270 SOCIAL REFORMlevel of human freedom or economic development? Certainly the removal of
the social stigma, legal discrimination, personal tribute, and susceptibility to phys-
ical punishment by masters and others that accompanied slavery must have pro-
vided great relief to the slaves. The loosening of the restrictive economic ties
of the early Chason period and the growth of commercial activity must also have
contributed to the relaxation of rigid rules of status distinction. But since many
more slaves ended up as tenants or landless laborers than as rich landowners,
the liberated ones may not have found themselves any wealthier than before.
More likely, they became part of the broth that made the nineteenth century the
most rebellious century in Korean history.
Nor did the escape from slavery necessarily mean automatic progress to a more
advanced economic or political system. Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst have
recently pointed out that slavery has existed in a number of different political
forms, and that, contrary to a number of Korean historians who have believed
that slavery ought to be found between the ancient and feudal modes of pro-
duction (which it does not in Korea, to their grief), it does not constitute in itself
a distinct mode of production in the Marxist sense, let alone one that necessar-
ily follows the ancient mode of production and precedes the feudal. They believe
that slavery has been found in a variety of modes of production and political
systems, and they think, and I agree, that "The character of a slave system is
dominated by the social structure in which it exists and not vice versa."^214
The mode of production in the early Choson dynasty could be described as
an agricultural economy based on private property, by which surplus profits were
extracted by landlords from tenant rental fees while the smallholders engaged
in subsistence production. Commerce and handicraft industry played a very small
subsidiary role in the economy. The pattern for the late Chason dynasty was
modified by introducing a small increase in profits from a modest increase in
agricultural wage labor, commercial agriculture, handicrafts, and trade. Slav-
ery was part of that mode of production, but it was not the main cause of that
mode's coming into existence, and its reduction to negligibility did not result in
its disappearance.