The first volume of Karl Marx's Capital…

The first volume of Karl Marx's Capital is published in 1867, a work that analyzes the capitalist process of production.

Here, Marx elaborates his labor theory of value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation, which he argues will ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.

Volumes II and III remain mere manuscripts upon which Marx will continue to work for the rest of his life and will be published posthumously by Engels.

Marx has sought to understand capitalism, given the repeated failures and frustrations of workers' revolutions and movements, and has spent a great deal of time in the reading room of the British Museum studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and on economic data.

By 1857, he had accumulated over eight hundred pages of notes and short essays on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, and foreign trade and the world market; this work will not appear in print until 1941, under the title Grundrisse (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie; German, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy).

In 1859, Marx had published Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work.

In the early 1860s, he had worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

This work is often seen as the fourth book of Capital and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought.