British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Social and Cultural Change in late pre-modern Korea
A one-day conference organised in collaboration with the
British Association for Korean Studies
Abstracts
The crisis of Seoul’s traditional commercial system, 1876-1895
Dr Owen Miller - Research Fellow, Centre for Korean Studies, SOAS
The guild system of late Chos?n Seoul and the guild-government trade underpinned the commerce of the capital city and represented a significant slice of national commerce as a whole. This premodern commercial system rested on three planks: a government that could afford to pay high prices for commodities; long-term stability in market prices; and a system of mixed commodity payments. However, in the 1880s all three of these factors were undermined, primarily by severe inflation and government insolvency, but also by the entrance of foreign merchants into the market and increased levels of bureaucratic corruption. This paper traces the origins and development of the crisis that engulfed the traditional guild-centred commercial system of Seoul in the 1880s and early 1890s as well as the responses of both guild merchants and the Chos?n government. Through an analysis of the accounting records of the domestic silk guild and an examination of government edicts, this paper will show how the Chos?n state attempted to remedy the problems of soaring inflation and its own insolvency by switching to more market prices and introducing a new payment system. However, so long as there was no fundamental improvement in government finances and the state continued to demand goods from the guilds at fixed prices in order to fulfil its tribute duties to Qing China, there could be no lasting solution to the crisis of the 1880s. This crisis was finally brought to a head with the reforms of 1894-5 that abolished both the monopoly of the guilds and their fixed price trade with the government. This did not mark the end of the close market-state relations that characterised Korea’s precapitalist commerce, but rather the beginning of a completely new phase.
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