Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century

Marx's least-known book, and the one the Moscow anthologies left out.

He wrote it in English, in London, across 1856 and 1857, and it appeared in instalments in The Free Press - the paper of David Urquhart's small circle of Russophobe followers, with whom Marx worked in these years without ever sharing their politics. He thought them cranks and said so; they printed what nobody else would, and it paid.

What he produced is a running commentary on eighteenth-century diplomatic papers, built to prove a single startling thesis: that the foreign policy of England had for a century been secretly bent to the service of Russia, and that the men who ran it were in one degree or another Russia's instruments. Around that argument he wraps a history of Russia itself - the rise of Muscovy in the shadow of the Mongols, and the state that crawled out of it.

The omission is precise rather than crude. Progress did not scrub Urquhart from the record: the 1971 Moscow collection Articles on Britain prints Marx's own dismissal of him in full, the prophet facing backwards, fascinated like an antiquarian by the vista of old England, with a straight biographical note in the index. The Marx who ridiculed the Russophobe crank was perfectly publishable in Moscow. What was not publishable was the long, furious, documented book Marx wrote for that crank's newspaper.

The consequence is visible in the scholarship. Serious Marxist work on English history has cited the Moscow anthologies page after page and never once cited this - not from avoidance, but because the anthologies do not contain it.

Gathered under the title Marx's daughter Eleanor gave it.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.