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

In: The Pakistan development review: PDR, Band 30, Heft 2, S. 207-212

Abstract

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.