Acknowledgements
This project has developed over the course of many years, and the number of people to whom I directly or indirectly owe thanks is truly humbling. I only attempt here to name those people whose help with the arguments and main themes of the book was fairly direct, but there are many others who could merit mention, and for those who number themselves among this large group I can only say that I do recognise my debt to you even if it goes unstated here.
I have benefitted from considerable feedback on all of the material in this book, and I would like first and foremost to thank those who patiently read and commented on various drafts of the chapters. Among those to whom I owe thanks for this are Jamie Doucette, Dong-Wan Gimm, Jinn-yuh Hsu, Bob Jessop, Bae-Gyoon Park, Garry Rodan, Ngai-Ling Sum, and Joel Wainwright. I owe especially great thanks to Young-Jin Choi, who not only read and provided feedback on much of the material but is also a co-author of Chapter Four. In addition to these compatriots, there is a large group of people who have given me feedback on different aspects of the work at points when it was in various stages of its development. These include Katherine Bowie, Samuel Bowles, Bill Burgess, Chaiyan Rajchagool, Gillian Hart, Kevin Hewison, Jin-Tae Hwang, Soohaeng Kim, Stefan Kipfer, Victoria Lawson, Patrick Oabel, Gay Seidman, Abi Sharma, James Sidaway, Janet Sturgeon, Mike Zmolek, students and faculty at both the Department of Geographic Education and the Asia Center at Seoul National University, participants in several renditions of the East Asian Regional Conference on Alternative Geography, and the members of Political Economy and Space group at the National University of Singapore. I owe thanks as well to all the participants in the ‘Geopolitical Economies of Development and Democratization’ International Research Roundtable, held at the University of British Columbia (UBC) during May 2015, including, especially, Bruce Cumings, Tyrell Haberkorn, Laam Hae, Szu-Yun Hsu, Mike Krebs, Helga Leitner, Debolina Majumder, Terry McGee, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard, and Jia Ye, who provided me with feedback on one or another of my arguments. All of these people have helped make this book much better than it would have otherwise been; any remaining mistakes are mine, and may even reflect my stubbornness in failing to heed all of their excellent advice.
I owe considerable thanks to the librarians and archivists at the major locations where much of the research underpinning the book was conducted. The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) system is of inestimable importance to those of us doing this kind of work, and I am indebted in particular to the many people who helped me at the College Park, Maryland branch of NARA, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Massachusetts, the George C. Marshall Foundation Library in Lexington, Virginia, and the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. In addition, I am grateful to the staff at the Harvard-Yenching Library for helping me access the James H. Hausmann Archive.
The staff of the Brill/Historical Materialism series has helped expedite a very efficient conversion of my manuscript into a book. I want to especially thank Rosanna Woensdregt, Danny Hayward, Cas Van den Hof and Simon Mussell for their efforts.
The Department of Geography at UBC has proven an excellent location from which to carry out research, while also proving a place where it is rewarding to bring research ideas into the classroom. I would like to thank all of the colleagues and students who have stimulated me with probing questions and provocative theoretical discussions over the years, some of whom I have already named. I owe special thanks to our Department Administrator, Sandy Lapsky, whose assistance with numerous practicalities of the research process and day-to-day academic life has been invaluable.
The many friends, colleagues, and family members who have helped me along the way are among those most likely to receive too little recognition, but several of these absolutely cannot go unnoticed, including Jim Stromseth and Lori Kenepp, who kept a roof over my head in Washington, DC while keeping me well fed and engaged in enlivening conversations, Guang Lei and Dongmei Wang, who did the same for me on trips to Southern California, and my family members in Austin, Texas – my mother Beth Glassman, my sister Cathleen Nicholas, and my brother-in-law Pablo Antoline-Nicholas. While I was conducting this research, two people especially dear and inspirational to me passed away. Joan Walters Drake, who both provided me a place to stay in Washington, DC and hours and hours of stimulating conversation about US foreign policy (and much more) is someone whose loss means more than I can express. My father, James H. Glassman, also passed away while I was undertaking this research, but not before imparting to me some of his great interest in East Asia, and I dedicate this book to his memory. My wife, Thitiya Phaobtong, has been – as always – the light that keeps burning brightly whenever other things in my life get dark.
I am thankful to the various funders whose support has made the research for this book possible, including the Hampton Fund at UBC (Hampton Fund Research Grant #J07-0018), the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, which supplied funding for the May 2015 International Research Roundtable (Grant #F14-02074), the Faculty of Arts at UBC, which supplied funding for presentation of some of the material at the 2015 Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers (Faculty of Arts HSS Conference Travel Grant #F14-04139), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provided both funding for the research (Standard Research Grant #F10-05178) and additional support for the International Research Roundtable (SSHRC Connection Grant #F14-03197), and the Social Sciences Korea Research Project on East Asian Cities at Seoul National University, funded by the Korean government’s National Research Foundation of Korea Grant (NRF-2017S1A3A2066514), which has provided support for workshops and other venues at which much of the material has been presented.
A small portion of Chapter 1 has been published previously as ‘Geopolitical Economies of Development and Democratization in East Asia: Themes, Concepts, and Historical Geographies,’ Environment and Planning A, 50, 2 (March 2018): 407–415; a portion of Chapter 4 has been published previously as ‘The Chaebol and the US Military-Industrial Complex: Cold War Geo-Political Economy and South Korean Industrialization’, Environment and Planning A, 46, 5 (May 2014): 1160–1180 (co-authored with Young-Jin Choi).