East Asia

Macabe Keliher, Southern Methodist University

This talk discusses how historians of East Asia are complicating the developmental state paradigm. With access to new archival materials, historians of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have begun to show that narratives of the developmental state constructed by social scientists and economists is less economic architecture and more a state following trends and developments already set in motion. The straight lines scholars previously drew from vision to policy to growth appears more as jagged responses that happen to work more often than not. Rather than an architect, or even a manager, historians are showing that the state appears to be more a coordinator or networker.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 208. Rethinking the Developmental State 5: Roundtable