Matjilŭi Nongmindŭl (Peasants of Matjil). Edited by An Pyŏng-chik and others. Seoul: Iljogak, 2001. 444 pp. 22,000 won (cloth).
Cha Myung Soo
This volume is a collection of eleven essays by nine different authors on the economic and social changes occurring in two landowning families and their rural community from the early nineteenth century to the end of the colonial period. The two families belonged to the Hamyang Pak clan and their members lived during the period mostly in Matjil, a landlocked village located in southeastern Korea. The families kept diaries and records of daily expenditure, upon which the contributors primarily drew to produce their empirically- and quantitatively-minded papers.
This multi-author volume is an outcome of well-organized collaborative efforts, rather than a collection of loosely connected independent studies. This allows one to conveniently divide the eleven chapters into three parts: the first three chapters, introducing readers to the object of study and archival sources used; chapters 4-9, investigating the economic performance of the two Pak families; and the final two chapters dealing with demography and land distribution.
Using anecdotal and descriptive evidence, Hidenori Sugawa argues in the opening chapter that peasants remained fundamentally autarkic, and that the sphere of the market was limited in nineteenth century Matjil. Lee Hunchang (Yi Hun-ch’ang) provides quantitative sense to Sugawa’s claim in the third chapter by analyzing numerical data on market transactions carried out by one of the two Pak families. While the resulting time series—such as the number of transactions in periodic markets and the commodity composition of expenditure, among others—are illuminating, one would have very much liked to know the proportion of market transaction in the total income earned by the family and how it compared with similar shares observed in other places and periods. Yi also contributed the useful second chapter familiarizing readers with the record of daily expenditure, the primary source of quantitative information used in the book.
The second part on the changing fortunes of the two families begins with a price history. In chapter 4, Park Ki-joo (Pak Ki-ju) and Park Woo-youn (Pak Wu-yŏn) compile a price series for twelve different commodity items from 1834-1937. They go on to calculate an index of the general level of prices and several relative prices. One interesting finding is that price of rice had already been rising relatively to other goods (most notably cotton textile),before Korea was opened to international trade in 1876. This carries a significant implication that domestic shocks—together with post-1876 external price shocks—drove the nineteenth century relative price change.
Deflating nominal wage data from the record of expenditure with the price index estimated in chapter 4, ParkWoo-younPark shows in chapter 5 that real wages fell from 1853 to around 1905 and then started to rise. In the following chapter, Park Ki-joo also identifies a declining trend in the amount of rice rent from an acre of paddy land in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was followed by a recovery in the early twentieth century.
The parallel long swings in wages and rents implies that living standards for both Pak families and the agricultural workers working on their farm lands worsened until around 1900 and then improved. Evidence of the economic decline of the Pak families in the nineteenth century are scattered throughout the volume, which include falling real value of market transactions (chapter 3) and diminishing landholding (chapter 6). In addition, Park Itaek (Pak I-taek) identifies a lower turning point in the 1910s in the long swing followed by the real value of gifts made by one of the two Pak families (chapter 9, p. 338, Figure 9-1). Kim Jaeho (Kim Chae-ho) finds in chapter 8 that one of the Pak families became so financially weakened in the 1880s that it shifted from being a lender to a borrower in the local credit market (chapter 8). Another interesting finding is that until around 1910 different nominal rates of interest hovered around 40% per year, a level commonly observed in traditional societies, where capital remains scarce and default risks are high (p. 317, Figure 8-4). During the colonial decades, nominal rates fell sharply, probably due to a large extent to capital accumulation financed by inflows of capital from Japan and also to monetary stabilization, reducing the expected rate of inflation.
Using a neoclassical production function, one can infer declining productivity in the second half of the nineteenth century and post-1900 productivity advance from the parallel movement in the two factor incomes. As Park Ki-joo and Park Woo-youn correctly infer in chapter 4, the rising rice price relatively to other goods in the nineteenth century suggests the negative productivity shocks occurred largely in the rice farming sector. Why did productivity decline to compress living standards in the nineteenth century? This is a question, which motivate different contributors to offer different conjectures. Citing the rising fuel prices relative to general level of prices, Park Ki-joo and Park Woo-youn point to deteriorating water control due to deforestation as one possible cause (chapter 4). In chapter 5 Park Ki-joo lists three additional factors contributing to the productivity regression: a weakening of supae, a village institution responsible for maintaining irrigation facilities; falling labor intensity due to increasing difficulty of labor control in the context of expanding chances of finding a non-agricultural job; finally, disintegration of the traditional status order. Outlining the evolution and degeneration of status order and fraternities in Matjil in chapter 7, Rhee Younghoon (Yi Yŏng-hun) discusses in greater detail how the supply of essential public goods—such as law and order, water control, and forestry—declined, as the traditional society fell apart. These all sound abundantly plausible, but the cause of productivity regress remains animportant issue awaiting further research.
The final two chapters are less microscopic and more aggregate. Hiroshi Miyajima identifies in chapter 10 a seasonal pattern in mortality, varying inversely with temperature. The evidence comes not only from the diaries of the Pak families, but also from the genealogies of Hamyang Pak and Andong Kwon clans, the death registration records of Yong’mun-myŏn (the higher administrative unit, to which Matjil belongs), and national vital statistics available from the Statistical Yearbook of the Colonial Government. The seasonality became gradually milder over the early nineteenth and twentieth century, which the author plausibly relates to improving living standards: specifically, better nutrition enabled people better survive cold winters.
Cho Sukkon (Cho Sŏk-gon) traces the long term change in land distribution and agrarian class structure in chapter 11. Gini coefficients calculated using data from landownership registration in Yong’mun-myŏn suggest that coloniallandlordism reached an apogee as early as 1940, and that the subsequent decline was accelerated by the post-colonial land reform in South Korea.
Different historians of the twentieth century have painted widely different pictures about economic and social changes during the last two centuries of dynastic Korea. A pessimistic interpretation first emerged during the colonial decades, claiming that Korea had suffered long term stagnation before the Japanese colonialism started to modernize the country. Angrily denouncing this as an unsubstantiated misrepresentation aimed at justifying the colonial rule, post-colonial historians in both North and South Koreacountered that “sprouts of capitalism” already existed in the late Chosŏn Korea. As long as these vastly different views remained assertions lacking sufficient empirical basis, the debate sounded empty and uninteresting.
In recent decades, Korean economic and social history began its evolution from being an emotional and ideological battleground into a field of science. Several studies have already identifiedlong swing patterns similar to that found in Matjil in the landlord incomes elsewhere. Preliminary estimates of eighteenth century unskilled wages turned out to be substantially higher than those observed during the following century, while wages followed a rising trend during the colonial period. An analysis of the genealogy of the branch of the Hamyang Pak clan settled in Yong’mun-myŏn indicated the number of male adults stopped increasing around 1800 and stagnated for most of the nineteenth century, due to rising mortality. Mortality started to fall, and the adult male population increase resumed in the 1880s, which accelerated with the beginning of colonial rule. The essays in this volume are important additions to thegrowing body of evidence indicating that dynastic Korea had probably been collapsing before Japanese colonial rule reversed the economic contraction. Given that the level of integration of factor markets is unlikely to have been high in dynastic Korea, it is probably too early to be absolutely sure about national trends inferred from the local factor income data collected so far. Further accumulation of micro-level evidence is required not only to reduce small sample biases, but also to throw light on regional diversity in Korea’s transition to modern economic growth.
(YeungnamUniversity)
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