About
Almost nothing in this book was written as a book. The bulk of it is journalism - some sixty articles that Marx, and now and then Engels, filed in the 1850s for the New-York Daily Tribune, the largest paper in the United States, whose editor Charles Dana had met Marx in Cologne in 1848 and offered him a column. To these the Moscow editors added five extracts from Capital and a sheaf of letters, and gathered the whole under a single heading.
The result is the fullest single collection of what Marx and Engels wrote about empire: India, China, Persia, Afghanistan, Algeria and Ireland, seen close up and in real time, as the events were happening and with the evidence of the British press in front of them. The Indian articles of 1853 and 1857-58, on the destruction of the village community, on the ruin of the handloom weavers, and on the Mutiny, are the best known; the Irish material and the letters on the effect of Ireland on the English working class are among the most consequential things either man wrote about national oppression.
Reading it whole rather than in extracts is the point. The articles show Marx changing his mind over two decades - from the early passages that treat British rule as an unconscious tool of history to the later insistence that the English working class could never be free while England held Ireland down - and the change is legible only when the pieces are set in order.
First issued in Moscow in 1959 and reprinted in this enlarged form from 1968.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
The result is the fullest single collection of what Marx and Engels wrote about empire: India, China, Persia, Afghanistan, Algeria and Ireland, seen close up and in real time, as the events were happening and with the evidence of the British press in front of them. The Indian articles of 1853 and 1857-58, on the destruction of the village community, on the ruin of the handloom weavers, and on the Mutiny, are the best known; the Irish material and the letters on the effect of Ireland on the English working class are among the most consequential things either man wrote about national oppression.
Reading it whole rather than in extracts is the point. The articles show Marx changing his mind over two decades - from the early passages that treat British rule as an unconscious tool of history to the later insistence that the English working class could never be free while England held Ireland down - and the change is legible only when the pieces are set in order.
First issued in Moscow in 1959 and reprinted in this enlarged form from 1968.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.