ABSTRACT
The Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878 was the last major international conflict in the lifetime of Karl Marx. There were some minor wars between 1878 and Marx's death in 1883; not all of them elicited written comments from the two socialists. Colonial expansion was widely practised in those days by the European great powers. Socialists in France and Germany sympathized with the anti-imperialist struggle of the Egyptians and denounced Britain's armed intervention. The same Karl Kautsky argued that the liberation of the colonies might come about peacefully while capitalism still held sway, at least where the colonial power was one of the European democracies where the working class could exert a measure of influence on government policies. Kautsky might have overestimated the difficulties of decolonization in India, but in the light of the bloodshed which accompanied British withdrawal ten years later his misgivings were not without foundation.
