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Karl Marx was born on 5 May, 1818, in Trier, Prussia. Two hundred and eight years later, as global inequalities sharpen and debates over empire, race and resistance rage, his legacy as a thinker who placed the struggles of colonised and enslaved peoples at the heart of the fight against capitalism deserves renewed attention. Far from a narrow Eurocentric theorist, Marx – working in close collaboration with Friedrich Engels – developed a profoundly internationalist perspective. Their writings and activism on Ireland, the 1857 Indian War of Independence, and American slavery reveal revolutionaries who saw the liberation of the oppressed as inseparable from the emancipation of the working class worldwide.

Marx and Engels did not merely theorise in the abstract. They analysed concrete events, corresponded extensively with revolutionaries and thinkers, and engaged politically through journalism, the First International, and personal networks. Their evolution – from early views influenced by the era’s Eurocentric assumptions to a sharper anti-colonial stance – demonstrates intellectual honesty and a commitment to material reality. Ireland served as their primary case study of colonial domination within Europe; India illustrated the brutality and contradictions of empire in Asia; and American slavery highlighted capitalism’s reliance on racialised bondage. In each, they championed international solidarity. 

As Tristam Hunt argues in his biography of Engels, even when Marx and Engels expressed racialised thinking, they remained supporters of policies to reform and change the conditions of the oppressed.

Ireland: England’s first colony and the ‘lever’ for revolution

Marx and Engels rightly saw Ireland as England’s oldest colony, a laboratory of racial-imperial exploitation whose subjugation propped up British power. Engels, who visited Ireland multiple times and drew on the lived experiences of his partner Mary Burns and her sister Lizzie (both working class Irish immigrants), provided detailed observations. In letters and notes, he described the systematic ruin of the country through centuries of conquest, land expropriation, forced migration, famine and economic subordination. The treatment of the Irish by English colonialism was the laboratory for pioneering colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

As Engels wrote, “Ireland may be regarded as England’s first colony and as one which because of its proximity is still governed exactly in the old way, and here one can already observe that the so-called liberty of English citizens is based on the oppression of the colonies.” 

The Great Famine........

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