1. I don’t want to disparage economics, but I would be remiss if I didn’t state my preference for political science. I tend to view economics by reference to Mancur Olson. However, there is a place in history for leadership and contingency, as Mahan argued. Regardless of Choson’s economic development, politically it increasingly appears through these conversations and allusions, that it was politically inept. The epithet, “most beloved loser’ in the world, means nothing to those who died because of the Choson leadership’s failure.

2. I don’t view this as just a mere “fun” counterfactual, but as a way to devise a standard by which to judge the current state of Korean political development. It’s possible given the volitility of the region, that Korea could be challenged politically again.

To define the unequal treaty system created in Japan in the bakumatsu era (1853-1868) as successful is very much a relative term: it did not, in the end, prevent Japan from modernizing, and it did not result in the profound loss of sovereignty which China and Korea experienced after similar interactions, but it was still a series of nearly unmitigated surrenders which prompted great unrest and hampered policy development.

I haven’t read Cullen either (I skimmed it as a possible textbook at one point, but it was a couple of years ago), but the definition of early 19c Japan as “more open and less oppressive” is not too helpful in the abstract: there are ways in which both local and national governments became both more open and more oppressive….

There are actually three, as I see it, kinds of arguments which might be implicit in discussions of Japanese development in Korea: as Mod Mephisto notes, the argument that Choson was a failed state and, as Owen notes, that it was a failed economy, is contrasted with effective development under Japanese rule; Second, there is the argument that, even if Choson was not a failed state, that Japanese economic development represents an improvement over what would have happened otherwise; third, there is the backwards-looking argument about the roots of post-liberation economic development, which ignores the question of Choson development and looks instead at the proximate connections between pre- and post-liberation society.

I do think that current research is pointing to rather a large divergence between Japan and Chosŏn economically and socially in the 19th century. It seems that the crisis of Chosŏn was very deep through much of the century and previous economic growth was probably being reversed. Of course many many other factors must have figured in the different path to modernity taken by these two countries, but I think if you look at the mid-nineteenth century we can say with some confidence that they weren’t at similar point economically and socially.

One bit of caution about what Mod Mephisto is saying/quoting above. As I understand it, the Meiji Restoration (ie the establishment of a capitalist state/independent centre of capital accumulation/modern nation-state or whatever you want to call it) came about as the result of a political struggle. It represented a break, not an organic process of transition from favourable conditions to favourable outcome. So while the conditions were probably more favourable for this to happen in Tokugawa Japan, it was not an inevitable outcome, just as the failure of such attempts in Korea (ie the Kapsin chŏngbyŏn) was not inevitable (although it was likely).

Also, although I have not yet read the book, L.M. Cullen’s “A History of Japan, 1582-1941″ argues “…that Japan before 1854, far from being in progressive economic and social decay or political crisis, was obalance a successful society led by rational policymakers. He also shows how when an external threat emerged after 1793 the country became on balance more open rather than more oppressive and that Japan displayedremarkable success in negotiation with the western powers in 1853–68. In the twentieth century, however, with the 1889 constitution failing to control the armed forces and western and American interests encroaching in Asia and the Pacific, Japan abandoned realism and met her nemesis in China and the Pacific.”

The experts will have to speak more specifically to the issue of late Choson as a failed state, but my impression is that it was no more of a failed state than the Tokugawa regime, but it was under greater pressure and interference from, ironically, Japan than Japan itself had been from foreign powers who were more focused on China in the mid-19c.