This thesis traces and analyses the historical processes of class formation in the Plateau province under colonial rule in an attempt to locate the genesis of the present ruling classes and the structure of current political attitudes and contestations in that region. We argue that three major colonial institutions, in addition to the colonial economy, were chiefly responsible for the distortion and deformation of the precolonial social classes as well as for the creation of new classes which, in due course, assumed positions of dominance in the politics of the Plateau colonial province. The institutions whith we identify and discuss are the native authority, colonial education and the christian missions and the churches which they founded. We demonstrate that these were amongst others, institutions concerned with the establishment of colonial social order and control but were also crucial in servicing colonial economic exploitation, a process which further intensified the formation of classes in the province. We thus show that in its selective use of African agents to serve on institutions of social control and economic exploitation in the new social order which it established, colonialism capitalism groomed a crop of Nigerians which over the period of colonial tutelage, developed into petty bourgeois