British extraction from India exceeded the income of sixty million Indian laborers

Evidence

In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in store for the British government. What the British take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless for the Hindoos, pensions for the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc., etc., – what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, – speaking only of the value of the commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England – it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60 million of agricultural and industrial laborers of India. This is a bleeding process with a vengeance. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 443

Categorization

• XREF: This late-life Marx letter directly contradicts the ‘Those people don’t suffer’ Orientalism quote Said uses — a concrete data point for the Said vs. Marx debate in postcolonial theory.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘bleeding process’ as colonial extraction advances the sacrifice/expropriation theme in the sacrifice piece’s logic of structural violence.