As the end of his MIT career approached, Kindleberger took on the challenge of explaining the catastrophic world depression that had been the context of his own intellectual formation. As against current Keynesian and monetarist orthodoxy, he wrote in defense of the conventional wisdom of his youth which, in his view, provided not only a viable explanation of events but even more a viable methodology for doing economics more generally. Comparative economic history would henceforth be his evangelical mission, explicitly so in his first postretirement book Manias, Panics, and Crashes, which became a best-seller.

A Financial History of Western Europe is Kindleberger’s self-identified masterwork, an attempt to derive robust theories from centuries of accumulated fact, and then to use those theories as a framework for making sense of the momentous events of Kindleberger’s own life. It is a story of financial development in support of economic development at a global scale, both development processes advancing together in Darwinian evolutionary fashion by means of boom and bust.

Building on Gerschenkron’s (1962) theory of late development, this chapter explores how the timing and context of political economic development among East Asian “late developers” shaped the construction of their citizenship regimes and, later, their immigration policies. I identify the formation of distinct civic legacies that emerged from nationally specific trajectories of citizen-making: local, grassroots movements in Japan; national, rights-based movements in South Korea; and ethnicity-based coalitions in Taiwan. This chapter thus seeks to highlight the macro-level foundations for the development of citizenship and non-citizenship in East Asian democracies that, I argue, are rooted in political economy rather than in cultural traditions. In contrast to dominant approaches that take a dichotomous view of citizenship and non-citizenship or that assume that citizenship is universal and democratic, this book treats citizenship as a contested institution and set of practices negotiated by state and non-state actors to demarcate formal membership in a nation-state that are tied to patterns of mobilization and exclusion in a country’s political economic development.