SLAVERY 2!!given as gifts, or inherited. They conformed to the definition of chattel property
and were referred to as such, even though their basic humanity was also recog-
nized in a number of ways. Some years ago a number of scholars of slavery in
China sought to demonstrate that Chinese slavery was more humane than the
chattel slavery of Rome because the Chinese recognized the humanity of the
slave, but the problem has been mooted by the more recent studies of Western
slavery which show that all slave societies, even the ones with the most legal-
istic and formalistic definitions of slaves as chattel goods or inanimate objects,
had to treat slaves as human beings.
Societies with slavery have varied in the degree to which they have recog-
nized the basic humanity of slaves and the latitude or leniency afforded to slaves.
Slaves in Korea usually did not have surnames except possibly in the case of
recently enslaved ex-officials, an indication that the rest of society did not think
it was necessary for them to be organized in familial or lineage kinship groups
with an identifiable ancestry. But in the Koryo period, for example, marriage
between slaves was recognized and slaves were listed on household registers of
their masters and the localities where they resided as families or households.
Although the master had the authority to sell them individually and break up
the unity of their families, they usually exercised this right with domestic ser-
vants and much less so with the so-called outside resident slaves (oego nobi)
who lived at some distance from the master and maintained individual residences.
Furthermore, while intermarriage between slaves and commoners was forbid-
den explicitly by law, the law was continually violated and the state virtually
acknowledged the violation by devising a series of laws to determine the status
of offspring of mixed marriages.
In law, slaves were subject to greater penalties for the commission of crimes
than commoners or higher status groups, but inequality before the law in the
standards of punishment is more a reflection of a hierarchic status society than
it is a denial of the humanity of the slave. This is seen clearly in China during
the T'ang dynasty and after when the law defined a number of intermediate non-
slave and noncommoner statuses distinguished as well by intermediate treat-
ment in the scale of punishments. In a number of ways the humanity of the slave
was positively acknowledged in law. Contrary to Roman practice and in accor-
dance with Chinese law, slaves in Korea were held individually responsible for
their actions. They were also protected by law against arbitrary murder by mas-
ters as well as third parties even though the legal protections were often ignored
in practice. Although there are no extant laws specifying the right of slaves to
own property or defining the extent of the slaveowner's ri ghts to his slave's prop-
erty (the peculium in Roman slavery), there are many cases of slaves owning
property and wealth in the form of land, cash, and even other slaves in the his-
torical records. As Chon Hyongt'aek has shown, in the Chason dynasty both
private and official slaves. mostly outside resident slaves (oego nohi), could pur-
chase and own land and bequeath it to their sons, who inherited both his status
and his obligations, but if the slave died without any heirs, the private master