Introduction

The Asiatic mode of production is a concept that Karl Marx formulated late in the 1850s in the course of his research into the history of private property and the emergence of capitalism. Marx never provided a definition of the concept, and most of his dispersed comments on Asia deal with the social, political, and juridical aspects of particular Asian states rather than the logic of their historical development. The Asiatic mode stands out in several ways from the other modes Marx names in the Preface to the Critique. The Asiatic form is thus closest to property’s primeval character as communal, belonging to the community in general but to no one individual exclusively. The difference between Asiatic property and the primitive-communal form of property that precedes it derives from the role of the state, which in the former has emerged to interpose itself by force between the community and its native right to property.