마법사의 공간

A second pattern was that the state uncompromisingly defined slaves as forming the lowest echelon of society regardless of their occupation. Under the Chosŏn Dynasty it was virtually impossible to negotiate a way out of such status. The social strata comprised the ruling elites, called yangban, commoners or sangin, and the slaves · nobi and ch’õnin. The state controlled mobility across the diffe..

Thus, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Korean slavery exhibited three major features. First, an increasing share of the large slave population came to be employed in direct economic activities such as agricultural production. In classical Marxist terms this was the era when Korean slavery came closest to resembling an ancient slave society. Agricultural production here should not..

Heritable status in Korea ensured a rising slave population. Slaveholders married their slaves to commoners in order to increase the number of slaves. Impoverished commoner households married off their young daughters to male slaves while unmarried male commoners too poor to get married also took female slaves as their wives. The slave population could only grow in these circumstances. There wer..

The proportion of enslaved people varied from region to region within Chosŏn Korea. In present-day South Korea it perhaps reached 40 percent toward the southern half of the peninsula, where agriculture was particularly important. While the slave ratio might reach 40 to 50 percent in some rural areas, household register of 1663 of 1663 from northern suburb of Hanyang, the capital city of Chosŏn, ..

In addition, as during the early years of Koryo, the Chosŏn Crown at first attempted to restrict the growth of the slave population. The Patrilineal Succession Law (chongbupõp) requiring offspring to take on the slave status only from the father was in fact briefly enacted during the reign of King T’aejong (r. 1400–1418), but the opposition was fierce, and the legislation was never effectively e..

Any conflict that arose between traditional Korean and Confucian values of slavery was always resolved favorably to Confucian elites as slave owners. A typical example is the legislation of slave succession. As we have seen, Mongol dominance had already ensured that the heritability of slave status was already incorporated into common law by 1300. In the fifteenth century, the heritability of sl..

The Confucian ruling elites of Chosŏn were influenced by Zhu Xi (1127–1200), who perceived slaves to be of a fundamentally different category from free men. The elites skillfully applied their own, rather broad, reinterpretation of the Confucian lord-subject relationship to justify slavery in Korea. In their hands, the master-slave relationship not even prevalent in China where Confucianism had ..

At the time Chosõn was founded, agriculture land and slaves constituted the major source of wealth. The so-called reformists who had been instrumental in founding the new dynasty, wanted more equal distribution of land, but in reality little land reform actually took place during early Chosŏn. Why, nevertheless, did reformists not challenge the existence of slavery? The answer lies in the contin..

The new Confucian elites that founded Chosŏn were actually keen to espouse the advantages of slavery. They recognized its utility in punishing criminals long one of the key underpinnings for the institution in Korea and believed that the distinction it made between free men and slaves was necessary for keeping social order. Even Chòng Tojõn (1342– 1398), the de facto planner of the new Confucian..

THE ZENITH OF KOREAN SLAVERY, 1400-1700s Almost all the ruling elite carried over into the new dynasty, despite the ascension of a new royal line, but politically they quickly came to embrace neo-Confucianism and developed a critical stance toward Buddhism. Chosõn, unlike Koryō, would mature into a society built on Confucianism. The new dynasty implemented fundamental reform of the state appara..

The attempt to reduce the slave population failed. After decades of Mongol pressure, the crown lacked authority, but the main cause was strong opposition by the generals and high-ranking aristocrats who had accumulated large numbers of private slaves. King Kongmin, who pushed ahead with his reforms despite opposition, was assassinated in the palace in 1374, and in 1392 the Koryŏ dynasty fell and..

In the last phase of the Koryŏ dynasty, some reformists criticized Buddhism for falling into degeneracy and argued that the foundations of the state must be rebuilt according to neo-Confucian values. They sharply criticized the corruption and inequalities of society, arguing that large landholdings should no longer be tolerated. However, these reformists were silent on the issue of slavery, whic..

As previously mentioned, the weakening state-ruling apparatus from 1170 onward allowed powerful individuals to secure land and a labor force, i.e. slaves. One could hypothesize that this is when the principle of slave succession evolved in Koryŏ society as a way to expand the slave population. In any case, the fact that slave succession was already pervasive throughout Korean society during the ..

In the period between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, a time of overall confusion in Korean history, slavery had expanded but was not yet firmly established as a state institution. Individual slaves could be upwardly mobile depending on the circumstances. Cases in which slaves are able to gain the status of free men and make something of themselves by way of exceptional martial skills or t..

As the fierce power struggles among the generals came to an end at the turn of the 1200s, the Korean Peninsula had barely been able to regain stability when it it was subjected to a series of invasions by the Mongol Empire between 1231 and 1257. The ruling apparatus of the state remained enfeebled during the eighty years between 1270, when the military regime collapsed, and the final takeover by..

THE PROLIFERATION OF KOREAN SLAVERY, 1200S-1400S In 1170, a military coup took place in the Korean Peninsula that destroyed the previous state system. A small number of generals seized political power, triggering a purge and dismissal of a great number of state officials. Even under the military regime, sort of Korean Shogunate, power struggles among generals continued, and the commander in chie..

While those between the ages of sixteen and fifty-nine were required to work as slaves, minors or seniors aged sixty were exempt from such work. In sum, although the origins of Korean slavery can be found during the second and third centuries BCE, slavery was not central to understanding the characteristics of Korean society, even into the twelfth century of the Common Era. Not only was the slav..

It was in this period that the state began legislating on slavery. First, the heritability of slave status was enacted as evidenced by the Matrilineal Succession Law (chongmopõp) of 1036, which stated that the offspring of nobi shall inherit the status of the mother. Since slaves in Koryŏ society were still mainly perceived as criminals, the state banned marriage between slaves and commoners. Th..

In 986, the state even set the price of slaves to approximately the equivalent economic value of what a commoner would make for a hundred days of labor with female slaves estimated at a slightly higher price than their male counterparts. Such a low price indicates the small contribution that slaves made to the Korean economy during the tenth to twelfth centuries. Nevertheless, such a measure con..

Accordingly, the kings of the newly reunified state needed to free as many slaves as possible to widen the tax base and increase the pool of military recruits. It is now generally accepted that the slave population in Korea did not exceed 10 percent of the total population until the collapse of the Koryŏ Dynasty in the late fourteenth century. Aristocrats in early Koryò did own slaves, but most ..