Here is a brief list of terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader. These are marked with an asterisk at the point of first occurrence in the text.
CENSITARY: A censitary regime (from the French censitaire) was a regime in which the right to vote was subject to a property qualification, generally met by paying above a certain amount of property tax. For instance, during the Restoration in France (1815–1830), the right to vote was reserved to men over the age of 30 who paid at least 300 francs in direct taxes (which in practice granted eligibility to vote to about 100,000 people or roughly 1 percent of adult males). The precise requirement varied over time.
GINI COEFFICIENT: A statistical measure of distribution which was developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912. It is used as a gauge of economic inequality, measuring income distribution among a population. The coefficient ranges from zero to one, with zero representing perfect equality and one representing perfect inequality.
GREAT DEMARCATION: A term introduced by the historian Rafe Blaufarb to describe a shift in the property ownership regime that occurred during the French Revolution, which resulted in a strict separation between regalian functions (henceforth the monopoly of the centralized state) and property rights (henceforth to be granted solely to private individuals), whereas trifunctional society was based on an inextricable imbrication of both.
IDENTITARIAN (Fr. identitaire): An identitarian ideology is an ideology structured around identification with a specific social group, often based on an ethnic, racial, or religious identity.
INEQUALITY REGIME: A set of discourses and institutional arrangements intended to justify and structure the economic, social, and political inequalities of a given society.
LIVRE TOURNOIS: Monetary unit of account used in France during the Middle Ages and early modern period.
OWNERSHIP SOCIETY (sometimes called proprietarian society): A social order based on a quasi-religious defense of property rights as the sine qua non of social and political stability. Ownership societies flourished in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
PATRIMONIAL MIDDLE CLASS: That portion of the wealth distribution extending from the fiftieth to the ninetieth percentile. In other words, the “middle 40 percent” of the wealth distribution standing between the bottom 50 percent and the top 10 percent.
PREMODERN: As used in this book, “premodern” means prior to the eighteenth century.
PROPRIETARIAN: See Ownership society, also called proprietarian society. Proprietarian ideology is the ideology of ownership society, based on the sacralization of property rights.
REGALIAN RIGHTS OR POWERS: The powers of security, justice, and legitimate use of violence.
SOCIETY OF ORDERS: A type of society based on an equilibrium between intellectual and warrior elites and on specific forms of ownership and power relations. See also Trifunctional society.
SUCCESSORAL: Pertaining to inheritance.
TERNARY SOCIETY: See Trifunctional society.
TRAJECTORIES AND SWITCH POINTS: The French text refers to trajectoires et bifurcations to describe the paths taken by different societies in their historical evolutions. Here, bifurcations has been translated as “switch points” to refer to points in time where a crucial turn was taken.
TRIFUNCTIONAL SOCIETY: A trifunctional society is one whose structure comprises three functional groups: clergy, nobility, and workers (the third estate). The ternary or trifunctional pattern can be found in nearly all premodern societies throughout the world, including China and Japan.