SLAVERY 245
was because the commoner and male slave hired laborers usually ran away from
their employers. '43
Contrary to the argument of Kim Yongsop that the chief employers of hired
labor should have been commoners, especially the entrepreneurial types, most
of the employers in Han's sample in and around Taegu were chung'in or petty
clerks and official slaves! '44 Furthermore, while Ch'oe Chun '0 believed that short-
term day labor represented the culmination of a progressive process that left the
peasant with nothing but his labor power to sell and no other guarantee of sup-
port for a season or a year, Han cited a few sources in 1783 when the Korean
court was about to adopt the Chinese law governing long-term labor contracts
for five years or more showing that short-term migrant labor had always been
the main type of hired labor in the dynasty, not the end-point or culmination of
what Ch'oe termed the "commoditization" of labor. '45 Ch'oe also included the
process by which immiserated and starving people in times of famine begged
the well-to-do to hire them on and provide room and board as one of the pro-
gressive developments taking place. Han, however, regarded this as a backward
form of labor because room and board, not wages, was the main form of com-
pensation, not to mention hired laborers who had no choice but to indenture them-
selves to employers for life just to stay alive and as such were subject to the
same kind of abusive treatment and harsh punishment meted out to slaves.'4^6
The weakness of Han's study was that the evidence he used was limited to
the household registers. Ch'oe Chun'o cited the appearance of koji contracted
labor in the mid-eighteenth century as another sign of progress. This form of
labor was also the product of desperate circumstances, in which peasants on
the verge of starvation in the winter months would enter into a contract with an
employer and take an advance payment in cash or grain with a promise to work
for the lowest possible wages on his fields in the spring and summer. Employ-
ers could get ten men to contract as laborers in the winter for only I yang or
string of cash C. I yang per man to do transplanting, weeding, and harvesting
for this "wage"). On the other hand Ch'oe cited evidence that some landown-
ers were offering higher than usual wages to attract koji laborers, particularly
around larger towns. '47
So the kind of labor that Han described as the last refuge of the desperate,
Ch'oe Chun'o treated as part of the development of the free labor market and
rational, capitalist business practice by entrepreneurial rich peasants. Unfortu-
nately, the ability to choose between these two interpretations is not aided that
much by studies of the rural sector in Europe. While Fernand Braudel pointed
out that itinerant rural wage labor was very much a part of a Europe plodding
slowly toward the burgeoning of industrial capitalism in late eighteenth century
England, that phenomenon was as much a feature of the fourteenth century as
the mid-eighteenth.^148 Georges Duby pushed the replacement of forced labor
by wage work back to the twelfth century in France and England. '49 In other
words, since the conversion from forced labor in Korea in the form of both slav-