ABSTRACT
Karl Marx's 1850s writings on non-Western societies, especially those on India, are far better known than his post-1872 ones. Although Marx's chief preoccupation was Western capitalism, there were two periods when he wrote extensively on non-Western and pre-capitalist societies. In the library of the British Museum, he began reading widely on India, China, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia. He wrote thousands of pages on those societies in his analytical journalism in the New York Tribune. The second strand in Marx's late writings on non-Western and precapitalist societies concerns Russia. In the Ethnological Notebooks, Marx engaged in a systematic effort to acquaint himself with diverse non-European or early peoples such as the Iroquois of North America, the Aztecs of pre-Columbian Mexico, the Australian aborigines, the villagers of northern India, and the Celts of ancient Ireland. This led him to a sustained emphasis on clan and village culture across a variety of precapitalist societies.
