How can the Japanese anomaly be explained? A review essay of Atul Kohli'sImperialism and the Developing World- Atul Kohli,Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Abstract

The impact of imperialism on long-term development in the non-Western world was once a popular agenda of inquiry. After the modernization paradigm turned into despair for postcolonial economies, the notions of informal empire (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953) and dependency (Prebisch, 1950; Frank, 1967; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979) marked economists' discussions on underdevelopment in the non-Western world. The agenda, however, lost its momentum after the 1970s, when some Latin American and East Asian economies began growing and research interests and policy agendas shifted from blaming external constraints to identifying internal enablers (Haggard, 1990, 2018). The externalist scholarship became almost moribund thereafter, although its leitmotif was taken over by some Marxian scholarship such as the world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974) and its structuralist and anti-globalization offshoots – also partly reincarnated in the literature on the resource curse (Auty, 1993; Karl, 1997).

Transformation of the Institutional Political Economy of Japan: From Rice Field Property Reform to the Zaibatsu

“…This technological and economic leapfrogging of Japan was described as an economic miracle in the literature. Yamada (2021) stated the theoretical clarification of the great economic development of Japan and underlined the importance of the political economy approach to Japanese modernization with a cite to Banno & Ōno (2010): "...although a large body of literature on the Meiji Restoration already exists, the influence of the modernization paradigm and Marxism was strong in past studies, and its political process has not much been analyzed from the comparative perspective in relation to the political economy theories concerning developing economies. Only recently this undercharted sea has begun to be explored."…”