A Confucian State and Its Commerce: The Commerce of Early Chosŏn Revisited

Abstract

Chosŏn Dynasty has always been a Confucian state as well as an agricultural society. It is only natural that its leaders placed utmost importance on agriculture while restricting commerce, and implemented economic policies in line with these ideas from the founding of the dynasty in 1392. Given that this Confucian state was primarily agrarian, scholars have long understood that the Chosŏn government believed commerce and handicraft manufacturing to be a target of strict restraint and prohibition, specifically referring to them as the “branch occupations(末業),” a concept in which ‘branch 末’ is in direct contrast with the primary ‘root 本’, namely agriculture. This anti-commerce policy-making inclination was also thought to be at its height out from the beginning of the state until halfway through the dynasty. The consequences were damaging. In the context of Korean premodern history, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are generally considered a period of stagnation concerning commerce of all sorts, either domestic or international. The alleged commercial condition of this period gives an impression that is highly incongruous with the economic