WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

What are global economic consequences of colonialism in the modern world? How can we reconcile contradiction between arguments of colonial exploitation and modernization? Examining business tax registers of Seoul under Japanese colonial rule, this research builds a model applicable to other colonial experiences across regions, using a Korean case. Korea under Japanese rule (1910–1945) experienced 2.3% average economic growth, twice the global average for the period. Yet records produced by Koreans depict grim poverty and exploitation, not prosperity, in most cases. This conundrum, I argue, can be explained by seemingly contradictory mechanism of dependent growth. Despite striking quantitative growth, qualitative industrial dependence of Korean businesses on Japanese counterparts endured throughout colonial period and, in some cases, intensified. I demonstrate this claim using large-scale taxation data digitized by researcher, spanning more than 10,000 cases of individual businesses. There are two major findings. First, Seoul’s business tax revenue, proportional to business income, expanded rapidly at annual average of 8.19% (1923–1939), and share of Korean businesses in tax revenue rose from 14.6% to 22.4%, aligning with previous observation of quantitative growth. Second, however, such growth did not translate into qualitative development on Korean side. Industrial composition of Korean businesses stagnated, relying on low-capital, low-skill sectors of rice trade, brewing, cloth trade, and private loan, whereas Japanese counterparts held near monopoly on modern industries such as finance, machinery, electricity production, and construction. Put differently, Seoul’s urban economy was microcosm of colonial economic relations: Korea producing foodstuffs while consuming Japanese industrial goods. In this sense, growth was rather a result of dependence and colonial division of labor—not by its overcoming. This mechanism of dependent growth offers a way to connect varied global colonial experiences while avoiding simple binaries of exploitation and modernization.

How was the United States—conventionally not a major power in East Asia—able to consolidate new regional hegemony after 1945 rapidly and smoothly? How did Korean and Japanese people come to accept U.S. Occupation as legitimate, even though it effectively negated Korea’s independence and, in Japan, imposed rule by a former archenemy? This paper addresses these questions through a political-economic lens, focusing on trade disruption, food crisis, and U.S. aid. In postwar East Asia, dissolution of the Japanese Empire also meant breakdown of long-standing trade networks. In 1936, Korea exported half of its rice production to Japan, and Japan relied on its colonies for one-fourth of total grain consumption. This highly interdependent economic bloc collapsed in 1945, as the United States forbade Japan’s import of food from former colonies in order to build independent national economies. Predictably, this policy generated food crisis and economic chaos; paradoxically, the United States also became the main solver. U.S. military governments and U.S.-led international food institutions compensated for disrupted trade in Korea and Japan by providing massive aid of flour and fertilizers produced at home. In 1949, for instance, Japan imported 1.45 million tons of flour—enough to feed 20 million people for a year—solely from the United States, for which Japanese statesmen frequently expressed gratitude in the National Diet. In Korea, where people had suffered population pressure throughout the colonial period, postwar U.S. aid was described as “incomprehensibly generous,” and U.S. efforts to sever Korea’s rice exports to Japan were also broadly appreciated. In this way, the Japanese Empire was recast as an American empire in postwar East Asia, through U.S. agricultural production that refilled East Asia’s empty granaries with flour from American Great Plains.