CASH AND ECONOMIC CHANGE 965
and desperate they might become for fear they might lay an eternal curse on
their male progeny. Yu's goal was to liberate the yangban class from its hered-
itary restriction to a life of scholarship and idleness.
The problem of unemployed yangban had been growing by the eighteenth cen-
tury because an increasing number of people had been able to escape the con-
fines of hereditary slavery and yangmin or commoner status, and some had
obtained qualifications for official posts by purchase or contribution, but the num-
ber of bureaucratic positions remained constant, increasing the supply of unem-
ployed and frustrated aspirants for office. Because they were unable to earn a
living by commercial activity, they were either reduced to penury, had to seek a
patron of influence, or engage in moneylending or bribery to survive.
Yu Suwon believed that if unemployed scholars were given the chance to earn
a living in commerce. not only would they be able to support themselves, but
they would participate in the formation of a new merchant class of better edu-
cated men. He was inspired by contemporary Ch'ing practice where commer-
cial activity did not disbar any man or his descendants from taking the national
exami nations.
Critics of YU's ideas objected to opening commerce to yangban because they
believed that commercial activity would have a deleterious effect on morals by
stimulating the search for profit, not only for individual yangban, but for their
sons and descendants as well. Yu retorted, however, that commerce and indus-
try were not base or ignoble occupations. and in fact merchants maintained a
higher standard of ethics than many of the fallen yangban or corrupt officials
who in a desperate struggle for survival entered into contractual arrangements
(pangnap) with peasants to pay their taxes in advance, lent money at usurious
rates, or conspired to seize slaves and land from others in trumped-Up lawsuits.
He pointed out that by the late 1720S only government-licensed shops had
been authorized in certain major cities and towns like Seoul, Pyongyang,
Kaes6ng, Chonju, Suw6n, and a few others, and he wanted to spread licensed
shops not only to every major administrative town, but to commercial market
towns as well. He was not. however, an advocate of free market commercial
activity because he wanted to retain the system of government licensing and
opposed the growth of unlicensed or unauthorized shops (nan jon), small-scale
itinerant merchants or subcontractors, itinerant peddlers, periodic markets (held
usually once every five days), or the ad hoc markets or fairs held in "open fields"
that Yu Hyongwon had objected to.
Anyone tied to the Western notion that capitalism can only develop by the
destruction of the feudal bonds of corporate guild relations to permit individu-
als to create their own enterprises and participate in a free market system might
well believe that Yu Suw6n's plan was misguided or illogical if he expected to
promote greater commercial activities by forcing all merchants to accept state
control. To be sure, he wanted to expand commerce but to do it by strengthen-
ing government licensing of shops to repress the competition of the rising num-
ber of unauthorized small-scale merchants and peddlers. He anticipated that the