360 LAND REFORM
The impoverishment of the less industrious peasant or landless tenants could
have been a necessary but unfortunate consequence of progressive developments
in land tenure relations, a by-product of the concentration of landownership in
the midst of a shift to market-oriented agricultural production by a small num-
ber of enterprising landlords. Except for the growth in cotton and cotton textile
exports that financed copper imports for the minting of metallic cash in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the growth of some exports of gin-
seng, there is little evidence of a significant growth in an external market for
agricultural products or any great growth of the urban population. Nor is there
sufficient evidence to indicate that there was any great shift away from agri-
culture to industry or that the cotton and homespun cotton textile industry was
assuming a significant proportion of the economy. Failing proof of any major
shift away from agriculture and consumption to industry and commercially mar-
keted products, the pattern of increased concentration of landholding and dete-
riorating conditions of tenant tenure would seem to demonstrate an increase in
peasant discontent, if not the immiseration of the majority of peasants.
"Managerial Peasants" as a Cause of Social MobilityAs pointed out before, Kim Yongsop followed the lead provided by Shikata
Hiroshi, who in his early studies of popUlation and status pointed out that in the
few villages he examined near Taegu in Kyongsang Province from 1690 to 1858
the household population fluctuated only slightly, but the percentage of what he
defined as yangban households increased steadily from 8.3 to 65.5 percent, the
percentage of commoner households increased slightly from 51. I to 59.9 per-
cent between 1690 and 1789 but then declined sharply to 32.8 percent by 1858,
and the percentage of slave households began at 40.6 percent, declined sharply
to 5.4 percent by 1783-89, and then still more to 1.7 percent by 1858. Kim
accepted the validity of Shikata's findings almost without question, and then
sought to find the economic reasons for these social changes.
He attributed the rise in the number and percentage of yangban in the popu-
lation to the new opportunities for the private accumulation of economic wealth,
and the accumulation of surpluses by the range of middle peasants (presumably
owning from 0.5-1.0 kyol) per household originally. 15 In conclusion, he argued
that a "managerial" or entrepreneurial type of landowner was the core of this
drive for upward social mobility. His managerial landowner, however, was a hypo-
thetical figure, not one based on an empirical examination of the account books
of even a single such landowner to calculate the degree of rationality used to
cut costs. Such cutting of costs was possibly through employing more efficient
wage labor over sharecropping tenancy arrangements, by increasing the inputs
offertilizer, experimenting with more productive varieties of seed, maximizing
profits by aiming at sales of surplus on the market, or reinvesting those profits
either in agricultural production or in nonagricultural industries.
One of Kim's conclusions was that the economic fortunes of yangban as a