Slavery in Chosŏn Korea

Abstract

Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) was one of the most enduring slave societies in world history. This chapter discusses how slavery as an institution evolved during the Chosŏn dynasty, paying particular attention to the emergence of a large-scale slave society, the socio-economic values of slavery within the social hierarchy, slaves’ legal status and their agency in managing their lives, various means through which slaves achieved their freedom, and the socio-economic, legal, and moral factors that contributed to the dissolution of slavery.

Introduction

One of the most enduring and prolific slave societies in world history was Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), where, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, slaves represented over thirty percent of the population. The relevant Korean term, which included males and females, is “nobi,” translated as “slaves” in this chapter because they were regarded as property that was bought, sold, inherited, and gifted. A rich scholarship debates the precise definitions of slave and slave society, but it converges on key criteria including slaves as property, elites’ economic dependency on slaves, violent domination of slaves by their owners, and natal alienation of slaves. While Korean slavery largely manifests these traits, this chapter examines the complexity of Korean slavery as it developed over several centuries with particular attention to entry into slavery, experiences of slaves, and exit from and decline of slavery.

Entry into Slavery

Slaves on the Korean peninsula appear in historical sources as early as the second century. In the compilation Book of Han (Han shu), completed in 111 CE, an observer of the Later Han (25–220 CE) reports that one of the eight laws practiced by the people of Old Chosŏn (?–108 BCE) under the rule of Han’s Lelang Commandery (108 BCE–313 CE) was to enslave thieves.¹ According to the third-century history Records of the Three Kingdoms (San guo zhi), the ancient state Puyŏ (?–494 CE) enslaved the family members of a murderer.² Regarding the three kingdoms centered on the Korean peninsula—Koguryŏ (37 BCE?–668 CE), Paekche (18 BCE?–660 CE), and Silla (57 BCE?–935 CE)—numerous entries in the History of Three Kingdoms, compiled in 1170, record penal enslavement, debt slavery, and enslavement of conquered people or prisoners of war. The Silla village documents dated between the late seventh and ninth century show that although they amounted to just five percent of the total population, slaves were an integral part of the village scape.

Historical records from and on the Koryŏ (918–1392) dynasty prove the presence of slaves throughout its period, although it is difficult to estimate the scale of slavery during that time. The slave population was replenished by enslaving prisoners of war, especially at the beginning of the dynasty when Koryŏ was contesting supremacy on the Korean peninsula with Later Paekche (892–936) and declining Silla. Other sources of new slaves were penal enslavement, self-enslavement due to severe economic deprivation, and forceful enslavement of commoners by powerful local magnates. The major source of slaves, however, was probably that slave status was hereditary: according to the 1039 law, a slave’s child is owned by the owner of the child’s mother. Further evidence comes from King Ch’ungnyŏl’s (r. 1274–1308) letter in 1300 to the Yuan (1271–1368) emperor countering his demand that Koryŏ change its slave laws. After quoting instructions, allegedly handed down from the Koryŏ founder, that defined those of base status as different, it states that if one parent is base then the child is too. It adds that even the descendants of manumitted slaves should remain slaves.³ Since international human trafficking and enslavement of captured people from outside the Korean peninsula were minimal, slaves in premodern Korea were racially indistinguishable from their owners.

Slaves were ubiquitous in Chosŏn Korea and they frequently appear in both official and unofficial sources, although there are no known primary sources penned by slaves themselves. Young-hoon Rhee and Donghyu Yang suggest that from about the fourteenth century, slaves composed over thirty percent of the total population. They also argue that elites who settled in the countryside desired to expand their landholding by applying new agricultural techniques, and acquired the extra labor for this enterprise by enslaving people. Using Orlando Patterson’s two modes—intrusive and extrusive—of representing the social death of enslaved people, Rhee and Yang note that this form of enslavement was extrusive in drawing from within Chosŏn society.⁴ Increasing numbers of legal codes and court discussions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries concerning forceful enslavement of commoners, transactions of slaves as gifts and donations, slave sales, and slave ownership and inheritance rules reflect these socio-economic changes.

Indeed, the Chosŏn government inherited a tremendous backlog of petitions and lawsuits concerning slave ownership and the clarification of slave status caused by decades of forced enslavement, self-enslavement, seizure of other’s property, and confusion in inheritance rules and practices during the late fourteenth century when Koryŏ state authority was much weakened—a situation exacerbated by the loss of slave rosters during the Red Turban invasions in the mid-fourteenth century. The state set up a temporary agency called the Directorate for Inspection of Slaves in 1391, but in 1413 the number of unresolved cases reached 13,000. In 1414, the Ministry of Penal Affairs proposed a plan to limit the ownership of slaves by individuals, ranging from 150 male slaves for the royal relatives of the first rank to 10 for commoners. Due to heavy opposition from officials who would stand to lose considerable resources, the court rejected the proposal.⁵ In fact, it was not unusual for a local elite household to possess a few hundred slaves, as shown in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century family inheritance documents that reveal the size of individual holdings in the region of northern Kyŏngsang Province. Of thirty-six cases, one family had 757 slaves; six had 200–400; seven had 100–200; nineteen had 40–100; and three had less than twenty. The seven top-holding families produced either incumbent officials with mid to upper rank positions or descended from such officials, while the remaining families also had close ties with officeholding, which shows the close relationship between official positions and slaveholding.⁶

While both official and private documents confirm slavery as a key social and economic institution in Chosŏn, overall slave population data are rather thin. Rhee and Yang estimate that in 1467 there were about 3.5 million slaves (not counting runaways), 39 percent of the estimated total population of 9 million.⁷ Many case studies of household registers from the seventeenth century provide a wide range of slave population ratios in different periods—over 75 percent in 1663 in the northern part of Seoul and 10.8 percent in 1672 in Kŭmhwa, Kangwŏn Province. In the Taegu area, Kyŏngsang Province, the slave population decreased overall from 44.6 percent in 1690 to 33.3 in 1729–1732, to 16.5 in 1783–1789.⁸ On the basis of numerous case studies, scholars largely agree that over thirty percent of the population were slaves until the mid-eighteenth century, followed by a decline.

Chosŏn, though to a lesser degree compared to Koryŏ, was a highly stratified society in which one’s status was largely determined by birth, where a person belonged to either “good” or “base” status. Social, economic, and political elite called yangban as well as commoners had good status and were in principle eligible for government posts in return for providing military services—an obligation which, by the latter part of the sixteenth century, fell mostly on commoners either in the form of physical service or tax payment. Slaves belonged to the base status group together with certain occupational groups such as butchers, Buddhist monks, shamans, government courtesans, and traveling entertainers.

Founders and rulers of the Chosŏn dynasty were professed Confucians, who used the Confucian notion of social distinction to rationalize hierarchical social order and slavery. Hierarchical social order would be maintained only if each member of the society knew their place and lived by the values governing interpersonal relationships. These were epitomized in the concepts of three cardinal relationships between ruler and subject, parent and child, and husband and wife, and the five moral imperatives: righteousness between sovereign and subject; proper rapport between father and son; separation of function between husband and wife; proper recognition of sequence of birth between elder and younger brother; and faithfulness between friends. Social distinction was a natural manifestation of different moral dispositions among people, and the purpose of governance was to maintain such a morally defined social order. In this scheme, the relationship between owner and slave was akin to the relationship between the king and his subjects. The absolute loyalty of slaves toward their owners was therefore demanded. The murder of owners by their slaves was regarded as one of the most heinous crimes, equivalent to treason. In Confucian teaching, however, social harmony required that relationships be reciprocal. While subjects owed absolute loyalty to their lords, the rulers were obligated to treat their subjects with benevolence and rule the country humanely. Laws, therefore, had to keep the balance between the need to maintain social hierarchy and an equivalent need to display benevolence and fairness to all subjects.

The ideological contradictions and moral ambiguities arising from hereditary slavery and treating a human being as an object were clear to Chosŏn rulers from the beginning. As early as 1391, officials recognized a slave’s humanity by insisting that “slaves, though they are base, are still Heaven’s people,” and they deplored that slaves were traded without hesitation alongside oxen or horses.⁹ Like other societies with slavery, which recognized the basic humanity of slaves to varying degrees, Chosŏn kings and elites repeated that slaves, like all others under their rule, were also human beings and children of the king and should therefore benefit from their benevolent rule. The kings also found their practice of hereditary slavery awkward because it was absent in Chinese antiquity, their inspiration and model for an ideal society. Moral and philosophical standards and inconsistencies, however, did not discourage slavery nor lead to its abolition because the state and elites saw the preservation of slavery as essential in sustaining their material interests, which is to say that the fate of slavery was determined largely by complex socio-economic processes.

Experiences of Slaves

There were two categories of slaves: those owned by the government, and those owned privately. The Chosŏn state was the largest slave owner. Public slaves, who worked in royal palaces, central and provincial government offices, and other state establishments, provided a wide range of services, including attending to the royal family’s domestic needs, miscellaneous services at palaces and offices, producing various artifacts as skilled artisans, and laboring on government land and royal estates. Private slaves, too, worked on lands and as domestic servants. Since land together with people were the primary sources of state revenue, this set up competition for resources between the state and private slave owners, mostly yangban, whose slaves did not owe any labor or military services to the state because their bodies were privately owned. More private slaves meant a decrease in tax-paying subjects. At the same time, the state had to protect the slaveholding yangban’s economic interests since they were the pillars of the state. Yangban were primary candidates for official court positions and were also essential in controlling local populations since the county magistrate, the sole court-appointed official assigned to govern a given county, needed the cooperation of local yangban. Slaves were the hands and feet of a yangban’s daily life, their economic foundation, and a symbol of their ruling status. It was thus in the state’s interest to ensure yangban slaveholding.

Registration status reveals a further distinction between resident and nonresident slaves, the former being registered under the owner’s household but living either in the owner’s household complex or separately in the same or a nearby village, and the latter being registered as an independent household and often living away from the owner, sometimes in different counties or provinces. The percentage of nonresident slaves in the total slave population ranges from 47.8 in 1609 in Ulsan to 71.8 in 1690 in Taegu. At Tosan Private Academy in 1765, nonresident slaves composed 42.6 percent (970 of 2275 slaves), an increase from 31 percent in 1619 (40 of 129 slaves).¹⁰ An inheritance document drawn in 1494 by the heirs of Yi Maeng-hyŏn (1436–1487) reveals that 757 slaves were located in seventy counties, including Hamgyŏng and Chŏlla provinces far away from both Yi’s residence in Seoul and his farm in Kyŏnggi Province.¹¹ Kwŏn Tae-un’s inheritance document of 1678 shows that his slaves were living in forty-two locations in five provinces.¹² One reason for this wide dispersal of slaves was generations of equal division of patrimonial property among siblings, which was based not only on the number of slaves, but also on a slave’s age, talent, health, and location.

Resident slaves usually worked under the direct supervision of their owners as domestic workers or worked on land located near their owner’s home. They were fed and clothed by the owner and sometimes given a monthly subsistence allowance. Yu Hŭi-ch’un (1513–1477), a high-ranking official from Haenam, Chŏlla Province who lived in Seoul during his service to the central court, provided a monthly provision of three tu of rice to a female slave and five tu of rice to a male slave, both of whom moved with Yu to Seoul to continue service. These amounts accord with the assessment of one month’s diet for an adult female slave at the time, which was three tu.¹³ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Tosan Private Academy bi-annually paid about 7.5 tu to one sŏk of rice to a slave.¹⁴ A study of slave labor in the mid-nineteenth century finds that the owner compensated a slave’s labor in cash or in kind in varied amounts depending on the kind and duration of work performed. For example, female slave Kŭm-nyŏl’s debt of two tu of unhulled rice was forgiven as compensation for her extra work on cotton production in 1849.¹⁵ This last case seems to indicate that the owner customarily paid a slave extra labor like a wage worker.

In addition to slaves who provided labor, both public and private slave categories also included those who provided tribute: as nonresident slaves they submitted to their owners, either the state or private, an annual tribute consisting of cotton cloth, grain, or various agricultural products, or cash after cash was introduced and circulated from the latter part of the seventeenth century. They enjoyed more “freedom” since they were not under the constant watchful eyes of the owners, but they were also subject to ad hoc service requirements, could be sold, exchanged, gifted, and inherited, and were liable for household taxes in the form of corvee labor—one of the three primary taxes together with land tax and military services—or other miscellaneous taxes.

Many public slaves assigned to royal families and government offices paid tribute. Tribute payment for a public slave was two p’il of cotton cloth per slave regardless of gender, the amount commonly applied to private slaves. This was the same amount as the military service tax on an adult commoner male until the rate was decreased by half in 1751. The rate of a slave’s annual tribute had decreased over time to 1.5 p’il for males and 1 p’il for females during the reign of King Hyŏnjong (r. 1659–1674). After 1755, the legal rate was 1 p’il for males and 0.5 p’il for females, although from 1774 tribute payment was waived for female slaves.¹⁶ One study, however, shows a wide range of irregularities in submitting tribute payments. Not every nonresident slave submitted annual tribute payment, and when they submitted payment, usually it was not annually. The highest submission rate for the Ŭisŏng Kim household in the eighteenth century was 46.2 percent in 1762 and the lowest was only 15.6 percent in 1757.¹⁷ In 1765, 54 percent of Tosan Private Academy’s tribute-paying slaves submitted their personal tribute.¹⁸

In early Chosŏn, slaves were not liable for military tax, but in late Chosŏn, especially by the mid-eighteenth century, private slaves, and nonresident slaves in particular, qualified for military taxes, though their tax rate was one half of a commoner’s. When comparing the economic burden of commoner men after 1751 (military tax of 1 p’il of cotton cloth) to that of nonresident male slaves (tribute payment of 1 p’il plus military tax of 0.5 p’il), it would appear that the slave burden was about 50 percent heavier. However, since the rate of annual tribute submission was relatively low, one can argue that in the aggregate, the economic burdens for commoner men and slave men were not so different. Like commoner households, nonresident slaves, if registered as tax-paying households, were liable for state taxes such as labor services, grain loan tax, and other miscellaneous taxes levied on households. But slaves were protected from such taxation once they were registered under their master’s household as resident slaves. In fact, there are numerous examples of yangban household registers that listed dozens of resident slaves throughout late Chosŏn. To prevent them from getting taxed, many yangban owners went so far as not to register their slaves at all.

Slaves as agricultural workers had a few different labor arrangements. In the sixteenth-century “chakkae” system, the slaveowner allocated to an individual slave a certain amount of land for the owner’s plot (chakkae) and some other land as a personal plot (sagyŏng). All production from the owner’s plot belonged to the owner while the harvest from the personal plot provided the slave’s subsistence. The system, which was often instituted in newly reclaimed land, allowed slaves to exercise entrepreneurial freedom, but slaves were often called to provide additional services, forbidden to sell their personal plot, and censured with punishment when unable to meet production expectations. With increasing land pressure from the latter part of the seventeenth century and the fragmentation of elite landholdings caused by repeated equal inheritance practice, the chakkae system disappeared in late Chosŏn and slaves worked on their owner’s land like sharecroppers, or like commoner peasants under tenancy.¹⁹

Elites depended on slave labor not only for agricultural production but also to expand their landed estates. In the early Chosŏn period, elites actively engaged in land reclamation in the countryside for various social, economic, and political reasons. Various laws established in the fifteenth century secured private ownership rights and the land tax was set at much lower than ten percent of the harvest, an ideal Confucian tax rate. Political turbulence caused by irregular royal succession and a series of literati purges ordered by despotic rulers in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries accelerated the migration of frustrated elites to the countryside. These elites, who had access to information on advanced agricultural methods, land reclamation, and water control, were eager to increase their wealth by experimenting and putting their knowledge into practice. Their reclamation activities turned wasteland, lowlands near the coasts, wetlands created by rivers, and hilly uplands into arable land, enabling them to accumulate landed assets. After the two major wars with the Japanese (1592–1598) and Manchu (1627 and 1636), the surviving elites engaged in another wave of agricultural expansion, including opening up ownerless land and adding new agricultural plots. These activities waned as they exhausted reclaimable lands in the eighteenth century.

Slave labor was key for this expansion of land. As a way to increase slave labor, owners discovered the profitability of mixed-status marriage between slaves and commoners, though such unions had been forbidden from the Koryŏ period. Despite a repeated ban, which was reaffirmed by the Chosŏn government, the law stood only in name. Because the offspring of mixed status inherited inferior status from either parent, slaveholders could increase their slaveholding by encouraging mixed unions. This slave breeding through mixed-status marriage, of course, meant a reduction of tax-paying commoners to the state. The state, therefore, tried to control the status of offspring from mixed-status marriages by adopting either the patrilineal or matrifilial rule of succession. While Confucian moralists, who recognized the defining importance of the father, supported the patrilineal rule, others promoted the matrifilial rule because paternity was difficult to prove. The problem was that either law provided loopholes, both for the slave owners who wanted to breed slaves and for slaves themselves who wanted to avoid having their children inherit slave status. The crux of the court discussion on the matter was to preserve an acceptable balance of population size between slaves and commoners and the distinction between social status groups.

Until the eighteenth century, the economic demand for slave labor on the part of slaveholders doomed any legal efforts to discourage mixed-status marriage and reduce the slave population by adopting either a patrilineal or matrifilial rule of succession, and so we find good evidence for the widespread practice of mixed-status marriages. According to an inheritance document of 1418, of 80 slaves divided among Kim Mu’s heirs, 37 percent were offspring of mixed unions. Another inheritance document of 1429, detailing the division of 225 slaves, shows a mixed-union rate of 22 percent. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the percentage was often closer to 50 percent. Labor shortage caused by the wars and reclamation of wasteland as an important activity of dynastic recovery after the wars further encouraged mixed-status marriages in the seventeenth century. One study of a household register in Ulsan in 1609 finds that 70 percent of resident slaves and 55 percent of nonresident slaves had mixed marriages.²⁰

Views of slaves by their yangban owners were overwhelmingly negative. They regarded slaves as stupid, lazy, deceitful, and also lascivious in the case of female slaves. Slaves in general lacked a family name, reflecting added degradation of the slave’s social standing in a society where ancestry and kinship were determinative. Probably due to frequent mixed-status marriages, some slaves obtained a family name from their non-slave status fathers. In legal documents, however, it was common practice not to record their family name. Their given name, moreover, often had derogatory connotations including dog, pig, excretion, stone, and such.

Chosŏn slaves married and formed a family. Existing studies have conflicting views on the stability and continuity of slave families. A study of 3309 slaves appearing in 31 inheritance documents in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries finds that about 80 percent of slaves formed some kind of family including a nuclear family or an extended family composed of three generations.²¹ An analysis of 181 slave families owned by several generations of the P’yŏngsan Sin family in Chinch’ŏn County from 1669 to 1891 shows that 65 households (35.9 percent) were one-generation families (a family of siblings), 102 (56.4 percent) were two-generation families, 13 (7.2 percent) had three generations, and 1 extended to a fourth generation. Additionally, out of 424 slave households, 226 (53.3 percent) were single-person households while 86 (20.3 percent) were households consisting of parents and children. From this data, the author argues that slave families were, in general, unstable and often dissolved due to sales and bequests.²² In contrast, a study by Kim Kŏn-t’ae analyzing slaves owned by the Ŭisŏng Kim family in Andong County from 1710 to 1771 observes that 13 out of 20 slave families were nuclear, consisting of parents and their children. Out of 75 slaves, only 7 were either single-person households or sibling households. Kim considered the possibility of family dissolution caused by sales and inheritance but finds that even when slave family members were inherited by different members of the owner’s family, they usually lived in the same place, and that in any case, slave sales were not very popular in Chosŏn. Kim concludes that slave families generally maintained their stability.²³

While these statistical studies based on household registers have limitations in revealing whether or not slaves had a stable family life, we can find more insight about a slave’s family life and social world from other sources such as diaries, litigation documents, and inquest reports. An example of a slave family’s coherence comes from the aforementioned Yu Hŭi-ch’un and his slave status concubine Ku-jil-tŏk (1528?–?), who was owned by a man named Yi Ku. The couple produced four daughters, who at birth became the property of Yi Ku, their mother’s owner. When they reached their teens, however, only the second daughter was owned by Yi Ku. The first daughter was owned by a person whose relation to Yi Ku is unknown while the third and fourth daughters became the property of Yi Ku’s son-in-law Yi Chŏng, probably as a wedding gift. The girls, who were born during their father Yu Hŭi-ch’un’s nineteen-year exile in the northeastern part of the Korean peninsula, lived there with both parents until Yu was freed from exile in 1567. After that, they moved with their mother to Haenam in the southwest while their father mostly stayed in Seoul to serve at the court. He sent annual tribute payments to the owners on behalf of his daughters and concubine and eventually freed them from slavery as discussed later in this chapter.²⁴

Another vignette of a slave family comes from an inquest report in 1842. A private slave named Yi Pong-dol, his slave-status wife (owned by yangban Sin P’il-ho), his slave-status sister Yi Ing-sim, and his eldest brother Yi Pong-un, who had a yangban title probably purchased by making grain contributions to the government, all lived in a same village. At least two cousins of Pong-dol lived there too. Pong-dol formed an independent household and had his own fishing pond. His brother also owned a bean field and family members cultivated the land together. The fact that the two brothers had a family name and some wealth suggests that their paternal blood might have come from either yangban or the commoner. Pong-dol drowned himself out of extreme frustration after Sin P’il-ho, his wife’s owner, barged into Pong-dol’s house and broke his precious sauce jars. Sin’s transgression was an infuriated reaction to Pong-dol’s challenge when Sin caught fish from his fishing pond. Though Pong-dol’s death by suicide was clear, his resentful sister reported the incident to the authorities, which unleashed an official investigation of the death including the interrogation of yangban Sin. The authorities did not find Sin guilty of any crime but sentenced him to one round of beating for his unruly and excessive behavior in breaking sauce jars.²⁵ From this case, we learn that a larger slave family lived in a village side by side with other members of the community. Family members worked together and cared for each other. They also invoked their legal rights to seek justice and protect themselves when needed.

As Yi Pong-dol’s death case reveals, Chosŏn slaves were recognized as legal subjects: they could buy and sell properties, bequeath their property, enter into contracts, and litigate. While the idea that all the people of Chosŏn, including slaves, were like children of the king partly explains the legal standing of slaves, the state designed the legal system to maintain and preserve social hierarchy and status distinction, clearly awarding privileged status to yangban. For example, slaves could not testify against their owners except for cases of treason and rebellion. Slaves who did so would be punished by strangulation. Slaves who struck their owners were punished by decapitation. Punishment for injuring one’s owner was 100 strokes with a heavy stick and life exile to the remotest areas in the kingdom. Intentional killing of an owner would incur death by slicing while accidental killing meant strangulation.²⁶

In stark contrast, the private use of violence against disobedient slaves was not punishable. Owners who killed their insubordinate slaves by accident while punishing them according to the law were not punished either. In 1597, O Hŭi-mun (1539–1613) flogged Han-bok’s soles seventy to eighty times as punishment for his flight with O’s female slave and his wife Kang-bi, who also received fifty lashes. Han-bok died the next day while imprisoned at a county jail. Han-bok was a drifter or a refugee during the Japanese invasion of Korea and worked under O’s care. Because Han-bok also stole a horse from a man named Hŏ Ch’an, Hŏ, too, beat Han-bok’s soles. The exact cause of the death is unknown, but O wrote in his diary on the day of Han-bok’s death, “I don’t regret his death…. His was not a crime deserving death, and I felt a little uncomfortable in my mind.”²⁷ O lost a night’s sleep over the incident but was not censured for Han-bok’s death. Simply put, slaves and even slave’s spouses were constantly exposed to arbitrary violence, which could lead to death.

At the same time, the state had to check a slaveowner’s tyrannical behavior and the oppression of commoners and former slaves as if they were slaves, because such unchecked abuse could not only cause social disturbances but also decrease the tax-paying commoner population. The Supplementary Great Code (Soktaejŏn), compiled in 1746, stipulates the punishment of 100 strokes with a heavy stick and life exile to the remotest place for those tyrannical local magnates who violated and abused people.²⁸ The range of tyrannical behaviors also included contempt of government and the court, evasion of taxes, and forced enslavement.

From early on, the state also established the petition system, which was available for all status groups and genders. In order to resolve grievances, people could submit a petition to the county magistrate’s office. If unsatisfied with the magistrate’s handling of the case, they could move up the administrative ladder and lodge a complaint at the provincial office. Petitioners who were still discontented could seek justice by appealing to the Ministry of Penal Affairs or other relevant central government offices. They could also appeal directly to the king by striking a gong and blocking a royal procession to obtain royal attention. It must have required extraordinary courage and resources for ordinary illiterate people including slaves to submit a petition to the authorities, for the petition had to be written in Literary Sinitic though the use of vernacular Korean script was apparently allowed. Even reporting a suspicious and resentful death was not a natural recourse for ordinary people, for inquests often involved unwelcome disruptions in daily life as well as an enormous mental, physical, and financial drain. Yet, there are plenty of cases in which slaves took advantage of the system to settle their grievances.

The following case illustrates a slave’s use of the legal system to seek justice in the wake of tyrannical behavior by a yangban. In 1737, Myŏng-dol, a private slave owned by Mr. Yi, was attacked by a gang of slaves under the supervision of a former military officer Kim Sang-yong, who was known to be tyrannical, malicious, and unruly.²⁹ Kim’s oppression of Myŏng-dol began in 1732 when Myŏng-dol married Ch’ŏn-mae, a private slave owned by yangban Yang Sŏng-ha. Kim, under the pretext that he had previously had a sexual relationship with Ch’ŏn-mae, beat Myŏng-dol and exacted thirty yang of money. Then in the second month of 1737, Kim, who stealthily bought Ch’ŏn-mae from her owner Yang—who was under financial difficulties and had originally planned to sell her to Myŏng-dol—led a gang of his slaves, some armed with bows and arrows and others with clubs, and stormed into Myŏng-dol’s house one night, tied Myŏng-dol, kicked, and beat him. Kim’s gang also stole Myŏng-dol’s horse, suspended Myŏng-dol upside down with his feet tied to the saddle and drove the horse over the rocky ground in the courtyard. Kim then demanded not only fifty yang of money to be paid in fifteen days but also dunned him to transfer six turak of fine paddies to him.³⁰ This malicious behavior and oppression came to the light because Myŏng-dol’s father and brother submitted multiple petitions to the authorities. The magistrate of Namwŏn County, who was in charge of the case, vehemently criticized the vicious nature of Kim, who had been in trouble with the magistracy for trying to avoid paying taxes, and arrested him for investigation. Ultimately, Kim was punished with a round of beating and his purchase of Ch’ŏn-mae was invalidated.

While the fragmentary nature of primary sources often generates more questions than answers, a few takeaways are worth noting. First, slaves were exposed to arbitrary violence by not only their owners but also anyone who harbored a personal grudge or was jealous of a slave’s personal fortune. Kim’s vengeful attack might have grown out of lust, jealousy, and greed, or he might have been frustrated and angered at losing Ch’ŏn-mae to a wealthy slave. Myŏng-dol initially submitted to physical molestation and material extortion. When his life was at stake, however, the slave family appealed to the law, which in turn recognized and punished the injustice done to him.

Slaves not only lived side by side with the non-slave population in the same village but also frequently married commoners, resulting in fluid social and cultural boundaries between commoners and slaves. As we have seen, slaves as legal subjects also accrued wealth, filed complaints against abusive overlords, and sued tyrannical rulers. This may help explain why, throughout Chosŏn, there were no known rebellions led by slaves. While slaves were no doubt economically exploited and physically abused, they had productive ways to exercise their agency, including legal pathways for airing their grievances. This relatively benign form of slavery, the product of an equivocal state that tried to balance slaveholder interests and a slave’s humanity, might have contributed to the longevity of the institution.³¹

Exits from Slavery

Slaves escaped from slavery through several routes including legal manumission, making a payment, serving in the military during national emergencies, and running away. Opportunities for obtaining freedom by legal means were relatively few and tightly controlled by the state and elites, who worried that manumitted slaves and their descendants would also feel be freed from social mores and distinctions and thereby erode the social fabric. Yet, the court ultimately provided legal paths to freedom for slaves in certain cases. One was the offspring of a yangban father and his slave status concubine: since status in principle followed the mother’s, that offspring was thus a slave at birth. But numerous court discussions in the early Chosŏn period revolved around whether to grant good status following the father and highlight the tension between two starkly contrasting ideas about these children. Opponents relied on the widely-shared argument that, if awarded good status, these offspring would mix with the yangban, go beyond their social standing, and even hold offices, and thus undermine the social status and leading to rebellion or treason against the state. Subscribing to Confucian ideas of paternalism, proponents countered that the father’s blood should outweigh the mother’s. They also invoked paternal compassion, declaring that the children of slave status concubines are also “flesh and blood” of yangban fathers, and questioned what compassionate father would let his children fall into a slavery.³²

The resolution encoded in the Great Code of Administration (Kyŏngguk taejŏn) of 1485 reflects the deep-seated anxiety and ambivalence of yangban toward these children. The law provided “high and low officials” a legal pathway to free their own slave-status children by going through a set of the process before they reached sixteen years of age. If the child was owned by other people because its mother was not the property of its father or father’s wife, the child had to be bought from the owner before filing the manumission paperwork. Once the administrative procedures were complete, the government issued a manumission certificate, and the freed child, if male, would be registered with the Auxiliary Army.

Historical records detail some cases in which a compassionate father took advantage of this law and freed his slave-status children. One example, discussed earlier, is Yu Hŭi-ch’un, who had four daughters whose mother was a female slave owned by someone else. One by one, Yu followed through the process to manumit his daughters, which included negotiating the price of one horse to purchase his own daughters from their owners, and submitting the necessary paperwork to the relevant offices. To Yu, it was the right thing to free them, his own flesh and blood. Not all qualified yangban fathers, however, used this law to free their slave-status children, opting instead to keep them in a slave roster. The 1554 royal edict declared that, while it is inappropriate to enslave one’s own siblings or cousins, it is acceptable to treat as slaves one’s nephews and nieces or more distant blood relations. This relieved the owners from guilt over treating their kin as slaves. The legal philosophy embedded in these statutes held that human emotions such as compassion apply to human beings differently depending on the closeness of their kinship relations, and should thus be stratified just like the social structure.

The state adopted several measures allowing the manumission of slaves in return for military service during national emergencies caused by wars. Slaves were even allowed to stand for military examinations and hold offices. Slaves who provided notable service in the suppression of rebellions also had an opportunity to gain freedom as a reward. Though rare and expensive in early Chosŏn, manumission could also be granted by making grain contributions during a famine. In 1485, the slave Im Pok paid 750 sŏk of grain to purchase the freedom of his four sons. In 1553, the price dropped to 50–100 sŏk, still a significant sum. During the Japanese invasions, the opportunities for this kind of manumission expanded, with prices ranging from 50 to over 500 sŏk.³³ The state usually compensated a slave owner’s loss with official ranks and other perks.

In late Chosŏn, manumission by making a payment or providing the owner with a replacement slave (of the equivalent age and gender) became common, and relevant laws were codified in the Supplementary Great Code, compiled in 1746.³⁴ In 1398, the Chosŏn state set the price for a slave between the ages 15 and 40 at 400 p’il of cloth, equivalent to a horse, and 300 p’il for slaves outside that age range.³⁵ The price codified in the Great Code of Administration promulgated in 1485 was 4000 paper money for a slave aged between 15 and 50, which was comparable to one horse or 20 sŏk of rice or 400 p’il of cotton cloth.³⁶ This was what Yu Hŭi-ch’un paid when he “bought” each of his daughters before freeing them. Though the actual price of manumission fluctuated in response to immediate circumstances, like increased vagrancy during wars and repeated famines, the maximum price the state set in 1731 was 100 yang in cash, equivalent to 20 sŏk of rice.³⁷ Over time, the price of this ticket to freedom declined. In 1735, a male slave named Cho Kap-sul paid 80 yang to exit slavery. A mother and her three children paid 70 yang in 1789, and in 1812 a boy paid 8 yang.³⁸

Running away was prevalent throughout Chosŏn. In the fifteenth century, 100,000 of 450,000 public slaves were counted as runaways, a flight rate of 22 percent.³⁹ Flight was also widespread among private slaves. We already noted the flight of Kang-bi, O Hŭi-mun’s female slave, and her husband Han-bok in 1597, which led to Han-bok’s death. O Hŭi-mun’s diary also reports one slave named Song-no, who repeatedly tried to run away. In 1593, Song-no took a leave to visit his mother but returned late with the excuse of his father’s illness. Next year, he took a leave and went to his home but did not come back for half a year. His excuse this time was that his father died and he himself got sick. He outright ran away in 1595 but was caught by O’s son and returned to his owner together with other family members such as his mother, uncle, and nephew. After a few months, however, he had illicit relations with O’s trusted slave Mak-chŏng’s wife Pun-gae and they took off together. After several years, Song-no, who lived with Pun-gae’s mother as a fugitive, voluntarily returned to O and reported that the couple now had two sons. No doubt Song-no and Pun-gae calculated the pros and cons of living as runaway slaves. If they were falsely recognized as commoners by the authorities, they would have been liable for various taxes. The prospect of their sons qualifying for military service might have loomed large as well. Private slaves in early Chosŏn were usually exempted from military service. Even when they formed their own household, they were often protected by their owners from being levied for miscellaneous taxes by the local government. Importantly, the law stipulated that when runaway slaves turned themselves in, they were not to be punished and their unpaid tribute payments were waived.⁴⁰ Though this law begins to appear in dynastic codes in the early eighteenth century, Song-no learned from his prior attempts to run away that O did not punish him when returned and therefore decided to take his chances. This episode shows Song-no and Pun-gae adapting and calculating their moves in response to evolving circumstances. Using their family resources, they chose, planned, and managed life as runaways. But when changing circumstances, including the presence of offspring, convinced them it was more beneficial to return, they did. For his part, O sometimes mobilized his own human resources—his son who held provincial posts as well as other officials with whom he was acquainted—to track down runaway slaves. But sometimes those actions proved impractical or impossible, leaving him little redress for his runaway slaves.⁴¹

Slave flight was still a major issue in late Chosŏn. One in every 5 slaves in the household registers of the northern part of Seoul in 1663 were runaways. One wealthy yangban household reported twenty runaways among 203 reported slaves.⁴² Of 587 slaves recorded in household registers of the Kyŏngju Ch’oe family in Taegu from 1672 to 1807, 171 (29 percent) were runaways.⁴³ The Chŏnŭi Yi family in Kwangju reports that from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, only eight of 82 runaway slaves were recovered.⁴⁴ Slaveholders continued to rely on their connections or hired professional slave hunters to catch these runaways. Many slave owners in late Chosŏn, however, had weakened political and social networks which meant less ability to mobilize official assistance for their private causes, and thus much less capacity overall to track down runaway slaves. The high opportunity cost of searching for and recovering runaways and the diminishing need to have slaves as cultivators surely helped discourage slave hunting. Yangban owners still kept a record of their runaway slaves but, more and more, made no earnest effort to recover them.

Some scholars see running away as a form of popular resistance against exploitative overlords, leading to a dissolution of slavery and the hierarchical social status system.⁴⁵ Reduced capability for slave owners to capture their runaways and the state’s repeated prohibition of slave hunting certainly made the flight more successful than in earlier periods. Other studies challenge this view, arguing that the socio-economic conditions of the time were not ripe for runaway slaves to find a stable livelihood, which motivated their voluntary return to their owners. Indeed, along with returning runaway slaves, many commoners, confronting the contracted economy of late Chosŏn, were busy enslaving themselves or selling their family members such as wives and children as slaves. This new supply of slaves secured the maintenance of slavery all the way to the end of Chosŏn, leaving probably 10–20 percent of the total population in enslavement by the mid-nineteenth century.⁴⁶

What, then, contributed to a decline of slavery in Korea? Scholars often credit the adoption of matrifilial law in 1731 as a direct cause. The surviving household registers confirm a decreased slave population from the 1730s on. The Chŏnŭi Yi family’s slaveholding, for example, numbered more than 100 until the mid-eighteenth century but decreased to 50–60 in the latter part of the century. In the 1798 register, only five slaves were recorded, and less than 10 appear throughout the entire nineteenth century.⁴⁷ But it is simplistic to think a new law led to a drastic change in the centuries-old institution of slavery. Indeed, many previous attempts to institute matrifilial rule were ineffective because the power of slaveholding elites and their domination of the government were too great to overcome. What had changed during late Chosŏn was the agricultural economy. Yangban, weaker but still a force to be reckoned with, no longer needed a large gang of slaves working their landed estates because opportunities to expand arable land through reclamation had diminished sharply. In addition, fragmented and scattered land ownership due to generations of equal inheritance meant that the costs of using slave labor now outweighed its benefits. Maintenance of tribute-paying nonresident slaves grew more difficult as owners found reduced means of reinforcing their subordination. A general population increase and smaller landownership together with advanced intensive agricultural technology such as transplanting also shifted the type of labor needed. Landowners found sharecropping more profitable than using slaves, which required large enforcement costs. As Rhee and Yang observe, the decline of slavery overlapped with “the emergence of independent peasants and the maturity of peasant society based upon them.”⁴⁸

Did moral argument make any impact on the decline of slavery or its abolition? A slave’s humanity had long been acknowledged but more elaborate and critical views on hereditary slavery in Chosŏn emerged in the late seventeenth century, spearheaded by Yu Hyŏng-wŏn (1622–1673).⁴⁹ The abolition decree of public slavery was announced in 1801, freeing about 66,000 tribute-paying public slaves. This monumental decision was preceded by numerous court discussions on the pros and cons of abolition. The proponents argued that the stigma attached to slave status, rather than their tribute payment obligation—which was the same amount as a commoner’s military tax—made life difficult for public slaves and led them to flee. Accordingly, they proposed to remove the stigma of slavery by changing their title from slave to commoner. They indicated that there was no financial utility in keeping the people in bondage and that slavery was against the manifestation of a benevolent government, in whose eyes all people are children of the king—a fundamental Confucian idea that yangban officials and scholars alluded to repeatedly throughout the dynasty. Opponents, meanwhile, stuck to their previous script that said abolition would encourage private slaves to rebel against their owners and disrupt the distinction between noble and base, the foundation of Chosŏn society. Interestingly, the royal edict of 1801 subscribed to affective terms as encoded in Neo-Confucian ideas to justify the historic emancipation. Quoting key Confucian texts, it advocates the idea that the king should love and care for his people and treat all the people equally with compassion without making a distinction between noble and base and between men and women as all human beings are the same.⁵⁰ When hereditary slavery was abolished in 1886, the reigning king also justified his reform with the argument that inheriting slave status forever was detrimental to a benevolent government.⁵¹ In 1894, the institution of slavery together with the hierarchical social status system was abolished.

The ideological justifications either to support or deny slavery were available all the time, but it was not ideology that led to its abolition. Rather, it was socio-economic changes, and slave policies of the state that weakened the boundaries between slaves and commoners, which made the decline and the eventual abolition more acceptable to slaveholders, whose holdings had contracted to a significant degree anyway. They were probably also satisfied by the durability of status distinctions, which remained unchallenged when using hired laborers or tenants instead of slaves. And the new mode of production was also more stable and profitable to them by the eighteenth century. Though Chosŏn intellectuals had discussions on historical precedents and the legitimacy of slavery as an institution as well as the humanity of slaves, the eventual abolition of slavery was not the result of any radical or persistent abolitionist movement.

Notes

• 1. Han shu, zhi, dilizhi xia, 103, https://ctext.org/han-shu/di-li-zhi-xia. Accessed 15 July 2021.

• 2. San guo zhi, Wei shu 30, Fuyu chuan, 1, https://ctext.org/text.pl?node=603338&if=en. Accessed 15 July 2021.

• 3. Koryŏsa [History of the Koryŏ Dynasty], 85: 43a–44a. All Koryŏsa citations are from Koryŏ sidae saryo database (Database of Primary Sources Concerning the Koryŏ Dynasty), http://db.history.go.kr/KOREA/item/level.do?itemId=kr&bookId=%E5%BF%97&types=r#articleList/kr_085r_0010_0060. Accessed 15 July 2021.

• 4. Young-hoon Rhee and Donghyu Yang, “Korean Nobi and American Black Slavery: An Essay in Comparison,” Millennial Asia 1 (2010): 5–39 (21).

• 5. T’aejong sillok [Veritable Records of King T’aejong], 1414.intercalary 9.27 (lunar). For the Chosŏn wangjo sillok (Veritable Records of the Kings of the Chosŏn Dynasty), I used the online edition provided by the Kuksa p’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe (National institute of Korean history), http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kca_11409127_001. Accessed 15 July 2021.

• 6. Yi Yŏng-hun, “Komunsŏ rŭl t’onghae pon Chosŏn chŏn’gi nobi ŭi kyŏngjejŏk sŏnggyŏk” [Economic Aspects of Early Chosŏn Slavery Seen through an Analysis of Family Documents], Han’guk sahak 9 (1987): 91–172 (103–5).

• 7. Rhee and Yang, “Korean Nobi and American Black Slavery,” 7–8.

• 8. Edward W. Wagner, “Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century Korea: Some Observations from a 1663 Seoul Census Register,” Occasional Papers on Korea 1 (1974): 36–54; Susan Shin, “The Social Structure of Kŭmhwa County in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Occasional Papers on Korea 1 (1974): 9–35; James B. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996), 251.

• 9. Koryŏsa, 85: 45b, http://db.history.go.kr/KOREA/item/level.do?itemId=kr&bookId=%E5%BF%97&types=r#detail/kr_085r_0010_0060_0240. Accessed 15 July 2021.

• 10. Yi Su-hwan, “Chosŏn hugi sŏwŏn nobi sin’gong e kwanhan yŏn’gu” [A Study of Tribute Payment Submitted by Slaves at a Private Academy in Late Chosŏn], Minjok munhwa nonch’ong 10 (1989): 109–62 (119 and 136).

• 11. Rhee and Yang, “Korean Nobi and American Black Slavery,” 18–19.

• 12. Martina Deuchler, Under the Ancestors’ Eyes: Kinship, Status, and Locality in Premodern Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 136–37.

• 13. Yi Sŏng-im, “Chosŏn chunggi ŏnŭ yangban’ga ŭi nongji kyŏngyŏng kwa nobi sahwan—Yu Hŭi-ch’un ŭi Miam ilgi rŭl chungsimŭro” [Land and Slave Management of a Yangban Family during the Mid-Chosŏn Period—Findings from Yu Hŭi-ch’un’s Diary], Chindan hakpo 80 (1995): 115–51 (144); Rhee and Yang, “Korean Nobi and American Black Slavery,” 17. One tu = 5.976 liter.

• 14. Yi Su-hwan, “Chosŏn hugi sŏwŏn nobi,” 116. One sŏk is either 15 or 20 tu.

• 15. Kim Hyŏn-suk, “19 segi chungban yangban’ga ilgi e nat’anan nobi wa nobi nodong” [Slaves and Their Labor Recorded in a Yangban’s Diary in the Mid-Nineteenth Century], Chosŏn sidae sahakpo 67 (2013): 429–64.

• 16. Though prices fluctuated, one p’il of cotton cloth was equivalent to 2 yang in cash or 6 tu of rice in the eighteenth century.

• 17. Kim Kŏn-t’ae, “18 segi chungyŏp sanobi ŭi sahoe kyŏngjejŏk sŏnggyŏk” [Socio-economic Characteristics of Private Slaves in the Mid-Eighteenth Century], Taedong munhwa yŏn’gu 75 (2011): 87–150 (127–31).

• 18. Yi Su-hwan, “Chosŏn hugi sŏwŏn nobi,” 136.

• 19. Rhee and Yang, “Korean Nobi and American Black Slavery,” 17–18.

• 20. Deuchler, Under the Ancestors’ Eyes, 139–40; Yi Yŏng-hun, “Komunsŏ rŭl t’onghae pon Chosŏn,” 107–8.

• 21. Yi Yŏng-hun, “Komunsŏ rŭl t’onghae pon Chosŏn,” 119.

• 22. Kim Ŭi-hwan, “Chinch’ŏn P’yŏngsan Sin-ssi nobi kajok ŭi chonjae yangsang—nobi ŭi kyŏlhon kwa kagye kyesŭng ŭl chungsimŭro” [Slave Families Owned by a P’yŏngsan Sin Family from Chinch’ŏn—Slave Marriage and Family Succession], Komunsŏ yŏn’gu 52 (2018): 313–41.

• 23. Kim Kŏn-t’ae, “18 segi chungyŏp,” 101–6.

• 24. Sun Joo Kim, “My Own Flesh and Blood: Stratified Parental Compassion and Law in Korean Slavery,” Social History 44, no. 1 (2019): 1–25.

• 25. Sun Joo Kim and Jungwon Kim, Wrongful Deaths: Selected Inquest Records from Nineteenth-Century Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 57–61.

• 26. Sun Joo Kim, “Resilience of Korean Slavery: Tyrannical Owners, Resourceful Slaves, and the Equivocal State,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 81, no. 1 & 2 (2021): 133–55.

• 27. Kichung Kim, “Unheard Voices: The Life of the Nobi in O Hwi-mun’s Swaemirok,” Korean Studies 27 (2003): 108–30 (124).

• 28. Soktaejŏn, 5: 16b, http://db.history.go.kr/law/item/level.do?levelId=jlawa_205_0260_0060. Accessed 15 July 2021.

• 29. Namwŏn-hyŏn ch’ŏppo imun sŏngch’aek [Namwŏn County Official Correspondences] (1736–1737), reprint in Yi Yŏnghun, ed., Han’guk chibangsa charyo ch’ongsŏ: Poch’ŏp-p’yŏn, 1–2 [Collected Local Sources of Korea: Official Correspondences 1–2] (Seoul: Yŏgang ch’ulp’ansa, 1987), 2: 189–95.

• 30. Turak is a unit of land sufficient to sow 1 tu of grain seeds.

• 31. Sun Joo Kim, “Resilience of Korean Slavery.”

• 32. Sun Joo Kim, “My Own Flesh and Blood.”

• 33. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions, 228–29.

• 34. Soktaejŏn, 5: 28a–b, http://db.history.go.kr/law/item/level.do?levelId=jlawa_205_0260&position=-1. Accessed 30 September 2021.

• 35. T’aejo sillok [Veritable Records of King T’aejo], 1398.6.18 (lunar), http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10706018_003. Accessed 30 September 2021.

• 36. Kyŏngguk taejŏn, 5: 16b, http://db.history.go.kr/law/item/level.do?levelId=jlawa_105_0240_0050. Accessed 30 September 2021.

• 37. Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi [Record of the Royal Secretariat], 1731.10.2 (lunar), http://sjw.history.go.kr/id/SJW-F07100020-02400. Accessed 30 September 2021; Soktaejŏn, 5: 28b, http://db.history.go.kr/law/item/level.do?levelId=jlawa_205_0260_0020. Accessed 30 September 2021.

• 38. Sun Joo Kim, “Resilience in Korean Slavery.”.

• 39. Rhee and Yang, “Korean Nobi and American Black Slavery,” 7–8.

• 40. Chŏllok t’onggo [Comprehensive Code of Administration], 12: 30a, http://db.history.go.kr/law/item/level.do?levelId=jlawb_060_0120_0060_0020_0120&position=4. Accessed on 15 January 2020. Chŏllok t’onggo was compiled in 1707.

• 41. Kim Kichung, “Unheard Voices.”

• 42. Wagner, “Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century Korea,” 44.

• 43. Chŏng Chin-yŏng, “Chosŏn hugi hojŏk charyo rŭl t’onghae pon sanobi ŭi chonjae yangt’ae—Taegu Kyŏngju Ch’oe-ssi-ga rŭl chungsimŭro” [Private Slaves in Household Registers in Late Chosŏn—a Case of a Kyŏngju Ch’oe Family from Taegu], Chibangsa wa chibang munhwa 11 (2008): 183–223 (200).

• 44. Chŏn Hyŏng-t’aek, “Chosŏn hugi han yangban’ga ŭi hojŏk charyo rŭl t’onghae pon sanobi ŭi chonjae yangt’ae—Kwangju Chŏnŭi Yi-ssi Munŭi-gong-p’a chongga sojang munsŏ ŭi sarye punsŏk” [Private Slaves Recorded in Household Registers of One Yangban Family—a Case of the Munŭi-gong Branch of the Chŏnŭi Yi Lineage from Kwangju], Chosŏn sidae hakpo 15 (2000): 115–51 (129).

• 45. Bok-rae Kim, “Korean Nobi Resistance under the Chosun Dynasty (1392–1910),” in Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia, ed. Edward Alpers, Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 67–81.

• 46. Chŏn Kyŏng-mok, “Chosŏn hugi chamae ŭi wŏnin kwa yangt’ae” [The Causes and Status of Self-Condemnation in Late Chosŏn], Chŏnbuk sahak 43 (2013): 141–78; Chŏng Chin-yŏng, “Chosŏn hugi hojŏk charyo,” 202.

• 47. Chŏn Hyŏng-t’aek, “Chosŏn hugi,” 149.

• 48. Rhee and Yang, “Korean Nobi and American Black Slavery,” 30.

• 49. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions, 232–68.

• 50. Sunjo sillok [Veritable Records of King Sunjo], 1801.1.28 (lunar), http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kwa_10101028_003. Accessed 30 September 2021.

• 51. Kojong sillok [Veritable Records of King Kojong], 1886.1.2 (lunar), http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kza_12301002_002. Accessed 30 September 2021.