What I found most bewildering, as someone who had read Marx 30 years ago, was to realize that Marx's essays on India and Engels Anti-during were arguments against an economic view that had been hidden. We were taught that the USA was the imperialist/colonial power and that Marxism was the ideology of the anti-colonial forces - and obviously that was partly correct. But the world changes and seeing Marx/Engels through the lens of Carey, the similarities between the Communist Manifesto and the works of Thomas Friedman become more explicable.

"The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate."

Was there ever a more false and more enthusiastic endorsement of "free-trade"?