2026-06-25 –, Room 403 PC Desk (Seats 30)
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.
Colonial Korea, Japanese Empire, Seoul, Colonialism, Economic History, Dependent Growth, Urban Economy
I am a second-year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. I received a BA in Western History and Sociology from Seoul National University, with summa cum laude, and an MA in Sociology from the same institution. My research interests include the history of capitalism, financial history, socioeconomic history, environmental history, and colonialism. I am currently working on a commodity history of rice in the Japanese Empire, focusing on how colonial rice trade helped usher in capitalist institutions, organizations, and ethos in modern East Asia.