2IO SOCIAL REFORMabandoned by consensus in one country after the other in the Western hemi-
sphere.~ In other words, economic and social forces appear to have played the
major role wherever slavery has declined: in the late Roman Empire the influ-
ence of philosophy and religion was negligible, and in the Americas Christian
attitudes were important but had to be stimulated by environmental forces. David
Brion Davis. who explicitly assumed the importance of Christianity in the anti-
slavery movement, asse11ed that Christian attitudes toward sin, human nature,
and progress had to undergo a radical shift before antislavery sentiment could
emerge. Although he associated the source of that change with naturalism, human-
ism, skepticism, and secular rationality without drawing a necessary causal con-
nection to the material world, the relationship to the development of science,
technology, and capitalism is inescapable.^9 Yet it appears not to have been cap-
italism itself that destroyed slavery, for it was a necessary concomitant of com-
mercial cotton farming in the southern United States that supplied the raw material
for British textiles. It was the support of the industrialized north for preserva-
tion of the Union against the cotton plantation system of the south - a contra-
diction within capitalism - that brought slavery to an end in the United States.
Despite the many differences between the nature and history of slavery in the
West and East Asia, they are alike in two respects: the higher religions and philoso-
phies proved remarkably tolerant if not supportive of slavery, and the rise and
fall of the slave population occurred primarily because of changes in economy
and society. In Korea the moral message of neither Buddhism nor Confucian-
ism served to eliminate slavery, hereditary or otherwise, on its own. As in the
West, when Buddhism and Confucianism became institutionalized they took on
the material aspects of the leading social and economic forces of society. The
Buddhist monastic estates and the Confucian academies both owned slaves.
Nevertheless. it is not that thought, belief, and attitude played no role at all.
In the history of Korean slavery, Confucian attitudes were important in explain-
ing the decline of slavery, but Confucian doctrine was not unequivocally
opposed to slavery, and when some Confucian scholars and officials did attack
slavery, they usually did so for economic, practical, or administrative reasons,
only rarely for moral or religious ones. At times Confucians even opposed the
abolition of slavery on moral grounds. Only when a number of socioeconomic,
administrative, and political changes occurring in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries established the basis for the gradual decline of slavery did some Con-
fucian thinkers begin to reexamine some of the premises upon which slavery
had been justified. Yu Hyongwon was not only one of them, but the one who ini-
tially provided the most thoroughgoing analysis of the relationship of slavery
to moral standards.
SLAVES AS CHATTEL AND HUMAN BEINGSWhatever the variations between Korean and other modes of slavery through-
out the world, in one respect they were alike. Slaves could be bought and sold,