Ac­cu­mu­la­tion and Power

The transformation of the South Korean economy is one of the genuinely startling stories of the twentieth century, and DuBoff treats it as the thing that turned geographic centrality into actual leverage. In the early 1960s South Korea was among the poorest countries on earth, with income levels comparable to the poorest parts of Africa and an economy that depended heavily on foreign aid. Within roughly three decades it had become an industrial power producing ships, steel, cars, and electronics for the world. The speed of the change had no real precedent at that scale.

DuBoff, as an economic historian of accumulation, is interested less in the miracle framing than in the mechanism. The growth was state-directed. Government planners channeled capital toward chosen industries, protected them while they grew, and pushed them relentlessly toward export markets. Large industrial conglomerates — the chaebol — were built up as the vehicles of this strategy, financed cheaply on the condition that they performed abroad. It was accumulation organized from the top, deliberately and sometimes brutally, and it worked in the narrow sense of producing rapid industrial capacity.

Northeast Asia, DuBoff observes, is one of the most economically interconnected regions on earth and one of the least politically integrated. The trade among China, Japan, and Korea is enormous; the trust among their governments is thin. History sits heavily here — Japan's occupations, wartime grievances, territorial disputes over islands and waters, the residue of the Cold War. The economies are woven together while the states keep their distance, and that gap is the central problem of regional cooperation.

This is where Korea's double centrality becomes decisive in his account. China and Japan are too large, too rivalrous, and too burdened by history to lead a regional bloc together; neither will accept the other at the head of the table. A region that cannot integrate around its biggest member has to integrate around something else, and the natural candidate is the player in the middle that is big enough to matter but not big enough to dominate. Korea, DuBoff argues, is that player — substantial enough to carry weight, contained enough not to threaten.

Step back from Korea specifically and DuBoff's larger thesis comes into view: power in an interconnected economy is not only a matter of size. The whole arc of his work argues that accumulation and power are entangled — that economic weight converts into political leverage — but the Korea case adds a refinement. Position matters as much as scale. A medium-sized economy at the structural center of a region can hold leverage that a larger economy on the periphery cannot, because everything has to pass through the middle.

This is a different picture of power than the one that dominates most thinking about Northeast Asia, where the question is usually framed as a contest between the two giants. DuBoff's framing suggests the more interesting variable is not who is biggest but who is unavoidable. Korea's value lies precisely in its in-between status — large enough that its participation counts, small enough that its leadership does not frighten. It can convene what the giants cannot, because it threatens no one's primacy. Being in the middle is its own form of strength.

The map that opens the book still shows the same thing at the end — a small peninsula pressed between far larger neighbors. What has changed is how we read it. The instinct to see Korea as a buffer or a flashpoint captures only the security story. DuBoff's economic story runs alongside it: the same centrality that made the peninsula a battlefield makes it, in an era of dense trade and political distance, the natural pivot of the region. Accumulation gave it the weight; geography gave it the place.