When the Crimean War broke out in 1854, pitting Russia against the Ottoman Empire and its European allies, Karl Marx was working on Das Kapital in the British Museum Reading Room. Meanwhile, he eked out a meager living writing for Horace Greeley's radical New York Daily Tribune. Most of these articles were pure journalistic hackwork, but a few of them reflect Marx's sophisticated historical insight. Although the Ottoman Empire at that time stretched far into Eastern Europe, the intricacies of its internal politics and social conditions were little known even to informed Western European readers. In faraway America, people knew even less, and this gave Marx an opportunity to write a lengthy article on the subject, published in the Daily Tribune on April 15, 1854. Marx describes the complex ethnic and religious demography of the Ottoman Empire and dwells at some length on the conditions of the minority communities living under Muslim rule. He provided his readers with detailed explanation of the millet system, which gave non-Muslims a degree of cultural autonomy and religious self-rule, with the right to maintain their own internal courts and collect their own taxes.
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Karl Marx 1984 Article
Eastern Question (1897) Edited by Eleanor Marx Aveling and Edward Bibbins Aveling
Edward Bibbins Aveling (29 November 1849 – 2 August 1898) was a prominent English biology instructor and popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution, atheism, and socialism. Aveling was the author of numerous books and pamphlets and was a founding member of the Socialist League and the Independent Labour Party. For many years he was the partner of Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx.