This chapter puts the developmental state in its place theoretically and historically and proposes an alternative account of recent changes in the role of developmental states in East Asia. It reinterprets the developmental state in terms of the state’s commitment to promoting the economic and extra-economic conditions for catch-up competitiveness and notes that such actions have at least a 500-year history starting in Europe. Because the frontiers and horizons of catch-up competitiveness change, the modes of governance adopted by states also change. On this basis the chapter presents a political economy of the East Asian developmental state, based on critical state theory and the regulation approach; analyses its crisis-tendencies in its ‘classic’ form of the Listian workfare national state; and indicates how East Asian states are adapting to the rise of the knowledge-based economy as the currently hegemonic economic imaginary and to finance-dominated accumulation (also known as financialization) as the currently dominant accumulation regime on a world scale. The chapter ends with some remarks on the research agenda that follows from this approach.