He opened his literary career in June 1872 by a work on "Srbija na istoku" ("Serbia in the East"), published in Novi Sad, wherein he analyses the history of Serbia, interpreting the Serbian society before the First Serbian Uprising of 1804 as a society divided not so much on religious lines as by class. Marković argued that the Serbian revolt against the Ottomans had a social character rather than a religious one. He saw the social organization of the Serbian peasants who played the leading role in eventual successful overthrow of Ottoman rule as insufficient to prevent the new state becoming a despotism which soon brought to life a parasitic bureaucracy.