  The understanding of the accretion process on to compact objects in binary
systems is an important part of modern astrophysics. Theoretical work,
primarily that of Ghosh & Lamb (1979), has made clear predictions for the
behaviour of such systems which have been generally supported by observational
results of considerably varying quality from galactic accreting pulsar systems.
In this work a much larger homogeneous population of such objects in the Small
Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is used to provide more demanding tests of the accretion
theory. The results are extremely supportive of the theoretical models and
provide useful statistical insights into the manner in which accreting pulsars
behave and evolve.
