Korea’s established landed class forced the Japanese to rule by coercion rather than incentives

Evidence

The Korean peninsula was occupied by the Japanese between 1910 and 1945. In this occupation, ‘a highly articulated, disciplined, penetrating colonial bureaucracy’, as Cumings has described it (1984: 6), ‘substituted both for the traditional regime and for indigenous groups and classes that under “normal” conditions would have accomplished development themselves.’ In Korea these ‘indigenous groups’ included, as they did not in Taiwan, which the Japanese also occupied, and which is often now compared with it, a large and established landed class. For this reason, as Cumings reports the colonial administrators saying at the time, what could be achieved with incentives in Taiwan required coercion in Korea. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1631

Categorization

• XREF: Direct causal claim: pre-existing social structure determines whether incentives can substitute for coercion — parallel to the book’s trust/observation theme where institutional form follows from prior social conditions.