244 SOCIAL REFORMroamed the countryside looking for work, assembling near some of the larger
towns in labor markets. By the middle of the nineteenth century the country-
side was filled with these wage laborers who were prime for two potential con-
sequences as Korean agriculture moved toward commercial capitalism. They
could be employed by large landowners who were presumed to be shifting from
tenancy to more efficient and less costly production by using itinerant wage work-
ers or they could join the mobs of discontented rural proletarians with their ris-
ing sense of class consciousness and who were ready to rise up in rebellion at
the slightest provocation. 138
As part of this general interpretation Kang Man'gil has also argued that when
Yu Hyongwon suggested replacing slaves with hired laborers, he was on the same
track as the current trend by which the system of required labor service was shift-
ing to a system of hired (or wage) labor. 1 39 The main thesis of Kang's article on
hired labor was that it marked the positive development of the Choson economy
since the sixteenth century, but Yu's own observations about hired labor indi-
cate that he was inspired not so much by the use of hired labor in Korea but by
China, where physical labor was not regarded as demeaning and the hiring of
labor was a common practice.
By contrast. Pak Songsu criticized the slavelike treatment of hired laborers in
Hamgyong and Cholla provinces. but he was not the only contemporary scholar
who took a less than sanguine view of the progressive consequences of hired labor.
In his investigation of hired labor in the late Choson period around Taegu
(Kyongsang Province) from 1705 to 1858 Han YOngguk called into serious ques-
tion the idea that hired labor in late Choson necessarily pointed the way to the
development offree wage labor. He also questioned Kim Yongsop's thesis about
the development of capitalistic management methods by "managerial" or entre-
preneurial landowners (the ones who spawned the use of wage labor over ten-
ancy as a more efficient mode of production) as based only on conjecture, not
solid fact. LjO
He found that the number of registered hired laborers in both the urban and
rural districts almost disappeared between 1825 and J 858, and that the percentage
of households of hired laborers in the total population of his sample also dropped
from 8.5 percent to 0.2 percent. On the other hand the number of households
hiring laborers inside the town of Taegu increased from 12.3 percent to 21.2
percent. 141 The ratio of commoners to slaves in the registered population of hired
laborers dropped from about 25 percent to almost zero by 1825 even though the
slave population as a whole had almost disappeared. Since almost all the out-
side-resident slaves and male domestic slaves had run away from their masters,
only a population of old slave women were left to act both as domestic slaves
and hired laborers. Han concluded that it was impossible that these female slave
hired workers could in any way have represented annual or seasonal hired labor;
they could only have been a kind of servile servant population who worked with-
out wages just to survive.14^2 One of the reasons that they survived as laborers