856 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
transplantation in the cultivation of rice with improved crop yields. I Undoubt-
edly total agricultural production was expanded as a result of these innovations,
but it is not clear whether greater production exceeded the growth of population
to produce a marketable surplus or simply kept pace with rising population.
Commercial activity did appear to be growing. There was the increase in cot-
ton production, the transformation of military service from actual duty to cloth
taxes, and the replacement of tribute taxes by merchant purchases by tribute mid-
dlemen under the pangnap system. The volume of trade was reinforced by the
development of private trading with the Chinese in the sixteenth century, par-
ticularly the imports of silk and the mining of silver to pay for those imports.
Yet concerted attempts to introduce copper cash into the economy as a more
efficient exchange medium were constantly thwarted by the reluctance of both
officials and peasants to accept it in place of bolts of cloth and bags of grain that
had constituted the only exchange medium for most of the countryside since
the mid-sixteenth century. The eventual victory of this effort was a combina-
tion of two factors: enlightened leadership by the proponents of copper cash from
the top, and a growth in the market and demand for a better medium of exchange
from the bottom.
What was also significant about the protracted process for the reintroduction
of copper cash in the seventeenth century - one that was marred by setbacks as
well as successes - was the debate over policies associated with the nature of
currency, its purposes, and the role of the state in the regulation of the money
supply, exchange rates between various media of exchange, and commodity
prices. These debates were complex but they can be crudely summarized as a
division between a loose-money policy designed to ease the state's financial prob-
lems and to stimulate the commercial economy, and a conservative money pol-
icy of control to prevent the ravages of inflation. It may seem strange that within
the first few decades after the reintroduction of copper cash, when the volume
of that cash was small and did not circulate in all markets throughout the coun-
try, that more sophisticated problems of money supply, exchange rates, and prices
could have been so significant. But they were, and the attitudes and policies toward
those questions had an important effect on the Korean economy in the eighteenth
century.
By the same token, Yu Hyongwon's analysis of the role and function of money
and the state's role in its management provides an interesting model for com-
parison with the policies adopted at the time and in the first half of the eigh-
teenth century. It was only in the mid-eighteenth century that his ideas became
more widely known, a century after he wrote his work on money, and a period
when a hundred years of experience with copper cash had changed perspectives
from the time when cash was being introduced.