If Marx, for all his hesitations and his recognition of Urquhart’s peculiarities, nonetheless worked with him, it was because he agreed with two of Urquhart’s core positions: his Russophobia and his profound suspicions of Lord Palmerston. Marx had his own distinct reasons for endorsing these beliefs; examining them offers insights into his political orientation in a frustratingly reactionary era.
The anti-Russian stance had been central to Marx’s position before and during the 1848 Revolution, and in this respect he was no different from most radicals in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. As Count Czartoryski’s policies show, war against Russia was a preferred option for those seeking to upset the political status quo, and the Crimean War seemed the ideal opportunity, bringing political radicals onto the anti-Russian bandwagon. In Marx’s political calculation, opposition to Russia took on an ever higher value during the 1850s. Ghostwriting for Marx, Engels made the point to American readers in April 1853, as the tensions over the Eastern Question were mounting steadily. Engels asserted that since 1789
there have been in reality but two powers on the continent of Europe—Russia and Absolutism, the Revolution and Democracy. . . . But let Russia get possession of Turkey, and her strength is increased nearly half, and she becomes superior to all the rest of Europe put together. Such an event would be an unspeakable calamity to the revolutionary cause. The maintenance of the Ottoman Empire, the arrest of the Russian scheme of annexation, is a matter of the highest moment. In this instance the interests of revolutionary Democracy and of England go hand in hand.35
This aim of thwarting Russia by preserving the Ottoman Empire was paramount for Marx, even overshadowing his sympathy for revolution. When the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Aetolia and Epirus rose against Turkish rule early in 1854, Marx dismissed the insurgents as “robbers of the mountains,” whose insurrection was the result of “Russian intrigues,” led by “Muscovite emissaries,” quite a statement for the author of a Manifesto which proclaimed that communists would support every revolutionary movement. Marx dismissed English liberal proposals for the reform of the Ottoman Empire, including equality between Christians and Muslims, or the establishment of a secular state, as fanciful and impractical calls for a “perfect social revolution.” Like many former 1848 revolutionaries, Marx was developing a more realistic and power-oriented position, one dubbed by an old Paris émigré acquaintance, August Ludwig von Rochau, as Realpolitik.36
Marx’s hostility to Russia was part of a broader attitude adopted by both English politicians and Continental political refugees. The belief he shared with Urquhart that Lord Palmerston was a czarist agent was more uncommon and peculiar. To be sure, Palmerston, an elderly veteran of English politics, who had first held office in 1807, had accumulated more than his share of enemies over the decades. Catty critics remarked, for example, that his inability to give a rousing speech was caused by his fear that his false teeth would fall out. Whatever most of his enemies would say about Palmerston, his being a traitor to England and a Russian agent was the last thing they would assert. Indeed, Palmerston’s reputation for patriotism was universal, his designation as “the most English minister” a common sobriquet by the 1850s. As was characteristic of the era, this patriotic stance went along with support for liberal and constitutional governments in continental Europe and a strong commitment to limit Russian power. Of all the cabinet ministers during the Crimean War, Palmerston was the one most inclined to advocate firm measures, even considering expanding the war as Marx himself wanted.37
In view of Palmerston’s position, contemporaries found David Urquhart’s accusations that he was a traitor the stuff of conspiracy theories. Marx’s endorsement of Urquhart’s charges, independently developed, was not well received either. Engels maintained a discreet silence, but Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx’s one political associate who had remained in Prussia and not been indicted in the Cologne Communist Trial, was openly skeptical. After seeing Marx’s evidence that Palmerston was a Russian agent, Lassalle astutely pointed out to his political mentor that the Whig statesman was an aggressive supporter of the war party in England, and that most of Marx’s proofs of Palmerston’s ostensible pro-Russian policies actually demonstrated an anti-Russian stance. Lassalle continued, drawing on personal experience:
It is not without significance that diplomats I know personally, who over a period of 10–15 years have had relations with him [Palmerston] and who are themselves so corrupt that they are up to their necks in corruption, have not the least suspicion that he has been bribed but regard him as genuinely anti-Russian. And, to be sure, diplomats who are especially initiated into the secrets of Russia.38
How did Marx reach the strange conclusion that England’s most vehement anti-Russian politician was actually a Russian agent? Unlike David Urquhart, Marx was not given to conspiracy theories, yet he endorsed this one wholeheartedly. He had certainly done extensive reading in Blue Books and parliamentary debates, current issues of The Times and yellowing eighteenth-century political pamphlets he found in the Reading Room of the British Museum. What led him to the conclusion was his interpretation of this reading in the light of his theories of social class and political power and of the circumstances of the age of reaction.
Although Marx perceived the United Kingdom as the quintessentially capitalist country, he found its bourgeoisie unwilling to take on the task of governing, turning it over instead to the landed classes. He saw the latter as divided into two factions: the enlightened, great landowners, whom he identified with the Whigs, and the small, provincial gentry, the basis of the Tories. Marx was unquestionably more sympathetic to the Tories, because he perceived them as a party “always run by parvenus, Pitt, Addington, Perceval, Canning, Peel and Disraeli.” Marx praised the ironic, witty, and articulate Benjamin Disraeli, the leading figure of the parliamentary opposition during the Crimean War, as the “ablest member of the present parliament.”39
For the Whig aristocrats, Marx had nothing but contempt. They were hypocrites, who pretended to be friends of the people while passing reactionary legislation: since 1688, “all laws directed against the people are initiated by the Whigs.” They were unprincipled, abandoning their basic ideas for political advantage, as Palmerston did, when he supported the Great Reform Bill of 1832, largely for the purpose of limiting political reform. Lord John Russell, another major Whig figure who was both an ally and a rival of Palmerston, did the same, according to Marx, when he dropped his endorsement of the Corn Laws under the pressure of the industrial bourgeoisie.
A more friendly observer might see these actions as examples of political flexibility and of the ability to compromise; but for Marx they were just “all the shams that form the essence of Whigism.” Whigs demonstrated the same hypocrisy and lack of principle in foreign affairs. According to Marx,
Yielding to foreign influence in fact [Palmerston] opposes it in words. . . . He knows how to conciliate a large phraseology with narrow views, how to clothe the policy of a peace-mongering middle-class in the haughty language of England’s aristocratic past, how to appear an aggressor where he yields, and a defender where he betrays. . . . If the oppressors were always sure of his active support, the oppressed never lacked a great ostentation of his rhetorical generosity. 40
For Marx, hypocrisy, lies, and corruption made up the essence of England’s ruling political faction—and necessarily so, given their position as great aristocratic landlords administering a bourgeois-capitalist society. Marx saw the leader of this group as a hypocritical traitor, a man celebrated for his English patriotism yet actually taking directions from the czar.
Marx’s own personal experiences reinforced this willingness to see the ostensible English patriot as a Russian spy. In the very recent past, Marx had tied himself closely to a purported revolutionary, who had turned out, to his considerable embarrassment, to be a secret agent of the Austrian and Prussian governments; he had watched a Prussian policeman weave a web of forgery and perjury that had put his friends and sup
porters in jail. Justifying his opinion of Palmerston to an evidently unconvinced Engels, Marx wrote in November 1853, just a year after the conclusion of the Cologne Communist Trial and after he had finally admitted that Jànos Bangya was a police spy:
Curious as this may appear to you, by my precise retracing of the footsteps of the noble Viscount over the last 20 years, I have come to the same conclusion as the monomaniac Urquhart—that Palmerston has been sold to Russia for the last several decades. . . . We have neglected this point altogether too much and one must know with whom one has to deal. All of diplomacy reproduces on a large scale Stieber Ban[g]ya and Co.41
FOR MARX, A CRUCIAL, distinguishing feature of capitalism as an economic system was its global scope. The Communist Manifesto had celebrated the global reach of the bourgeoisie. Marx’s outlines of his planned work on political economy during the 1850s always had as a concluding chapter an analysis of the world market.42 Yet for all this evocation of what would later be called globalization, Marx’s own historical and political analysis remained distinctly Eurocentric. He did pay close attention to developments in the United States, but regarded the North American republic as an overseas outpost of European culture and society. British parliamentary debates over the proper government of India and the imperial conflicts of the 1850s, all duly covered by Marx as a New York Tribune European correspondent, gave him the one opportunity in his life to analyze non-European societies and European imperial rule. His reflections showed many of the features of mid-nineteenth-century social and political thought, but very little of twentieth-century Marxist interpretations of imperialism and capitalism on a global scale.
Marx’s interest in the Orient began, as was invariably the case among nineteenth-century German intellectuals, with the Bible. Engels wrote him in May 1853 about a book he had been reading by Charles Forster, an English Bible critic, who described the Old Testament genealogies of Noah as a listing of Bedouin tribes. Following Forster, Engels discussed the ancient Orient—from the Assyrians to the rise of Islam—as the product of Bedouin invasions. Marx, most interested in Engels’s observations, noted that the key question for him was “Why does the history of the Orient appear as the history of religion?” His answer was that in the “East,” which included for Marx Persia, India, and the Ottoman Empire, there was no private property in land. “This is the real key, even to the oriental heaven.”43
In further correspondence, Engels suggested that the chief reason for the lack of private property was the dry climate, which made a state-run irrigation system a necessity for civilization. Marx agreed with him, but added that the Eastern empires consisted primarily of a myriad of small villages, each with some form of collective agricultural property, generally accompanied by small-scale craft production. With this exchange of letters, Marx’s basic theory of government, society, and economy in Asia was formed; future discussions, mostly in his unpublished drafts on political economy, would not change it much.44
The chief opportunity for Marx to apply these theories came in his articles on British colonial rule in India, which appeared in the New York Tribune just a few days after this correspondence and drew directly on the ideas developed in it.45 Both economically and politically the most important part of the British Empire following the loss of most of its North American possessions and the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean colonies, India was not yet the jewel in the crown of the later Victorian era. It was still ruled by the British East India Company, a state-sponsored but private corporation, an increasingly archaic remnant of the eighteenth century that was equal parts colonial authority, trading and economic development firm, and band of thieves.
Marx’s portrayals of British India emphasized at different times these different features of the East India Company’s rule. In 1853, he portrayed the British as the latest in a long line of conquerors, who ruthlessly exploited and looted “Hindostan.” But the “misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially differently and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before.” British rule was a capitalist social revolution, introducing private property in land, and dismantling the state-run irrigation system. “British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agricultural and manufacturing industry . . . separate[ing] Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.”
Yet this condemnation of British imperial rule turned into a defense of its legitimacy. Marx explained to the readers of the New York Tribune in his noticeably Teutonic English that the separation of India from its past had its positive features:
Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved . . . and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition. . . . We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man [to] the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny.
Since such a civilization was easy prey to foreign aggression, “The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the British.”
What made the British perversely more desirable as conquerors was precisely the extreme disruption they brought to a static Indian society, which would be followed by the creation of more dynamic social and political order. Although this “work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins,” it was already underway. Private ownership of land would lead to economic development; railroad construction would bring the onset of modern industry. Between the introduction of a free press, and the implementation of a European system of higher education, a class of state administrators and scientists was just beginning to emerge. The British were also creating a future state for them: the political unity, telegraph network, and an all-Indian army resulting from British colonialism would be the “sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder.”
Marx’s take on imperialism had little in common with the views of his twentieth-century adherents, who have emphasized the negative, socially and economically retarding effect of capitalist, colonial rule while generally holding a more favorable opinion of pre-colonial society. Instead, his view emerged from the debates of mid-nineteenth-century European, but above all British, practitioners of a nascent social science. Like Marx, the sociologist Herbert Spencer, the legal historian Henry Maine, and the anthropologist Edward Tylor each understood Asian societies as static and incapable of the progress Europe had achieved. Only the adaptation of Western institutions would enable Asian societies to change. But they tended to be skeptical of the extent to which such institutions could be transferred to Asian countries. Even Tylor, the most optimistic among them, saw the need for a constant infusion of Western ideas.46
Marx certainly agreed with his contemporaries that Asian societies were static and incapable of change—a notion asserted by Hegel in the early nineteenth century, as much as by later social scientists. But he also thought that once the proper, capitalist institutions were present, Asians would advance quite vigorously. He quoted a British observer “that the great mass of the Indian people possesses a great industrial energy, is well fitted to accumulate capital and remarkable for a mathematical clearness of head and talent for figures and exact sciences.” The course of progress, though, as had been the case in capitalist Europe, would be neith
er smooth nor pleasant. “Has the bourgeoisie,” Marx asked, “ever effected progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?”
Marx’s defense of British colonialism in India was very much like his 1847 advocacy of free trade for its destructive effects, advancing capitalism and, through it, a future revolution. Imperial rule, Marx informed his readers, was an integral part of the capitalist system, with its global project of “the centralization of capital . . . universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind . . . and . . . the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies.” But only, Marx continued, “When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois-epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”
That last powerful, richly symbolic sentence, which in many ways sums up Marx’s entire understanding of the historical process, was also a call for an improved, enlightened, and socialist colonial policy: note its description of a future in which the world market would be under control of the “most advanced,” that is, European, “peoples.” Marx did see the prospect of an eventual Indian revolution for national independence, led by the new class of capitalists and professionals British rule was gradually creating. In his reporting on the 1857 Indian rebellion against this rule, such an Indian bourgeoisie was not in evidence. Instead, Marx emphasized the more parasitic features of the East India Company.
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