MARX TO ENGELS
London, 2 June, 1853
About the Hebrews and Arabians your letter interested me very much. For the rest : (1) A general relationship can be proved among all Oriental tribes, between the settlement of one section of the tribe and the continuance of the other in nomadic life, since history began. (2) In Mohammed’s time the trade route from Europe to Asia had been considerably modified and the cities to Arabia, which took a great part in the trade to India, etc, were in a state of commercial decay; this in any case contributed to the impulse. (3) As to religion, the question resolves itself into the general and therefore easily answered one : why does the history of the East appear as a history of religions?
On the formation of Oriental cities one can read nothing more brilliant, vivid and striking than old Francois Bernier (nine years physician to Aurengzebe) : Voyages contenant la description des etats du Grand Mogol, etc. [Travels Containing a Description of the States of the Great Mogul, etc.] He also describes the military system, the way these great armies were fed, etc., very well. On these two points he remarks, among other things : “The cavalry forms the principal section, the infantry is not so big as is generally rumoured, unless all the servants and people from the bazars or markets who follow the army are confused with the real fighting force; for in that case I could well believe that they would be right in putting the number of men in the army accompanying the king along at 200,000 or 300,000 and sometimes even more, when for example it is certain that he will be a long time absent from the principal town. And this will not appear so very astonishing to one who knows the strange encumbrance of tents, kitchens, clothes, furniture and quite frequently even of women, and consequently also the elephants, camels, oxen, horses, porters, foragers, provision sellers, merchants of all kinds and servitors which these armies carry in their wake; or to one who understands the particular state and government of the country, namely that the king is the sole and only proprietor of all the land* in the kingdom, from which it follows by a certain necessary consequence that the whole of a capital city* like Delhi or Agra lives almost entirely on the army and is therefore obliged to follow the king if he takes the field for any length of time. For these towns are and cannot be anything like a Paris, being properly speaking nothing but military camps* a little better and more conveniently situated than in the open country.”
On the occasion of the march of the Great Mogul into Kashmir with an army of 400,00 men, etc. he says : “The difficulty is to understand whence and how such a great army, such a great number of men and animals, can subsist in the field. For this it is only necessary to suppose, what is perfectly true, that the Indians are very sober and very simple in their food and that of all that great number of horsemen not the tenth nor even the twentieth part eats meat during the march. So long as they have their kicheri, or mixture of rice and other vegetables over which when it is cooked they pour melted butter, they are satisfied. Further it is necessary to know that camels have extreme endurance of work, hunger and thirst, live on little and eat anything, and that as soon as the army has arrived the camel drivers lead them to graze in the open country where they eat everything they can find. Moreover, the same merchants who keep the bazaars in Delhi are forced to maintain them in the country too, likewise the small merchants, etc…. And finally with regard to forage, all these poor folk go roaming on all sides in the villages to buy and to earn something, and their great and common resort is to scrape whole fields with a sort of small trowel, to crush or cleanse the small herb which they have scratched up and to bring it to sell to the army…”
Bernier rightly considers that the basic form of all phenomena in the East—he refers to Turkey, Persia, Hindustan—is to be found in the fact that no private property in land existed. This is the real key, even to the Oriental heaven.
ENGELS TO MARX
[Manchester] 6 June [1853]
The absence of property in land is indeed the key to the whole of the East. Here lies its political and religious history. But how does it come about that the Oriental do not arrive at landed property, even in its feudal form? I think it is mainly due to the climate, together with the nature of the soil, especially with the great stretches of desert which extend from the Sahara straight across Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary up to the highest Asiatic plateau. Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture and this is a matter either for the communes, the provinces or the central government. And an Oriental government never had more than three department : finance (plunder at home), war (plunder at home and abroad), and public works (provision for reproduction). The British government in India has administered numbers 1 and 2 in a rather more formal manner and dropped number 3 entirely, and Indian agriculture is being ruined. Fice competition discredits itself there completely. This artificial fertilisation of the land, which immediately ceased when the irrigation system fell into decay, explains the otherwise curious fact that whole stretches which were once brilliantly cultivated are now waste and bare (Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in the Yemen, districts in Egypt, Persia and Hindustan); it explains the fact that one single devastating war could depopulate a country for centuries and strip it of its whole civilisation. Here too, I think, comes in the destruction of the Southern Arabian trade before Mohammed, which you very rightly regard as one of the chief factors in the Mohammedan revolution. I do not know the trade history of the first six centuries after Christ thoroughly enough to be able to judge how far general material world conditions caused the trade routes through Persia to the Black Sea and through the Persian Gulf to Syria and Asia Minor to be preferred to the route over the Red Sea. But in any case the relative security of the caravans in the ordered Persian Empire of the Sassanids was not without considerable effect, while between the year 200 and 600 the Yemen was almost continuously subjugated, invaded and plundered by the Abyssinians. The cities of Southern Arabian, which were still flourishing in the time of the Romans, were sheer ruined wastes in the seventh century; within five hundred years the neighbouring Budouins had adopted purely mythical, fabulous traditions of their origin (See the Koran and the Arabian historian Novairi), and the alphabet in which the inscriptions in that part are written was almost totally unknown, although there was no other, so that even writing had actually fallen into oblivion. Things of this sort imply, besides a “superseding” caused by some knid of general trade conditions, some absolutely direct and violent destruction which can only be explained by the Ethiopian invasion. The expulsion of the Abyssinians took place about forty years befor.. Mohammed and was obviously the first act of the awakening Arabian national consciousness, which was also spurred by Persian invasions from the North, pushing forward almost to Mecca. I am only starting on the history of Mohammed himself in the next few days; up till now, however, the movement has seemed to me to have the character of a Bedouin reaction against the settled but degenerate fellahin of the towns, who at that time had also become very decadent in their religions, mingling a corrupt nature-cult with, corrupt Judaism and Christianity.
Old Bernier’s things, are really very fine. It is a real-delight once more to read something by a sober old clear-headed Frenchman, who keeps hitting the nail on the head without appearing to notice it…
Marx and Engels : Selected Correspondence : translated and edited by Dona Torr; London 1943. Letters 22 and 23.
…………………
* Underlined by Marx.
* Quated from the French