Engels proposed qualifying ‘history’ as ‘written’ before Marx’s death
Evidence
When the Manifesto was to be reprinted in 1886, after Marx’s death, the only revision Engels proposed (but then dropped) was to add the word ‘written’ before ‘history’, so that the phrase would then be ‘the written history of all hitherto existing society’. Marx’s outrageous statement that ‘India has no history at all, at least no known history’ gets a very peculiar twist from the fact that the history of class struggles in pre-colonial India was in fact not ‘known’ in his time. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 745
Categorization
- XREF: Relates to the broader colonial-epistemology theme in this book about what counts as ‘history’ and who writes it. — connects to: Engels explained history as unintended outcomes of conflicting individual wills. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 497