Colonial-era wealth enabled a comprador class to compete with metropolitan capital

Evidence

The irony of this personally felt and highly valorized biographical detail is that Said has given us, probably without Guha’s consent, the portrait of a typical upper-layer bourgeois; for it is that kind of individual who has typically mobilized the accumulations achieved during the colonial period to acquire the most modern Western technology, to launch upon collaborative competition with the metropolitan bourgeoisie, from the margins of global capitalism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 397

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s broader engagement with postcolonial class analysis and the comprador bourgeoisie debates.