To a significant extent, North Korea’s foreign trade is dominated by what are known as foreign trade companies, or FTCs, a rather unusual situation for a country that is at least nominally a communist state.

But this was not always the case, and a wealth of little-known documents recently found by this author — including decades-old writings by defectors, new editions of past leaders’ works and specialized DPRK periodicals — reveal the process by which Pyongyang came to embrace a capitalistic approach to foreign trade.

Emerging when North Korea had the most rigid of all state socialist economies, the FTCs