Hassan N. Gardezi. Understanding Pakistan: The Colonial Factor in Societal Development. Lahore: Maktaba Fikro-Danish (1991). Pages 162. Price: Rs 99.00.

After almost forty-four years of existence as a sovereign nation, Pakistan still remains an underdeveloped country. This underdevelopment and poverty is not the original state, that is, it is not entirely inherent in the original social and economic structures or cultural traditions of Pakistan; rather this socio-economic retardation of Pakistan is due mainly to the integration of Pakistan's society and economy in the world capitalist system. This integration of a weak and stagnant semi-feudal society with the industrially advanced capitalist societies has gradually resulted in an unequal relationship and an international division of labour, which binds Pakistan as a 'periphery' to the highly developed and industrialized metropolitan 'centres' of capitalism, and in which resources tend to flow from the former to the latter. Hassan N. Gardezi advances this radical hypothesis by characterizing Pakistan's socio-economic formation as 'peripheral' capitalism which is internally ruled by a tiny, but powerful, minority of feudal, capitalist, bureaucratic, and military elites. These ruling elites, says Gardezi, are externally dependent on and subservient to the highly industrialized capitalist countries; and the colonial factor has determined the contours and character of Pakistan's socio-economic system