68 EARLY CHOSON DYNASTY
tion and transplantation. By the middle of the sixteenth century almost all the
arable land in the southern provinces that had not yet been had reclaimed was
opened to cultivation. IS Nevertheless, the tripling of population from about four
to twelve million between 1392 and r693 probably explains why the expansion
of cultivated land and productivity from irrigation and transplantation that began
in the late fifteenth century was not accompanied by higher standards of living
for anyone other than large landlords. Many contemporary observers commented
on growing immiseration and indebtedness by ordinary peasants, usury, and fore-
closures on mortgages by creditors. This economic situation was blind to sta-
tus considerations, so that even some slaves became creditors for their social
superiors.^16 One commentator in 1537 noted that the commoners had lost their
land, and the only ones who possessed any were the rich merchants and the fam-
ilies of the scholar-officials (sajok), that is, the yangban.^17
As Yi Kyongsik has shown in his studies, landlords increased their holdings
of estates by using the profits from rent for usurious lending, by selling rice and
other goods like straw, willow baskets, leather, fish, salt, agricultural tools, silk,
and clothing, and by manipulating rice prices on the market. They had their estate
agents or managers, the pan 'in, conduct those activities and even participate in
tribute contracting (see pp. 70-75) and smuggling to maximize their profits, or
act in collusion with merchants engaged in those activities.^18
The accumulation of large holdings or estates by the landlords led to changes
in the nature of the agricultural workforce. While an increasing number of com-
moners had ended up as slaves by the end of the fifteenth century, some by com-
mending their lands to the landlords to escape the extra burden of military service
or the military support tax, an even larger number of commoner, smallholding
peasants who had lost their land either from sale or foreclosure were reduced
to the status of sharecroppers. For that matter, even those private slaves who
lived at some distance from the master's house and cultivated his lands for him
(oego nobi), were de facto tenant sharecroppers because they split the crop and
paid what was in effect a rent as "personal tribute" (sin 'gong). lY
A third source of labor for the landlords was provided by hired labor (kogong).
Hired labor existed at the beginning of the dynasty, but most of them were long-
term or seasonal hired workers because there was not enough of a labor market
to provide for daily wage workers (known colloquially as mosum). The long-
term hired laborers were usually regarded as dependents of their employers, who
treated them as if they were their private slaves, but they worked primarily for
commoner landowners rather than for the yangban, who usually had a sufficient
supply of private slaves. Their numbers began to increase in the early sixteenth
century as more peasants took the road to escape famine, taxes, and military
service. By the mid-sixteenth century some high officials had as many as fifty
of them in their households. They generally called them pan 'in and used them
to manage estates that they began to accumulate in the northern provinces at
this time.^20
These changcs in the structure of the labor force were accompanied by other