Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyongwon and the Late Choson Dynasty - James B. Palais

246 SOCIAL REFORM

ery (as opposed to serfdom in Europe) and corvee service began to weaken in
the sixteenth century, the labor market in nineteenth-century Korea was undoubt-
edly far behind the northern Italian city-states of the quattrocento that devel-
oped a major international export market in textiles, developed sophisticated
monetary instruments like bills of exchange and double-entry bookkeeping, estab-
lished worldwide contacts for the sale of products in international markets, and
accumulated the fabulous wealth that spawned the Renaissance. As a rough sort
of comparison Braudel noted that in Tudor England (sixteenth century) one-half
to two-thirds of all households received a part of their income in wages, while
Han YOngguk pointed out that only about 8 percent of the households in his sam-
ple in 1858 were listed under a hired worker as head of the household with one
hired laborer in each such household. ISO
In short, while Yu Hyongwon's proposal to substitute hired labor for slavery
represented an advance in freedom over the slavery of Korea, it was limited by
his commitment to Confucian moral standards and respect for obedience and
hierarchy within the family. Despite the progressive historians like Kim Yongsop
who would like to portray the advances made in the Korean economy at this
time as only a shade behind Western Europe, Yu's conservative expectations about
the subordination of hired labor to employers as a matter of propriety and respect
continued to prevail despite his discussion of the beauties of free choice.

Yu's INFLUENCE ON THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

There were a number of major developments in the slave system that occurred

in the next century: the permanent adoption of the matrilineal rule for inheri-

tance of status in mixed marriages in 173 I, a conversion of labor service for

official slaves to substitute tribute payments, a reduction in the tribute payments

for official slaves to the same rate paid by commoner support taxpayers in the

labor service tax system, a decline in the percentage of private slaves beginning

in the late eighteenth century and their replacement by commoner tenants and

hired laborers, and finally the abolition of official slavery in 180 I by the royal

decree of King Sunjo. These changes were accompanied by - many would argue,

caused by - shifts in economic circumstances such as a presumed increase in

surplus agricultural production, the accumulation of wealth by entrepreneurial

peasants of all status categories, and the growth of the market. Unfortunately,

the assertions about the increased wealth of outside-resident slave cultivators

and peasant commoners as the main factor in the decrease of private slavery

through the purchase of manumission or bribery of slave registrars has not been

proven by any detailed microeconomic studies. What is a more compelling expla-

nation is the indisputable rise in the number of runaway slaves, a phenomenon

that is not necessarily caused by an increase in wealth by those slaves. lSI Because

of the high opportunity cost - and also futility -of searching for and recover-

ing runaways, especially when turning over the cultivation of surplus land to

commoner peasant sharecroppers cost the landlord-slaveowners very little, it