Hamza Alavi

Hamza Alavi (10 April 1921 – 1 December 2003) was a Marxist academic sociologist and activist. He was born in the Bohra community in Karachi, in the then British India which now constitutes Pakistan and migrated in adulthood to the UK. The focus of his academic work was nationality, gender, fundamentalism and the peasantry. His most noted work was perhaps his 1965 essay Peasant And Revolution in the Socialist Register which stressed the militant role of the middle peasantry. These middle peasants were then viewed as the class in the rural areas which were most naturally the allies of the urban working class. In the 1960s he was one of the co-founders of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. He believed that a “salary-dependent class of Muslim government servants, called the ‘salariat’ led the movement of independent state for Muslims in subcontinent as they saw a decrease in their share of jobs in pre-partition India. which finally resulted in creation of Pakistan.

His publications are

• Jagirdari or Samraaj, fiction house Lhr (Urdu)
• Takhleq-e-Pakistan, Fiction House Lhr (Urdu)
• Pakistan Ek Riasat ka Bohraan, Fiction House Lhr (Urdu)
• Alavi, Hamza (1965) Peasant and Revolution, Socialist Register, pp. 241–77
• Alavi, Hamza & Shanin, Teodor (2003) Introduction to the Sociology of "Developing Societies", Monthly Review Press
• Alavi, H. (1982). Capitalism and colonial production. London: Croom Helm.
• Alavi, H., & Harriss, J. (1989). South Asia. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Alavi, H., & Harriss, J. (1989). Sociology of 'developing societies': South Asia. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.
• Halliday, Fred & Alavi, Hamza (1988) State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, Monthly Review Press

• "The White Paper: A Spur to Racialism". CARD. 1965. 
• R S Pannu (1985) Review of Introduction to the Sociology of 'Developing Societies' by Hamza Alavi; Teodor Shanin, Third World Quarterly, Jan., vol. 7, no. 1, p. 162-164