A full account of South Korea's economic dynamism in the second half of the twentieth century must begin with developments in the first half of the century. The argument is that the Japanese colonial influence on Korea, from 1905 to 1945, was important in shaping a modern political economy that later evolved into a high-growth path to development. Japanese colonialism differed in important respects from European colonialism. As late developers, the Japanese made extensive use of state power for their own economic development and then used the same state power to pry open and transform Korea in a relatively short period. The Japanese colonial impact was thus more intense, more brutal, and deeply architectonic in comparison with European colonialism. It also left Korea with three and a half decades of economic growth (the average annual growth rate in production was more than 3 percent). When judged against the standards of such other colonial economies as India and Nigeria (though not Brazil, which had also experienced significant economic growth by midcentury), the result was a relatively advanced level of industrialization.

More specifically, the colonial origins of three patterns that we now readily associate with the South Korean “model” are traced below. First, I discuss how the Korean state was transformed under Japanese influence from a relatively corrupt and ineffective agrarian bureaucracy into a highly authoritarian, penetrating organization, capable of controlling and transforming Korean society.