“Do you not exist? Do you feel like a machine? Does your life count for a mere commodity and nothing else besides? There in a nutshell, gentlemen, is what my ‘philosophy’ amounts to. And this is what we must all struggle against.”

When Karl Marx arrived in London in 1849, together with his wife Jenny and their three children, he was a thirty-one-year-old refugee. Already exiled from Paris, Brussels, and Cologne, Marx was a largely obscure figure. The Marx family planned for their stay in London to be brief, expecting that the revolutionary wave sweeping the European continent would go on. Instead, the revolutions were suppressed and England became Marx’s homeland for the rest of his life.

The Marxs’ move to London placed them in the financial capital of the world, and close to Manchester, its industrial capital. Marx thus ended up living out his remaining years at the very heart of the system that he spent his life struggling to theorize and overthrow. For better or worse, the understanding of capitalism captured in his mature thought was entwined with the history and culture of his adopted land, so that it would not be unreasonable to call Capital a thoroughly English work, in its subject matter, sources, and the tradition of political economy it deeply engaged with, if not in original language.