대한제국기 충주군양안의 지주제와 농민층분해

Abstract

This study ascertained the crisis of agricultural society and the collapse of peasantry in the Taehan Empire Era by analyzing the land survey records(量案, Yangan) of Chungju-gun. First, this study focused on the whole peasantry(farming households) over gun-hyeon(郡縣) local units — covering 38 myeon(面) local units — extending beyond the other existing analyses which only focused on the myeon-lee(面里) local units. Second, the land ownership forms of the upper-class landlords were revealed. They widely existed in Chungju-gun beyond myeon-lee(面里) local units. In this condition, a mere 4.7% of the landlords owned 46.6% of the lands. It was proved that most of the great landlords, who had possessed over 40 cheongbo(町步) of the lands, were the bureaucrat landlords working in the central political world. Sharecropping on a fifty-fifty basis was still the dominant land management style, as the great landlords at the time had not yet overcome the traditional land management style. Third, the descending differentiation of peasantry was shown. Although the number of the lowest income farmers formed 55.8% of the whole population, the amount of the lands they possessed were only 5.6% of the total amount of lands. With regard to the land ownership, each person only owned 0.126 cheongbo(=378 pyeong) in the case of the poor farmer class, while the each landlord owned 12.536 cheongbo(=37,608 pyeong) in the case of the landlord class. How to solve such polarization of peasantry was a supreme task of the Taehan Empire.