[KS] Maid servants in early modern Korea

[Frank Hoffmann]

Amy Stanley wrote:
>> women began to work on fixed contracts rather than in 
>> hereditary slavery.

Eugene Y. Park wrote:
>> more mainstream South Korean scholars tend to be skeptical 
>> toward the notion that anyone anywhere in the early modern 
>> era worked for "wage" in the purest sense of the word


Hi Gene, hi All:

This is more a question than a comment -- and it is more about your 
interesting intro to Amy Stanley question and does NOT specifically 
concern female labor. 

I know very little about this, but I wonder if the term "indentured 
labor" may possibly be a good one, one that explains the situation? For 
example, at least half of Europeans who came as immigrants to North 
America until the mid-19th century were indentured farm laborers, 
clerks, and servants. Many were so-called redemptioners who were given 
tickets for the travel and then had to pay off that debt with years of 
work. (And if we look at how illegal immigration works today, we will 
find that we have not moved an inch from there, and if, then probably 
rather backwards, given the inhumanity of the deals.)

Anyway, looking at the regular abuses done by the yangban elite in the 
18th and 19th century, it seems that especially the taxation system was 
a magnificent tool to move free farmers over to a system of indentured 
labor (where labor was a supplantation for crops as tax payment). Did 
that downward spiral not continue into the 20th century? FOR EXAMPLE, 
you mentioned runaways "joining traveling merchants" -- and most likely 
the "pay" that the traveling merchants then offered was hiding and food 
and some promises for the future, while getting their labor in return. 


Best,
Frank





--------------------------------------
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreanstudies.com