EPILOGUE I017
Commerce and Industry
Yu Hyongwon learned much from the debate over the emergence of a more active
commercial economy in the seventeenth century, and he was one of the spokes-
men for progress in the context of that time. He expected commerce to playa
more active role in the economy than in the past century, and he welcomed the
introduction of copper cash to promote a more fluid exchange system, but his
ideas were only known to a few until the turn of the eighteenth century. When
they did, some of his ideas that were progressive for the seventeenth century
had become conservative in the eighteenth.
The reason was that King Sukchong was unable to manage the currency to
prevent inflation in those arteries of trade that used cash, and he shut down the
mints in frustration. The fear of inflation was inherited by King Yongjo in the
1720s. who believed that a return to a noncash agrarian economy would be bet-
ter for the Korean population. The policies of these two kings did not reflect the
dominant opinion at court. In fact the kings were far less enlightened or pro-
gressive than a number of officials, contrary to Kings T'aejong, Sejong, and Sejo
who unsuccessfully sought to introduce metallic and paper money into Korea in
the fifteenth century. Only reluctantly was King Yongjo persuaded that cash had
become a permanent aspect of Korean commerce, and that minting cash was the
best way to solve the economic bottlenecks created by long-term deflation.
Even though a number of active officials had become more open and pro-
gressive in their attitude toward currency and suggested the minting of multi-
ple-denomination and silver cash and paper money, Yongjo refused to go
beyond penny cash, a policy left intact until the Taewongun's regime in the 1860s.
This was essentially the same attitude of Yu Hyongwon in the mid-J 600s, but
after currency became indispensable to the economy, the fear of inflation and
penny cash led to deflation and a serious brake on economic growth.
The development of commerce had also led to the rise of private, unlicensed
merchants and artisans - even members of the official establishment who engaged
in both private as well as official production of goods - who challenged the
licensed monopolies and took over an increasing share of the market without
government permission. This phenomenon represented a departure from thc
licensed monopoly system of the early Choson dynasty, but government ot1i-
cials tolerated it nonetheless. They did not ban it as an unacceptable violation
of Confucian principle. In fact, Confucian officials often warned against direct
government involvement in business activity because it was too demeaning, too
close to the selfish pursuit of profit.
Yu Hy()ngwon had no idea that this development would take place, but his
armchair statecraft successors as well as government officials devised policy
recommendations to deal with the problem. The dcbatc, however, was not con-
ducted in twentieth-century terms between free trade versus a state-managed
economy. On the contrary. the eighteenth-century Korean economy looked more
like the kind of goulash economic system currently underway in China in the