from the point of view of enrollment in the two highest classes, India and Spain finally appear closer to one another than France and Spain, which perhaps suggests that radical oppositions sometimes established between different civilizational, cultural and religious essences (Indian castes often playing the role of absolute strangeness in the Western gaze, when they are not considered as the symbol of the excessive taste of the East and despotism for inequality and tyranny) are actually less important than sociopolitical and institutional processes that can transform social structures. Chart 1.1 The structure of ternary societies: Europe-India, 1660-1880 Reading: in 1660, the clergy grouped about 3.3% of the adult male population in France, and the nobility 1.8%, totaling 5.1 % for the two dominant classes of the trifunctional society. In 1880, the Brahmans (former class of priests, as measured by British colonial censuses) accounted for about 6.7% of the adult male population in India, and the kshatriya (former class of warriors) about 3.8%, or in total 10.5% for the two dominant classes. Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/ ideologie . We will also have ample opportunity to see that the estimates of the numbers of these different groups, such as those we have just mentioned, are themselves the product of a complex social and political construction. They are often the result of various attempts by state powers in formation (absolute monarchies or colonial empires) to organize surveys on the clergy and the nobility or censuses of the colonized population and the different groups within it. These inseparably political and cognitive devices are generally part of a project of social domination as much as the production of knowledge and representations. The categories used and the information produced inform us at least as much about the intentions and the political project of their authors as about the structure of the society in question. Which does not mean that we can not learn anything useful from these materials, on the contrary. If we take the time to contextualize and analyze them, they are valuable sources to better understand the conflicts, developments and breaks in societies that we would be wrong to imagine static and sedimented , and to oppose them more than reason. Moreover, if the ternary societies are often accompanied by various ethnic theories concerning the real or supposed origins of the dominant and dominated groups (the nobility is for example famous Frankish, Norman or Aryan in France, England or India, while the people are supposed to be Galloromain , Anglo-Saxon or Dravidian), theories that were alternatively used to legitimize or on the contrary delegitimize the system of domination in place (including of course by the colonial powers, who loved nothing so much as to push back the societies colonized in a radical differentiation, to assign them to an identity supposedly unrelated to the European modernity, considered dynamic and mobile), all the historical elements available today suggest that the mixtures between classes were in reality sufficiently important for these supposed ethnic differences disappear almost entirely in the b out of a few generations. Without doubt, mobility within ternary societies was generally quantitatively lower than in contemporary societies; still that it is difficult to make precise comparisons, and that there are many contrary examples, founded on the promotion of new elites and new nobilities, in India as in Europe, which the ternary ideology only legitimizes after the fact, which testifies to the passage of its flexibility. But, in any case, it is a difference of degree and not of principle, which must be studied as such. In all trifunctional societies, including those where the religious class is in principle hereditary, there are clerics from the other two classes, commoners ennobled as a result of their combat exploits or their other merits and qualities, religious taking up arms, and so on. Without being the norm, social fluidity is never completely absent. Social identities and dividing lines between classes are negotiated and contended in both ternary societies and in others. The Justification of Inequality in Ternary Societies More generally, it would be wrong to see in ternary societies the incarnation of an inherently unjust, despotic and arbitrary order, in radical opposition to the modern meritocratic order, deemed just and harmonious. The need for safety and meaning have always been two essential social needs. This applies in particular, but not only, in underdeveloped societies, characterized by territorial fragmentation and weak communications, and marked by chronic instability and precariousness of existence, whose very foundations may be permanently threatened by looters, deadly raids or epidemics. Since religious and military groups are able to provide credible answers to these needs for meaning and stability, in the context of institutions and ideologies adapted to the territories and times in question, the former by proposing a a grand narrative of the origins and future of the community, and concrete signs that make it possible to express one's membership and ensure its perpetuation, the latter by offering an organization to regulate the scope of legitimate violence, and to ensure security people and goods, it is hardly surprising that the trifunctional order may appear legitimate in the eyes of the populations concerned. Why should we risk losing everything by attacking a power that brings material and spiritual security, without knowing who will succeed it? The mysteries of politics and of the ideal social organization are so thick, the uncertainties about the practical means of achieving them are so extreme, that it is natural that a power offering a tried and tested model of stability, based on a distribution simple and intelligible of the major social functions, meets a certain success. This obviously does not imply the existence of a consensus on the exact distribution of power and resources among the three groups. The trifunctional schema is not an idealistic and reasoned discourse proposing a precisely defined norm of justice open to deliberation. It is authoritarian, hierarchical and violently unequal, allowing religious and military elites to dominate, often shamelessly, brutally and excessively. It happens frequently in the ternary societies that the clergy and the nobility try to push their advantage too far or overestimate their power of coercion, which can lead to revolts, their transformation or their disappearance. I simply insist on the fact that the trifunctional system of justification of inequality which is at the heart of ternary societies, namely the idea that each of the three groups has a specific function (a religious function, a military function, a laborious function), and that this tripartition potentially benefits the entire community, must always have a minimum of plausibility for the system to continue. In ternary societies, like all societies, an unequal regime can only be sustainable if it is based on a complex mixture of constraint and consent. Hard and hard coercion is not enough: the model of social organization defended by the dominant groups must also provoke a minimum of adhesion in the population, or at least within a significant part of it. Political leadership must always be based on a minimal form of moral and intellectual leadership, c ' is to -dire a credible theory of the public good and the public interest 3. This is undoubtedly the most important common point between trifunctional societies and later societies. The peculiarity of ternary societies is simply their specific mode of justification of inequality: each social group fulfills a function indispensable to the other groups, renders to each of the vital services, in the same way as the different parts of the same human body. The body metaphor is also frequently used in the various texts theorizing the trifunctional organization of these societies, in India since Antiquity (in particular in the framework of Manusmriti , legal-political treaty written in the second century BC common [AEC] in northern India, more than a millennium before the first Christian texts formalizing the ternary scheme, and on which we will return) as in medieval Europe. This gives the dominated groups a place in a coherent whole, most often with the role of the feet or the legs (whereas the dominant groups are generally incarnated in the head and arms), which is certainly not very rewarding, but at least an indisputable useful function serving the entire community. This mode of justification therefore deserves to be studied as such, in particular the conditions of its transformation and its disappearance, and to be compared to modern regimes of justification of inequality, which are not always totally dissimilar, even if the functions have evolved a lot, and the equality of access to different occupations is now proclaimed as a cardinal principle (without ever being very much worried about whether equal access is real or theoretical) . The political regimes that have succeeded the ternary societies have been responsible for denigrating them, and this is very natural. For example, the discourse of 19th century French bourgeois vis-a-vis the nobility of Ancien Régime, or even the speech of the British colonizer against the Indian Brahmans. But these discourses themselves sought to justify other systems of inequality and domination, which were not always more tender with the dominated groups, and it is important to study them as such.

Multiplicity of elites, unity of the people? Last but not least, we must begin our investigation by studying ternary societies and analyzing some of their many variations and transformations, for whatever the extent of their opposition to modern societies, the fact Central is that the different trajectories and historical transitions that led to the disappearance of ternary societies have left a lasting imprint on the world today. We will see in particular that the main variations between ternary societies can be explained by the nature of the dominant political-religious ideology, and in particular by its position on two key questions: that of the more or less assumed multiplicity of elites; and that of the real or supposed unity of the people. The first is the question of hierarchy and complementarity between the two dominant groups (clergy and nobility). In most societies of European orders, and especially under the French Ancien Regime, the first order is officially the clergy, and the nobility must be satisfied with the second official place in the processions. But who really holds the supreme power within the ternary societies, and how to organize the coexistence between the spiritual power of the clergy and the temporal power of the nobles? The question is anything but innocuous, and it has received varying answers in time and space. This first question is itself closely linked to that of the celibacy of priests and their reproduction as a social group truly distinct from the other two. Thus the clerical group can reproduce itself and form a true hereditary class in Hinduism (in the form of the Brahmans, a true clerical and intellectual class, which in practice has often occupied a dominant political and economic position vis-a-vis the warrior nobility of the kshatriya , what we will have to understand), Shia and Sunni Islam (with here also a true hereditary clergy in the case of Shiism, organized and powerful, often at the head of quasi- local states, when it is not the centralized state itself), Judaism and most religions, with the notable exception of Christianity (at least in its Roman and modern Catholic variant), where the clergy must constantly be fed by the other two groups (in fact by the nobility for the high clergy, and by the third state for the lower clergy). This immediately makes the European case very specific in the long history of ternary societies, and unequal regimes in general, which can also help to explain certain aspects of the subsequent European trajectory, in particular the point of departure. view of its economic-financial ideology and its legal organization. We will also see in the fourth part of this book that this competition between different types of elites (clerical or warlike) and legitimacy is not without relation to the oppositions between intellectual and commercial elites that sometimes characterize the modern political and electoral conflict. , even if the conditions of the competition have obviously changed since the trifunctional age. Secondly, there is the question of the more or less complete unification of the statutes within the class of workers, or, conversely, the more or less late maintenance of various forms of slave labor (bondage, slavery). and the importance given to professional identities and corporations, in connection with the formation of the modern centralized state and traditional religious ideology. In theory, the ternary society is based on the idea of ​​unifying all workers into one class, one status, one dignity. In practice, things can be much more complex, as illustrated for example in the Indian world by persistent inequalities between lower-caste groups ( Dalits or untouchables, formerly untouchable and discriminated labor) and from low and medium castes (the ex- shudra , former proletarian or servile labor force depending on the case, but in any case less discriminated against than the Dalits ), an opposition that still plays a central role in the structuring of the conflict sociopolitics in India at the beginning of the 21st century. In the European world, the process of unification of the status of work and gradual extinction of serfdom has spread over almost a millennium, starting around the year 1000 and continuing until the end of the nineteenth century to Eastern Europe, which has left visible traces and discrimination until the present (as illustrated by the case of the Roma ). Above all, the Euro-American proprietary modernity has been accompanied by an unprecedented development of slave and colonial systems, which has led to persistent inequalities between white and black populations in the United States, and between populations of indigenous and postcolonial origin. in Europe, in different and comparable ways. To sum up: inequalities linked to different statutory or ethnoreligious origins (or perceived as such) continue to play a central role in modern inequality, which can not be reduced to the meritocratic fairy tale sometimes mentioned in should. However, to understand this central dimension of modern inequalities, it is important to begin by studying traditional ternary societies and their variants, and how they have gradually changed since the eighteenth century into a complex mix of homeowners' societies (where statutory and ethno-religious differences are in principle erased, but monetary and patrimonial inequalities can take on unsuspected proportions) and slavery, colonial and postcolonial societies (where statutory and ethno-religious differences play a central role, possibly in conjunction with considerable monetary and wealth inequalities). More generally, the study of trajectories postternaires and diversity provides an essential key to the analysis of the role of religious institutions and ideologies in structuring modern societies, especially through their involvement in education, and more generally in the regulation and representation of social inequalities. The ternary societies and the formation of the State: Europe, India, China, Iran Lastly, it is not a question of proposing here a general history of the ternary societies, on the one hand because it would require many volumes and would go far beyond the scope of this book, and secondly because the primary materials needed to write such a story are not available to date, and to some extent never will be completely, precisely because of the extremely decentralized ternary societies and the limited traces they have left us. More modestly, the purpose of this and subsequent chapters is to lay some groundwork for such comparative and global history, focusing on the most important elements for the analysis of later developments and modern unequal regimes. In the rest of this first part, I will examine in more detail the case of France and that of the other European countries. The French case is emblematic, because the Revolution of 1789 marks a particularly clear break between the Ancien Régime, which can be considered as a paradigmatic example of ternary society, and bourgeois society flourishing in France in the nineteenth century, which appears as the archetype of the owners' society, a major historical form that succeeds in many countries to the ternary societies. The term "third state" comes from the French language and expresses as clearly as possible the idea of ​​a society divided into three classes. The study of the French case and the comparison with other European and extra- European trajectories also make it possible to question the respective role of revolutionary processes and long-term trends (linked in particular to the formation of the State and changes in structure socio-economic) in the transformation of ternary societies. The British and Swedish cases offer a particularly useful counterpoint: these two countries are still monarchies today, and the process of transformation of ternary societies has proceeded much more gradually than in France. We will see, however, that the moments of rupture also play an essential role, and that these trajectories also illustrate the multiplicity and the diversity of the possible bifurcations within this general evolution. I will then analyze in the second part several variants of ternary (and sometimes quaternary) societies observed outside Europe. I will focus in particular on the way in which their evolution was affected by the enslavement and colonialist domination systems set up by the European powers. I will focus in particular on the case of India, where the stigmata of the ancient ternary divisions remain exceptionally strong, despite the will of the Indian governments to put an end to it since the country's independence in 1947. India offers in addition to a unique observation point, linked to the violent encounter between an ancient ternary civilization (the oldest in the world) and the British colonial power, a meeting that totally transformed the conditions of state formation and social transformation . The comparison with the trajectories observed in China or Japan will also open several hypotheses on the different post-tertiary trajectories. Finally, I will mention the case of Iran, which offers the striking example of a late constitutionalization and still in force of clerical power, with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Armed with these different lessons, we can go to the third part of this book and to the analysis of the fall of the owners' societies under the blows of the twentieth century crises, and of their possible regeneration and redefinition in the neoproprietarist and postcolonial world of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the 21st century.