Hamza Alavi's groundbreaking study of the 'overdeveloped' post-colonial state represented the first major attempt in the Marxist tradition to capture the specificity of the post-colonial historical experience. Alavi's empirical focus was Pakistan, but sadly the majority of the literature dealing with the state in the Pakistani context has tended to engage with Alavi's theoretical formulation in a very descriptive manner. This thesis is an attempt to address this gap within the literature.