EPILOGUE 1015until the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars like Kim Yongsop would like
to attribute this phenomenon to the emergence of an entrepreneurial spirit among
the peasantry that allowed slave cultivators to accumulate surpluses and buy their
way out of slavery, but the concrete evidence for this thesis is weak. Even though
the high opportunity cost involved in recapturing runaway slaves and the easy
economical alternative of replacing slaves with tenants and hired lahorers were
more likely causes, it is difficult to discount the effect of Yu's direct challenge
to slavery on Confucian moral grounds, particularly because his views became
widely known among the educated class in the late eighteenth century. His con-
tribution to the decline of slavery and Korea as a slave society may be his most
outstanding contribution to the improvement of Korean life.
Yu had much less direct influence on the debate over the equal service reform
(kyunyokpop) of 1750, a misnomer if there ever was one. Yu's idea had been to
reconstitute and rebuild the military establishment by which the military cloth
tax paid by a discrete group of support taxpayers would finance rotating duty
soldiers. He had also argued for the reintroduction of military affairs into the
education and training of officials, the adoption of Western firearms, and the
reorganization of a defense system.
By the eighteenth century, however, the Chason military system lost its rai-
son d'etre and the military cloth tax became a hane on the existence of the com-
moner peasant. Because of the widespread evasion of registration and service,
the shrinking number of commoner peasants had to bear the full weight of the
military cloth tax. Yu did not anticipate this outcome, but his concern for the
maldistribution of tax burdens was earried on by many other active officials,
who promoted some method of lightening the tax load on commoner peasants
by shifting slaves to commoner status and including the service-exempt yang-
ban and the legions of tax-evading scholars and putative students in the ranks
of the support taxpayers. Slaves did eseape servitude primarily by running away,
but they escaped the net of the military service registrars by fair means or foul.
The result of three quarters of a century of discussion to extend the military cloth
tax to yangban was disappointing, however, because King Yongjo finally capit-
ulated to their interests and only reduced the tax on commoners. The tax reduc-
tion had but temporary and limited effects, for by the middle of the nineteenth
century it became one of the major causes of peasant rebellion.
Another issue was the land tax, an issue where Yu's ideas were far beyond the
capacity of his age. He had recognized that the maldistribution of land, not just
the land tax, was the primary cause of peasant poverty in an agrarian society. His
appeal for national confiscation and redistribution did not elicit much of a response
in the seventeenth century because the land tax was still quite light. The adop-
tion of the tllcdongmi rice surtax on land to provide funds to replace local trib-
ute, however. increascd the severity of the land tax in the structure of taxation.
Even then the nominal land tax rate still remained relatively low, but the trend
toward the concentration of land in the hands of large landlords, the loss of land
by smallholders, and thcir decline to landless sharecroppers and laborers exac-