LATE CHOSON PROPOSALS 359settled, or migrant laborers who worked either for room and board or a small
wage. In the late eighteenth century, for example, Pak Chiw6n thought that only
10 to 20 percent of the peasants owned their own land, andYi Kyugy6ng reported
that only IO percent of the land in a village was owned by smallholders. Kim
Yongs6p himself discovered that in the Kobu region of Ch6lla Province, 60 per-
cent of the land was rented and 40 percent of the peasants were tenants in the
early eighteenth century, but a century later, 5 percent were landlords, 25 per-
cent were owner-cultivators, and 70 percent were either full or part-tenants. The
number of full tenants had increased from 25 percent to 40 percent in that inter-
val, and over half rented only slightly more than. r kyo/ per person. 10
Tenancy, by itself, does not necessarily indicate backwardness or poverty, but
as an indication of development one would at least expect something approach-
ing the emergence of an equivalent of the capitalist tenant-farmers of England
who leased large amounts of land, employed wage laborers, and profited from
the sale of surplus products on the market. 1 1 Unfortunately. most of the evidence
indicates a pattern of minute parcels of rented land cultivated by tenant fami-
lies just eking out a bare living.12
Earlier in the dynasty, when most land was held by owners who held larger
parcels on the average of 5 kyol, the labor was done either by the family or by
slaves, but as the holdings of the rich peasants grew larger and transplantation
requiring much larger amounts oflabor spread around the country, peasants had
to turn to hired labor to supply the need. The poor peasants who lacked the cap-
ital to hire workers or to afford the oxen and tools needed to increase produc-
tion either borrowed what they needed or donated their own labor as
compensation, losing time on their own fields. Kim believed that the need for
capital was also increased by the shift to nightsoil fertilization, which spread
widely only in the eighteenth century. 13
There is little doubt that the increase in tenancy was accompanied by harsher
conditions for tenants in general as the landlords tried to increase their rents and
the return on their investment. Landlords also shifted the mode of rent from share-
cropping (tajak or taja) to fixed rent (taja) to guarantee at least a secure and
stable rental income, and they added other kinds of charges to increase their
income, such as taking over reservoirs for irrigation and levying a water tax on
the tenants.
Landlords began to require that tenants pay the land tax as well. In fact, in
the early eighteenth century the land tax had become an even more important
segment of national tax revenues because the tribute tax had been converted from
payment of goods in kind to a surtax on land (the taedongmi) throughout the
seventeenth century. Since the government failed to maintain accurate registra-
tion of cultivated and taxable land (a cadastral survey was not carried out between
the 1680s and 1717), that omission favored the wealthy landlords and shifted a
greater perccntage of the tax quotas to the backs of the smallholders. As a result
of these developments Kim Yongs6p concluded that the accumulation of wealth
through tenancy hy rich landlords had widened the gap hetween rich and poor. 14