IMPACT OF EAKLY COLONISATION 49 his articles on India (1853). The notes, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations^ throw great light on the core of this system. The fundamental characteristic of the Asiatic mode, Marx held, was "the self-sustaining unity of manufacture and agriculture55 within the village community, which thus contained "all the conditions for reproduction and surplus production within itself5 Marx's remarks on the theoretical absence of property in this system should not be interpreted too literally to rule out all property relations and the existence of classes. There is a large sector of "communal property.55 The smaller communities existed as part of a larger society and a part of the surplus they produced went towards "the cost of the (larger community), i.e., for war, religious worship, etc., "and for economically essential opportunities like irrigation and the maintenance of minimum communication. But the point was that "the despotic government (was) suspended above the small communities.554 Because of the 'closed5 nature of the common units, the town did not occupy a central, or even an important, place in the economy. Whatever the variations, the essential function of the town in this system was some external trade and the facilitation of the exchange of revenue (surplus product) between the leader and the overlords. The appropriation of the surplus-produce contained the germs of "seignorial dominium in its original sense55 and feudalism may, in fact did, develop out of it. But the crux of the difference between the Asiatic mode and the European formations is the "historically crucial one of systems which resist and those which favour historical evolution . . . We note that it (the Asiatic mode,) does not exclude further evolution, but only as a luxury, as it were ; only in so far as it can develop on the sur--plus given by or extorted from the basic self-sustaining economic units of the tribe or village.5'55 It was this relatively 'unchanging5 character of the Asiatic mode (based on the self-sustaining village community) that Marx referred to so eloquently. It is crucial to an understanding of this theoretical-conceptual work. Any attempt to read into this analysis a puzzling 'exemption5 from the laws of development that Marx discovered is to miss the whole point of the complex and highly dialectical method of Marx and Engels and to lapse into a mechanical understanding. When Marx wrote that "in broad outline we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and the modern bourgeois modes of production5' he was offering a theoretical-conceptual analysis conducted at a very high level of intellectual generalisation. This is invaluable, because Marx here is concerned with establishing the general process of all historical change. At this level of historical discussion, Marx was not essentially grappling with chronological succession or with the details of the evolution of one formation from another. Most emphatically, Marx was not offering a cut-and-dry formula for the study of human societies the world over, 'Primitive-Slave-Feudal-Capitalist5, which can be mechanically applied to all historical conditions. Indeed, it is insulting to the path-finding quality of Marx as a scientist to think that he was capable of taking such a