Cho Ki-jun has held up Kim Yŏn-su and his Kyŏngsŏng Spinning as the preeminent example of national enterprise, a colonial venture representing more than just local ownership and management. Only local industrial entrepreneurship and the career of Kim remain to complete our story of dependent capitalism on the peninsula through 1945, and bring us to a conclusion about benign capitalism. One would hope local accumulation in a colony might provide capital for commercial or industrial reinvestment and a start toward indigenous development despite economic reliance on the metropole. But the task of attracting capital to local industrial and commercial ventures demands both organizations and symbols, structures and precedents, a “demonstration effect” of productive local enterprise: that is, indigenous banks, retailers, wholesalers, and light industries, plus confidence in their long-term viability. Consumers had been exposed to the quality and utility of Japanese manufactures flooding local markets. Now local consumers would be exposed to reliable, productive Korean manufacturers, retailers, and financiers. Such was the hope of the Native Products Campaign.

The Mins and Pak organized corporate structures and established precedents for productive local enterprise, but always by way of exception in a dependent situation. We can conclude this was “indigenous capital” insofar as they maintained local ownership and management for the most part.

Abe Sen'ichi

Abe joined the government-general in Seoul as secretary just after graduation from Tokyo University in 1919. He was later appointed mayor of P'yŏngyang and then governor of South Kyŏngsang Province. Abe managed the Korean operations of Chōsen Gold Industry, and later organized Okkye Gold with Kim Yŏn-su. Abe served as president of the government's control agency, the Chosen Gold Sales and Purchase Company, during the war years.

Ariga Mitsutoyo

Born in 1873, Ariga joined the Tax Bureau in Japan after graduation from Tokyo Law Academy in 1895. He soon came to Korea as an official in the finance section of the residency-general and the government-general, before appointment as a director and then president of the Industrial Bank at age forty-six in 1919. Successful direction of the bank led to his appointment to the Japanese House of Peers in September of 1934. Retiring from the bank in 1937, Ariga went on to the presidencies of such prominent Japanese firms as Chōsen Refining, the Japan High Frequency Heavy Industry, and Kankō Hydroelectric.

Ch'oe Ch'ang-hak

Born in 1891 in North P'yŏngan Province, Ch'oe gained wealth and presitige as the “gold mining king” through development of Samsŏng Mining, sold to Mitsui Mining in 1929.

Min Tae-sik, Pak Hung-sik, and Kim Yŏn-su confronted the awesome task of being both Korean and successful within the colonial economy. They took up the challenge with their own blend of ideology, enterprise, and portfolio management in the shadow of a strong colonial state and extensive zaibatsu investment on the peninsula. Sustained ownership and management of core ventures represented a legacy of both structure and precedent for postcolonial capitalism in Korea. And if patterns of concentration, state relations, and class ties among a Korean inner circle distinguish dependent capitalism in large-scale enterprise through 1945, intriguing questions of causes, continuity, and concepts remain. I conclude with possible causal factors behind these patterns, continuities in the postcolonial economy, and the theoretical significance of the colonial experience of large-scale enterprise.

Attention to portfolios with interrelated levels of investment puts the issue of concentration in a different light than is evident in case studies of simply the major enterprise of one or another native entrepreneur. Ownership and control characterized the first two concentric levels of investment, directorships and smaller blocks of shares distinguished the outer two levels. The Mins, Pak, and Kim concentrated capital in core ventures of the first two levels, balancing their portfolios with more diversified holdings on the third and fourth levels.

A few prominent Korean aristocrats turned to banking in the late nineteenth century. An established aristocratic and landowning family like the Kims led a few other of the landowning elite into industrial investment two decades later, again a considerable adjustment from the secure and lucrative investment in land common among the Korean aristocracy. But you find few aristocrats among leaders in commerce, for not only did the occupation of merchant rank lowest in the Confucian hierarchy of professions, but commerce itself was not sufficiently developed to attract large-scale capital in the self-sufficient, barter economy of agrarian Korean society. Both cultural and structural factors discouraged the growth of commerce critical in the transition from agrarian to commercial capital in the late Chosŏn Dynasty. The role of merchant took on a new importance with the rise of commercial agriculture stimulated by the expanding rice trade with Japan from the late nineteenth century, though still few aristocrats were numbered among the leading merchants.

A domestic market on the peninsula quickly developed for cotton, wool, and silk textiles, paper products, ceramics, and oil during the colonial period. Imports of cotton goods increased from 12 million yen to 36 million yen, woolen goods from less than 1 million to 10.5 million yen, and silk from 1 to 10 million yen between 1915 and 1935.

The record of development in South Korea over the past three decades has drawn the praise of businessmen, the envy of Third World leaders, and the belated scrutiny of Western scholars. The story has given hope to many working to alleviate poverty and spur national development in less developed areas. Is there a model of Korean development with lessons pertinent to other areas of the world? Curiosity soon leads us from admiration to analysis, from consequence to cause, from present to past. As yet, however, few studies of the origins of private enterprise or government economic policy in South Korea are available. The commercial and industrial growth of Japan's leading prewar colonies of Korea and Taiwan lead some to suggest the colonial experience contributed greatly to subsequent economic growth, while others find little more than economic exploitation in the years of Japan's rule. Such polemics offer little insight into the beginnings of modern capitalism on the peninsula. If the Korean road to economic prosperity is to influence development strategies elsewhere we can ill afford to overlook origins in the rush to analyze recent success.

Dramatic changes in the way Koreans lived and worked marked three and a half decades of colonial rule under Japan.

Strong economic growth in the Republic of Korea has gained the attention of scholars, policymakers, and businessmen. Effective state strategies and concentration in private enterprise have enkindled keen interest in the role of the state and the large business combines or chaebŏl. The entrepreneurs and firms, planning and accomplishments of the past two decades have drawn most of the attention thus far. We find much less concern for the origins of Korea's development model in the First Republic (1948–60) under Syngman Rhee, or her earlier experience under Japanese colonial rule (1910–45). I began this study of business–state relations in colonial society with the aim of better understanding earlier patterns of capitalism on the peninsula. The relevance of the initial patterns for both the state and large-scale enterprise in postcolonial South Korea quickly became apparent.

The study of business–state relations falls well within the sociological tradition of C. Wright Mills and his emphasis on both “history” and “biography,” and the institutions where they meet and define what we know as society. My interest in colonial society has been influenced by the work of French scholars such as Maunier and Balandier and their attention to the interactions between colonizers and the colonized in the “colonial situation,” rather than to wider issues of competition among imperial powers or contrasting styles of colonial rule.

If the colonial state helped structure the economy on the peninsula, so also did the massive business combines from the home islands. Japanese corporate investors left behind estimated assets of 3.5 billion dollars in 1945, representing 67 percent of total Japanese assets in Korea. Leading zaibatsu such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Noguchi Jun's Nichitsu dominated the corporate share. Contrasting cultural with economic assimilation, the colonial scholar Yanihara Tadao concluded: “the invasion of the peninsula by Japanese capital is tantamount to an assimilation of Korea by the capitalistic structure of Japan.” Whatever the Japanese achieved culturally on the peninsula, they certainly succeeded in transferring the model of close relations between state and major private enterprise. The small number of Korean entrepreneurs can hardly be termed a third party in business on the peninsula. They rather went about their farming, commerce, and food processing in the shadow of a formidable alliance between colonial state and major zaibatsu.

The design of colonial state relations with the home island corporate giants permeated the colony's business climate in the formative years of large-scale local enterprise. There were parallels in the concentration of capital and ownership between the large Japanese firms and the native enterprises of the Mins, Pak and Kim.