In surveying a document that Marx wrote for a speech on Ireland (November 1867) a dialectical analysis of colonialism is revealed and it appears to be a multifaceted process which penetrated into all aspects of Irish society. Not only is the economy thwarted by this colonial process but also the other processes that make up this societal organic totality. In metabolising with these social (and natural) processes colonialism, according to Marx, created ‘abominable conditions of existence’ for the colonised. The overriding determinant of this continually evolving process of colonisation was the presence of a landlord caste who were not only the dominant faction in the British colonising regime but they also dominated the other diverse strategies which emerged from the other factions of the colonising regime. The concrete consequence of landlord dominated colonialism was that the rental form was the main driver of accumulation rather than capital as in the capitalist mode of production. Accordingly, we have an empirical example of colonialism without capitalism in this Irish social formation even though Ireland was colonised by capitalist Britain.