Contrasts and comparisons between the Philippines and Taiwan have been of considerable interest to political scientists and policy makers since at least the 1970s. The eminent development economist, Gustav Ranis, for example, penned an important report for the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1974 titled Sharing in Development: A Programme of Employment, Equity and Growth for the Philippines in which he celebrated the Taiwanese model of “growth with equity” as worthy of emulation; he subsequently published a series of academic journal articles along similar lines over the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the 1990s, moreover, as the Philippines was still struggling to catch up with economic growth rates of the other “ASEAN Four” countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand—scholars working on the comparative political economy of development focused considerable attention on comparisons between the “Taiwanese economic miracle” and its South Korean counterpart on the one hand, and the impressive but markedly less equitable pattern of economic development observed in Southeast Asia on the other. Here the contrast between growth with equity and growth without it was most glaring between the neighboring countries of Taiwan and the Philippines, and thus arguably most instructive.

Against this backdrop, Reo Matsuzato’s empirically rich and analytically rigorous study Statebuilding by Imposition comes as a very belated but also very welcome comparative analysis of Taiwan and the Philippines, even if today the contrasts between the two countries are not so stark as they were several decades ago. Interestingly, as flagged in its title, the book is less focused on the puzzle of variance in patterns of economic development across Taiwan and the Philippines and more on the implications of the divergence in their forms of governance for various “state-building efforts” by the United States and “the international community” in diverse settings, such as Afghanistan, Libya, and Somalia. Yet the line of analysis developed in the book’s paired comparison of Taiwan and the Philippines will be of considerable interest to specialists on East and Southeast Asia, as well as to scholars addressing the challenges of development and governance in a variety of regions across the world.

Matsuzaki proceeds with commendable clarity, coherence, and command of diverse primary and secondary sources in English, Japanese, and Chinese to elaborate and substantiate a set of arguments that account for divergences in patterns of governance in Taiwan and the Philippines already evident under Japanese and American colonial rule, respectively, in the two countries in the decades preceding World War II. Late nineteenth-century patterns of rule in both countries, Matsuzaki suggests, were roughly comparable in their forms of local power rooted in landownership and commerce and in state offices at the local level. If anything, the local institutions of the state were more fully differentiated and developed in the late Spanish colonial Philippines than in Taiwan under late Qing rule. Against this roughly comparable backdrop, the intervention, occupation, and colonization of Taiwan and the Philippines by Japan and the United States, respectively, unfolded more or less simultaneously at the turn of the twentieth century, thus presenting further commonalities across the two cases, which serve as the basis for the paired comparison between them.

In both cases, external intervention, occupation, and colonization met violent resistance. But by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, divergence in the patterns of colonial governance was evident, and it became enduring in its legacies. In Taiwan, a strong state was effectively consolidated; in the Philippines, what Prasenjit Duara, in his 1988 book Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942, termed “state involution” unfolded instead. As Matsuzaki shows, this broad divergence in patterns of governance prefigured marked differences between Taiwan and the Philippines in the establishment and implementation of new institutions and procedures for education, public health, policing, property relations, and public infrastructure. Differences in patterns of governance thus mattered already in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s in myriad concrete ways in Taiwan and the Philippines. Where previous studies, like Lynn T. White’s 2009 book, Political Booms: Local Money and Power in Taiwan, East China, Thailand, and the Philippines, emphasized the imposition of the Kuomintang regime in the late 1940s as the foundational moment from which to plot lines of path dependency, Matsuzaki’s study instead brings the paired comparison back to the turn of the twentieth century and identifies an earlier critical juncture from which to date the diverging trajectories observed over the following decades.

By Matsuzaki’s account, the crucial cause of divergence between Taiwan and the Philippines lay in the varying ways in which what he terms the “mediating institutions” of local governance were established and institutionalized at the turn of the twentieth century. Here he emphasizes the “formalization” and “cellularization” of such mediating institutions in Taiwan: a centrally controlled polizeistaat was imposed on the village or neighborhood level, thus creating small “administered communities” known as hokō. In the Philippines, by contrast, the devolution and concentration of state powers and prerogatives into the hands of locally elected officials at the municipal and provincial levels reproduced and reinforced the small-town landowning principales and provincial elites emerging in the late Spanish colonial period; this occurred even as their counterparts in Taiwan, the scholar-gentry officials of the late Qing era, fled en masse to the mainland in the early aftermath of the Japanese invasion of 1895. Thus a state apparatus capable of effectively penetrating, surveying, and disciplining rural society emerged in Taiwan, while the curse of local caciquismo or bossism became entrenched in the Philippines.

Matsuzaki’s Statebuilding by Imposition thus provides a clear, coherent, and compelling account of the diverging patterns of colonial rule established by Japan in Taiwan and the United States in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. His analysis helps explain the subsequent patterns of divergence in economic development between the two countries: the establishment of a strong state in Taiwan enabled thoroughgoing land reform and an early and effective transition from import-substitution industrialization to export-oriented industrialization unimpeded and unencumbered by the “state capture” effected by local interests in the Philippines. Matsuzaki could have traced the implications of his account for the postwar period, but his amply detailed and well-documented analysis of the diverging consequences of “state-building” in the colonial era should suffice to make the point.

Beyond East and Southeast Asia, perhaps the most important implications of this carefully crafted and well-executed study relate not to the arguably overdetermined failures of “state-building” in contexts like Afghanistan, but instead to the diverse decentralization programs if not imposed then at least partially induced by the World Bank and the international community on developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Here Matsuzaki’s fine-grained analysis of the modalities of local governance—“mediating institutions”—and the contrast between formalization and cellularization and state involution is especially instructive: it is worthy of further exploration in terms of the implications for further experiments in state-building through decentralization in diverse settings around the world.