Land Tenure in Korea: Tenth to Twelfth Centuries

Land Tenure in Korea: Tenth to Twelfth Centuries JAMES B. PALAIS lhe private ownership of land is central to the understanding of Korean society in any historical period prior to the onset of industrialization in the twentieth century. It is of special concern to contemporary Korean historians who tend to see the emergence of private property in land as a sign of historical progress. The reason for their attitude is clear: they feel that the Japanese historians of the early twentieth century sought to rationalize Japan's colonization of Korea on the grounds of Korea's cultural backwardness and more specifically to justify the infamous land investigation registration program of the 1910s because of the absence of any system of modern private property .1 If, then, contemporary Korean historians can prove the existence of private property in land in the period prior to the imposition of Japanese colonialism, they will have saved the Korean past from the most opprobrious of modern-day epithets—backwardness and un· development—and rescued the pride of the Korean people in their own heritage. Private landownership is, of course, a sign of progress because in European history the land enclosures of England are supposed to have marked the end of the feudal period in two ways. Private ownership replaced both the fief and the commons. The fief could not be disposed of freely because it was restricted by the framework of personal obligation in the lord/vassal relationship, and hence could not play its 1. See Kang Chinch'ol's discussion of Wada Ichiro, Chosen tochi seido chosa hokokusho [Report on the investigation of the Korean land system] (1920), in Kang Chinch'ol, Koryo t'oji chedosa yon'gu: chonsikwa ch'ejep'yon [A study on the history of the Koryo land system: Volume on the chonsikwa system] , (Seoul: Koryo taehakkyo ch'ulp'anbu, 1980), pp. 329-31. 73 74Journal ofKorean Studies proper role in capital accumulation. Land had to be liberated from the feudal bond to join with its partners, labor and capital, in the march toward capitalism. In addition, private ownership of land wrecked the old village economy as well, partly by enclosing the common land and eliminating it from the use of all villagers. Not only the village economy , but also a way of life—the village commune—was destroyed as land became an object of free purchase and sale. However destructive these developments may have been, they were necessary precursors to the rise of industrial capitalism in the West and have since been endowed with grace by the eulogizers of progress. It is not enough for Koreans and other denizens of the third world to carry out industrialization and rapid economic growth today, for this is not sufficient to salvage their own past and traditions from total irrelevancy. Many have therefore sought to discover the sprouts of capitalism prior to the influence of the West to break free of psychological inferiority pursuant to a period of colonial domination by a Western or other foreign powers. They seek to assure themselves that they belong to the realm of humanity, that is, capable of progressing as well as the most advanced of peoples albeit a little behind in phase. This is the emotional drive that has pushed Korean historians to a search for private property or landownership in their past. The legacy of early twentieth-century Japanese historiography was the charge that Korean society was stagnant and that this stagnation was the product of the centralized bureaucratic monarchy. Private property in land could not develop because the king or the state owned all land, making the entire peasant population something akin to the slaves, serfs, or tenants of the state. Some readers will recognize the features here of Marx's Asiatic mode of production or Wittfogel's Oriental despotism, but it was not just the Marxist (or anti-Marxist environmentalist materialist) view of history that ascribed backwardness and stagnation to the bureaucratic imperial system of China and Korea. Marxist and non-Marxist alike saw the political system—the superstructure—dominating the base of material life and preventing the emergence of private property in land. In addition to the notions of state ownership and...