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

INTRODUCTION 17

monopolies or guilds to free merchants and free markets, from stagnation to devel-
opment? There are certainly resemblances between these changes in Korea from
the late fifteenth through the eady seventeenth centuries that appear similar to
those in the West from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, but bedrock dif-
ferences remained, impervious to facile comparison. Land was privately owned
from the outset, but it lacked an independent legal system to guarantee it against
predators, whether the state or influential private parties. The economic and polit-
ical systems were not feudal in the classical Western sense because the centralized
bureaucratic state was already in place, autonomous fiefs were not granted to
military vassals, and the peasants were not bound to the land. About one-third
of the labor supply was unfree, and they were chattel slaves, closer perhaps to
the social system of ancient Rome than either the Western Middle Ages or early
modern Europe. The smallholders, tenants, and hired laborers were legally free,
but still repressed by state officials, landlords, and local magnates - and they
remained that way to the end of the dynasty. The economic system did experi-
ence a loosening of the bonds and regulations imposed at the beginning of the
dynasty, but the growth of the market and private merchant activity was
restricted, licensed monopolies remained to the end of the dynasty alongside
unlicensed or private merchants, and currency, either in metallic or paper form,
disappeared entirely from the market just as other, presumably "progressive"
developments in the economy were taking place.
Finally, class structure was not moving in the direction of freedom. Mobility
there was, both upward and downward, but because the yangban class at the top
through the highest civil service examination (munkwa) was becoming narrower,
and the class of hereditary slaves were remaining in place if not growing in size
until about 1780-T 800, there was no corollary liberalization of society to accom-
pany moderate economic liberalization. The state, not terribly powerful but
stronger than it had been in any past dynasty, remained under the control of a
class of bureaucrats educated in Neo-Confucian thought but recruited primar-
ily from the ranks of the yangban families, not the general public.

The Disaster of the lmjin War, 1592-98

Could the Choson dynasty, the political entity that prevailed over this disinte-

grating system, have continued indefinitely? If Chinese history were to provide

the template for comparison, it would have been unlikely. There were too many

things wrong in I592 for Korean society to have continued much longer with-

out popular rebellion. In any case, we will never know, because a deus ex machina

in the form of the Hideyoshi war machine with a century of practice in bloody

combat and armed with its new Portuguese-style muskets and cannon cut a bloody

swath through the Korean countryside. If anyone had had any doubts about the

health of the Choson dynasty, its utter incapacity for self-defense removed those

doubts forever.

Prior to the invasions only a few men of foresight could see trouble brewing