Conventional and radical approaches alike to the anthropological study of social change and economic development have fallaciously attempted to examine complex and mutable underlying social and historical processes by means of abstract theoretical structures. Through a critical focus on the contemporary marxian debate over modes of production, a new and potentially more fruitful direction for economic anthropology and development studies is proposed here in the form of an hypothesis concerning imperialism. / Imperialism is hypothesized to constitute such a complex and mutable process inseverably bound to that of capitalist development throughout the latter's history. Attempting in a gradually maturing manner to accumulate capital by any possible means, metropolitan ruling classes have persistently been forced to intervene in and distort local processes of class struggle and transformation in other social formations. But continuously changing processes of so-called economic "underdevelopment" must therefore necessarily have been imposed on peripheral areas of metropolitan nations and regions just as they have on colonies and neo-colonies of the Third World. / An initial test of this hypothesis is thus afforded by the "domestic" case of the northern New England state of Vermont in the USA before 1870. Particular emphasis is placed on the crucial period of rapid U.S. capitalist development after 1830, as an incipient process of proletarianization was distorted and delayed in rural hinterland Vermont well beyond such processes taking place on the nearby northeastern seaboard. The initiation of peripheral capitalist development in Vermont is analyzed in terms of the substitution for native-born free peasants of an ethnically distinct, "super-exploited" immigrant proletariat in a few rural export enclaves, as the former direct producers began emigrating permanently instead to the established industrial cities on the seaboard. Vermont's changing relative economic "underdevelopment" within New England and within the USA as a whole from 1870 through the 1970's is discussed in a summary chapter. / The initial confirmation in the Vermont case of this hypothesis concerning imperialism and capitalist development suggests it must be seriously considered in cases of contemporary economic "underdevelopment" elsewhere.

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