ABSTRACT
The most striking characteristic of the colonial state to most scholars has been the unusual scope and intensity of its intervention in the economic and social life of a colony. This increased steadily during the colonial period in Africa and was accompanied by the development of the colonial state from an initially simple administrative control apparatus into the complex and sophisticated institutions of social control and economic management of the 1945–60 period. Recognition that this development was a function of the socio-economic forces operating at the periphery of the world capitalist system brings us only as far as the real analytic issue: the specification of the linkage of these forces with the development of the colonial state in such a way as to account adequately for both its general form and the specific variations that emerged in different colonies; and, simultaneously, account for the particular role of such structural forms and practices of the state in shaping the development of the forces and relations of production and processes of class formation in those colonies.
