934 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
century the attitudes toward cash and its role in the economy had been almost
totally reversed from what they had been in the early seventeenth century. From
King Injo through the first half of King Sukchong's reign, kings and a growing
percentage of high officials had favored a positive policy to introduce cash into
the economy and promote its circulation throughout the country. Officials like
Kim Yuk and H6 Ch6k and scholars like Yu Hy6ngw6n believed that the absence
of cash demonstrated the persistence of backwardness if not barbarism in the
level of civilization. Both Sukchong and Ky6ngjong remained faithful to their
moral obligation to succor the starving, and they were willing to use cash to do
it, but even though the cash shortage and price deflation in the second decade
of the eighteenth century provided sufficient economic and rational grounds for
a small increase in the money supply, neither king could overcome the anti-cash
prejudice of their top officials.
Even though the introduction of cash had always been opposed by a hard core
of conservatives who preferred the imagined simplicity of a natural, agrarian
economy, the new conservative opposition to cash was now the product of reac-
tion against anomalies in prices, exchange values, and interest rates that was
now attributed exclusively to a lack of constraint in restricting the money sup-
ply in the 1690s. Conservative critics might easily have focused attention on
administrative mismanagement by the government caused by insufficient report-
ing and monitoring of price conditions, or the lack of sophistication in regulat-
ing not only the national volume of cash but its unequal distribution throughout
the country. They chose, however, to reduce the problems of monetary man-
agement to a simple, moral conception of the capacity of cash itself to create
evil. Negativism toward cash that appeared in the first two decades of the eigh-
teenth century was therefore a recent development, a reaction to a "modem"
trend rather than simply the obscurantism of the Confucian fundamentalists.
By the latter part of the 1720S, however, the increasing use of cash and the
gradual expansion of market activities had so exacerbated the shortage of money
and the deflation of commodity prices that officials began to see that since the
development of cash in the economy had virtually become irreversible, the gov-
ernment was obliged to meet its responsibility to enlarge the money supply and
bring down prices.
King Yangjo's Anti-Cash Prejudice: 1727Unfortunately, the most powerful person in the political system, King YOngjo,
had become the captive of anti-cash prejudice. Even though he agreed with the
request of some officials in 1725, a year after he ascended the throne, to mint
cash to provide relief to alleviate the severity of the famine, he did so only with
the greatest reluctance and imposed a time limit on minting.
YOngjo reminded his officials that even though cash had been used in China
at least since the Chou and Han dynasties, Ssu-ma Kuang had warned against its
evils in his Tzu-chih t 'ung-chien, and the history of cash in Korea had reproduced