EPILOGUE 1009to Korea in 1592. The Westerners were intellectually and morally incapable of
continuing K wanghaegun 's more pragmatic policy of adaptation and delay. What
was worse, after the Manchu imposition of sovereignty over Korea, it became
impossible for Korean kings to rebuild Korean military forces in the face of
Manchu surveillance.
Under the protection of the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty, however, the threat of
foreign invasion was removed and a strong military defense became unneces-
sary. The armed forces were kept in place mainly to ensure domestic tranquil-
lity, but because its cost was far too large for that purpose, it functioned more
and more as an oppressive mode of taxation. Since military service was deemed
demeaning to begin with, the tendency to evade it grew, and a smaller and smaller
group of commoner peasants were left to carry the whole fiscal burden. The most
serious weakness of the Ch'ing peace, however, was the desuetude with which
officials considered military defense because when the Ch' ing state lost its power
in the nineteenth century to defend itself, let alone its Korean tributary, Korea
found itself helpless and isolated.
The need for more adult males for the payment of the military support tax, if
not actual duty as soldiers, continued to stimulate plans for drawing more slaves
into the military service system or liberating them from inherited slavery. Dur-
ing the Imjin Wars slaves were incorporated in considerable numbers into the
sago units and manumitted in return for military merit or purchase, but after
the war the price of purchase was too high to allow much reduction of the slave
population. The need for adult males subject to military service, however, kept
slaves as military support taxpayers. The same motive also explains the origin
in official circles of the long debate over the matrilineal rule for the manumis-
sion of offspring of the sons of commoner mothers in mixed slave!commoner
marriages, first instituted in 1669. This marked an important step in the state's
interference with the slaveowner's control over his slaves.
The idea for reforming the local products tribute system began in the late fif-
teenth century, but the stimulus needed to accomplish the task also occurred as
a result of the Imjin Wars. The illicit system of tribute contracting underway
since the late fifteenth century demonstrated the advantages of market purchases
of goods over in-kind tax payments, and state officials simply applied to the whole
country what had already been tried by some officials - financing the cost by
an extra tax. The taedong reform carried out in the seventeenth century con-
tributed to even greater commercial activity than before.
Almost the same officials who championed the adoption of the taedang reform
also pioneered the introduction of metallic currency. From their observation of
the Ming economy they realized that metallic currency was needed to overcome
the cumbersome use of grain and cloth as media of exchange to lubricate mar-
ket transactions.
The reform of the military system, the matrilineal rule in mixed marriages,
the taedong law, and the currency reform of the seventeenth century represented
a series of positive responses to serious problems by active Confucian officials,