Extraction as Continuity: How Bangladesh Went from the 22 Families of Pakistan to the 22 Brands of the World

Research Report  ·  Futura Genesis Center  ·  July 2026

The Disclosure That Named the Problem

In 1968, Dr. Mahboob ul Haq, then Chief Economist of Pakistan's Planning Commission, made a disclosure that briefly made him famous and permanently made him dangerous to the state he served. Twenty-two families, he said, controlled 66% of Pakistan's industrial assets, 70% of its insurance, and 80% of its banking. The families were overwhelmingly West Pakistani. The wealth they controlled had been built, in significant part, on East Pakistani jute, tea, and labour — raw material and export earnings extracted from the eastern wing and reinvested, almost entirely, in the west.

Mahboob ul Haq was not a dissident. He was the state's own chief economist, and his numbers were not disputed by the state — they were confirmed by it, then buried by it. The disclosure was picked up two years later by Richard Nations, whose 1971 essay "The Economic Structure of Pakistan: Class and Colony," published in New Left Review, gave the extraction its proper name: not underdevelopment, not a lagging region, but a colonial relationship enforced within the borders of a single, notionally unified state. East Pakistan supplied the value. West Pakistan's industrial families captured it.

That structure — under-investment in the producing region, systematic transfer of the surplus to owners located elsewhere, and the political suppression required to keep the arrangement in place — did not end when Bangladesh won its independence in 1971. It changed hands. It changed geography. It did not change its logic.

The Same Structure, a Different Owner

Bangladesh's readymade-garment sector is, today, the country's economic core: roughly 84% of national exports, worth $45 billion in the 2023–24 fiscal year, and 11.7% of GDP. It is also, structurally, the direct descendant of the extraction Mahboob ul Haq described — not because the same families are involved, and not because the same institutions persist, but because the underlying arrangement is the same arrangement in a new form.

In 1947–1971, East Pakistan produced the raw commodity — jute — while West Pakistani-owned firms captured the processing margin, the export margin, and the reinvestment. In 2024, Bangladesh produces the finished commodity — garments — while foreign-owned brands capture the design margin, the retail margin, and the brand premium. In both cases, the producing population is paid a wage calibrated to subsistence, not to the value it creates. In both cases, the surplus leaves the country of production and accumulates somewhere else. In both cases, the arrangement survives not because it is natural but because it is enforced — in 1971 by a colonial bureaucracy and a licensing regime that channelled credit and export permits to West Pakistani industrialists; today by a global buyer market with the leverage to set the price it will pay and the freedom to walk to the next low-wage supplier if a government or a union pushes back.

The numbers make the comparison concrete rather than rhetorical. A Bangladeshi RMG worker today earns roughly $113 a month, against a living-wage benchmark of $302 a month calculated by the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies in its November 2023 wage review. Brand-audit studies of major retailers — H&M, Levi's, Zara, Primark, Walmart, Costco among them — have repeatedly found that the wage embedded in a garment's retail price amounts to somewhere between 0.5% and 2% of what the customer pays at the till. The garment worker's labour is, in other words, priced at a fraction of a percent of the value it ultimately realises — a ratio not unlike the one East Pakistan's jute farmers lived under, unable, as contemporary accounts noted, to name a single mill that processed their own crop.

What the Parallel Is, and What It Is Not

This is not a claim that H&M's shareholders are the heirs of the Dawood or Adamjee families, or that any literal line of ownership runs from Karachi's 22 industrial houses to a Stockholm or Bentonville boardroom. No such line exists, and asserting one would trade a real structural insight for a false genealogical one. The claim is narrower and, for that reason, sturdier: extraction is a logic, not a lineage. It recurs wherever a producing population is denied a proportionate share of the value it creates, and wherever the institutions that could correct that — a state, a union, an international rules regime — are too weak, too captured, or too far away to act.

In 1947–1971, the enforcing institution was the Pakistani state itself, which allocated industrial licences, bank credit, and foreign-exchange permits to West Pakistani entrepreneurs while denying the same access to East Pakistanis producing the underlying wealth. Today, the enforcing mechanism is a global buyer market in which brands compete suppliers against one another across borders, with no single sovereign obligated to correct the imbalance and a labour-rights architecture — codes of conduct, audit regimes, the 2013 Bangladesh Accord and its 2021 successor — that mitigates the worst physical dangers without touching the underlying wage share. The mechanism changed. The outcome — a producing population priced near subsistence while the surplus accumulates elsewhere — did not.

The Debt That Was Never About One Set of Owners

Bangladesh's 1971 liberation did not resolve the extraction it fought; it relocated the country from one extractive arrangement to the terms of its own choosing, and then, within a generation, found itself supplying a new global economy on terms it did not set. That is the uncomfortable continuity this piece is naming: not that Bangladesh remains a colony of Pakistan, which it plainly is not, but that the structural position — producer of value, taker of subsistence wage, non-recipient of the margin — has proven more durable than the specific empire or the specific brand that occupies it at any given moment.

Recognising the pattern is the precondition for breaking it. Mahboob ul Haq's 1968 disclosure did not, by itself, change Pakistan's industrial structure — but it named it, publicly, from inside the state that benefited from the silence. The equivalent act today is naming the RMG wage share for what it is: not a market outcome dictated by economic law, but a bargaining outcome dictated by the relative power of buyers who can leave and workers who cannot. The 22 families were not inevitable. Neither are the 22 brands.

Futura Genesis Center | For Peace, For Humanity fuence.com | contact@fuence.com