Marx—then writing a China column for the New York Daily Tribune—suggested that politics was the real factor that had locked in Western rule. For thousands of years, he claimed, Oriental states had been so centralized and so powerful that they had basically stopped the flow of history. Europe progressed from antiquity through feudalism to capitalism, and proletarian revolutions were about to usher in communism, but the East was sealed in the amber of despotism and could not share in the progressive Western trajectory.
