were highly centralized and manipulated to obtain the people’s consent. The
Tswana state had clear rules stipulating how the chiefship was to be inherited
and these were used to remove bad rulers and allow talented candidates to
become chief. This culture promoted the executive powers of the state in pre-
independence Botswana. Those executive powers included the appointment of
state personnel and command over the military, both of which prevented the
emergence of rival institutions to the state (Maundeni, 2001). The post-
independence leaders of Botswana (in particular the first two presidents,
Seretse Khama and Quett Masire) have often been praised for their vision, lack
of corruption and strength of purpose. But good leadership is better considered
as a product of the deeper determinants of growth, or as an ‘intrinsic part of the
historical divergence of Tswana’s political institutions’ (Robinson, 2009:4).
The Tswana institutions persisted and evolved because Botswana was a colo-
nial sideshow largely ignored by the British, and unlike Nigeria had strong
indigenous state structures.
Developmental colonialism in South Korea
Korea became a Japanese colony in 1910. Much writing on South Korea argues
that rapid economic growth under a strong state only began with the shift to
export promotion under the incoming military government of Park after 1961
and denies any continuity with the colonial period. Others disagree: ‘South
Korea under Park Chung-Hee fell back into the grooves of an earlier origin and
traversed along them,well into the 1980s’(Kohli, 1994:1270). The colonial
story does not fit with the Acemoglu et al.thesis. In Korea settler-type colo-
nialism set up extractive institutions but used them to promote long-run growth
and some aspects of development (notably education). The post-colonial state
continued with this model,freed from the burden of the benefits of economic
growth being drawn away to Japan.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Korean state was unable to
collect taxes. The monarchy was dominated by independent factions of aris-
tocratic state officials who manipulated the legal system to enable themselves
to extract a surplus from agriculture. According to Kohli (2004:27), the
impact of Japanese colonialism (1910 to 1945) was ‘more intense, more
brutal, and deeply architectonic in comparison with European colonialism’.
Korea was seen as a long-term integral part of ‘Greater Japan’ and colonial-
ism was based around settlement to more closely integrate the two countries.
The aristocratic state was abolished and replaced by a cabinet-style govern-
ment run by Japanese bureaucrats. The number of police increased from 6,222
in 1910 to 60,000 in 1941. The police wore military uniforms and had
summary powers to judge and punish minor offenders. The Korean state in the
1960s certainly looked much like the late-colonial state, despite the fifteen-
year interlude. Though the 1950s Rhee presidency was marked by chaos, his
successor General Park, a graduate of the Japanese military academy in
Manchuria,was more obviously a product of the Japanese experience (Kohli,
192 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth