Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, to a family of Jewish descent that had converted to Lutheranism, and studied law and then philosophy at Bonn and Berlin. Expelled from Prussia, Paris, and Belgium in turn for his radical journalism, he settled in London in 1849 and spent the rest of his life there, chiefly supported by his collaborator Friedrich Engels, researching and writing in the British Museum's reading room. With Engels he wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848); alone, he produced the first volume of Capital (1867), a critique of political economy left unfinished at his death, with two further volumes edited from his manuscripts by Engels. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London.