This is a study of the development of classes and structure of the society of Bangladesh. It began by recognising the peripheral status of Bangladesh in the world capitalist system and explained the problem in terms of colonial and neo-colonial subjugation. Unlike other Third World societies whose forceful integration in world capitalism resulted in the underdevelopment of classes and social structure, in the case of Bangladesh, it was intensified with the prolongation of colonial domination. British colonialism was immediately followed by the clcss and colonial exploitation of Pakistani capitalism. Thus, the transformation of classes and the structure of the society in Bangladesh, within a dominant capitalist mode of production, created specific social features under successive forms of colonial domination. The British introduced bourgeois property relations in land but undermined the capitalist transformation of the economy by restricting the organic growth of the forces which could otherwise revolutionise the mode of production. Similarly Pakistani rule restricted capital accumulation in both agrarian and non-agrarian sectors and blocked the growth of capitalism and the classes related to it. At the same time, the impoverished peasantry being forced to subsist on agriculture, opened up new avenues of exploitation for the rural upper classes: rack-renting, usury and petty-leasing. Thus, in both cases the emerging relations of production were distorted and ushered in a 'deformed' capitalist mode of production: the 'colonial mode of production'. In the post-colonial actuation the security of capital accumulation generated conflicts amongst different propertied classes and conditioned various forms of class alliances for the perpetuation of the status-quo and the structure of the state. In the process, the different propertied classes entered into alliances with the neo-colonial metropolitan bourgeoisie through the mediation of the state and reinforced the status-quo. In the face of the alliance, the lumpen-proletariats cannot sustain the contradictions that occasionally surface under extreme conditions of exploitation and subordination.