Fans of Thomas Piketty’s influential 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century will find much to like in this long-awaited sequel. It is even more weighty (literally: the English edition has more than 1,000 pages), reflects a prodigious amount of scholarship and is as full of indignation at our world.

It contains fascinating descriptions of lesser known historical uprisings against inequality such as the Haitian revolution, and interesting details about better known ones such as the French revolution. Yet, as a call for nations to enact massive redistribution programmes to reduce inequality, this latest work will persuade few outside his devoted following.

What Capital and Ideology does not lack is ambition. Piketty describes societal systems through the ages — such as slavery, feudalism, colonialism and caste — collectively as “inequality regimes”. No surprises, then, about what he thinks is their key attribute. In each case, he uses historical sources to map the distribution of incomes and wealth and show how the situation today parallels those earlier abhorrent episodes. The obvious implication: if we are not disturbed by what is going on around us, we should be.