This magnum opus, chosen by the Financial Times as the best business book of the year, documents growing concentrations of wealth over time.

Filling nearly 700 pages, Piketty uses both quantitative economic history and literature to track and illustrate the accumulation of capital over time.

Armed with centuries' worth of data drawn from 20 countries, Piketty says returns on capital will always exceed rates of overall growth. The result is that wealthy investors get disproportionately richer than the average workers whose efforts create goods, foods and services.

Only government policies, such as heavy taxation of wealth, can help redistribute income in ways that allow for a fairer sharing of the economy's overall growth and rewards, he argues.

Baptist's book narrows the focus from global wealth creation to America's rapid economic rise in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

A stinging indictment of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told argues that U.S. capitalism flourished in the 19th century largely because Southern enslavers and Northern bankers were able to turn stolen labor into massive profits.

Many Americans believe capitalism flourished on U.S. soil because of positive factors, such as technological innovation, high literacy rates, natural resources, strong contract law and so forth. But Baptist says the fundamental advantage was that Southern slave labor camps, known as plantations, were highly productive and profitable.

Enslavers used improvements in transportation and the opening of new markets to produce and sell more cotton, and thereby get richer from the labor they stole. That in turn allowed Northern bankers, manufacturers and merchants to further profit from the cotton industry.

His book shows American economic "exceptionalism" in a very different light: Tales of Yankee ingenuity and all-American gumption may sound good, but it was the crack of whips and clank of chains that accompanied U.S. growth.

Lewis makes a case that the stock market was rigged to allow firms using hyper-speedy advantages to jump in front of "mom-and-pop" investors.

In Flash Boys, he explores the ways Wall Street trading has changed from the days when an investor could "bid" on a stock to buy it, and a shareholder could "ask" for a price to sell. These traditional transactions would help companies raise money to expand their operations and hire workers.

But then the game changed, becoming an unfair race among high-frequency traders using algorithms and new technologies to get milliseconds ahead of each other. Lewis argues this ferocious push to gain speedy advantages helped enrich a few on Wall Street, but did nothing for Main Street companies seeking long-term investors.