THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND WORLD LITERATURE met, to expand Engels' brief draft of fifteen pages into a major book, The Holy Family, in 1845 and wrote—two years later, in French— Poverty of Philosophy which he regarded as the first scientific exposition of his theory. With all this achievement behind him, the Communist Manifesto was not only the first relatively mature text of this very young man who had nevertheless written thousands of pages before turning thirty, but also a text that distilled, in prose of great brevity and beauty, a wide range of themes—from history, philosophy, political economy, philosophy of history, socialist theory, and much else besides—that had preoccupied him at much length previously. This greater maturity would be evident from even a cursory comparison of this text with, let us say, "Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith" and "Principles of Communism", which Engels had drafted in June and October 1947, respectively, as obvious prelude to the drafting of the Manifesto itself which began in December that year.6 Yet, it would be wrong to treat this as the text of some final illumination. For, if we judge the Manifesto from the standpoint of his own more mature texts—Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire and Civil War in France, or Critique of the Gotha Program—it turns out to be more of a transitional text. It is very well known, and we therefore need not offer any extended comment on the fact, that for all the originality and magisterial sweep of the materialist conception of history which Marx had worked out in his earlier texts and which is stated in the Manifesto with such brevity and brilliance, the essential categories of his economic analysis had not until then gone much beyond the familiar categories inherited from classical political economy. It was only during the next fifteen years that some of the distinctive categories of Marxist economic analyses, such as the distinction between 'labour' and 'labour power', or the shifting balance between absolute and relative surplus value in the history of capitalism, fully emerged.7 It is equally worth emphasizing that until well into the 1850s Marx understood colonialism in the most general terms, simply (though crucially) as a globalizing tendency in the capitalist mode of production but with virtually no understanding of what it was to eventually mean for the objects of this globalization in the colonized world. Prabhat Patnaik puts the matter succinctly: The Manifesto, notwithstanding a reference to the United States, was addressed essentially to Europe. Moreover, it was addressed not even