PART VI
Financial Reform and the Economy:
Introduction
1he middle of the seventeenth century witnessed the beginnings of important
changes in thc Korean economy. The most visible manifestations of those changes- the conversion of the tribute tax in kind into a grain surtax on land to finance
market purchases of goods and the minting of copper cash - had begun at the
beginning of the century, but they also represented deeper changes in the econ-
omy that had begun in the late fifteenth century. They signified that Korea was
about to emerge from the near-barter economy of the first quarter of the six-
teenth century into the beginnings of a more vigorous market accompanied by
the expansion of commerce and a more active role by private merchants outside
the restricted system of licensed merchants.
Yu Hyongwon was not the first scholar to notice the changes that were taking
place in his lifetime, but he was far more thorough in his analysis of those changes
than anyone before him. He provided one of the fullest treatments of commer-
cial development from the perspective of someone trained thoroughly in the con-
ventional Neo-Confucian curriculum of his era. Did his commitment to the
primacy of agricultural production mean that it would be impossible for him,
or for any Confucian of his day, to overcome the Confucian bias against com-
merce and the profit motive? Or would his almost iconoclastic predilection for
challenging honored Korean social traditions steer him to a new appreciation
of a freer and more expansive commercial and industrial economy?
While Yu was in many ways an original thinker, he in no way played the role
of an Adam Smith by clarifying and defining the nature of commercial activity
and championing its nature as the key to releasing Korea from economic back-
wardness. He was, however, an observer of the economic changes that were occur-
ring in his own time. That role as observer operated as a constraint on his vision
because he was responding to changes already wrought by a number of Korean
officials of his century. Those men were not trying to work out an original phi-
losophy of economic activity but were responding to the injustices of a rigid