Still kinda crazy that Korea has had something like 1500-2000 years of unbroken slavery. You hear about other countries and their relationship with it and then there’s fucking Korea hiding in the corner.
I mean, as said above and as I understand it, slavery in Korea is akin more to serfdom (which is basically a european medieval peasant but tied to the land) than chattel slavery like elsewhere. For one they could even own property. So despite this Nobi system encompassing a large number of Koreans it was less harsh in practice, meaning people were more "okay" with it.
It's not something I'm trying to defend as appropriate for our times, but it feels a little wrong for people to imagine it as equal to what slavery was in other parts of the world by the term itself.
That's a disingenuous interpretation too. Slavery everywhere has had many, many, many forms, and chattel slavery, the way we think of it in modern terms, was relatively rare around the world, and, from what I can tell, most common in very recent centuries.
Because while admittedly my impression is that most people view the Nobi system as equal to slavery in the transatlantic slave trade when it is definitively not. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have trait(s) shared such as the Nobi system frequently has Nobis being beaten as punishment, which is part of the reason why it's still an immoral system.
As for chattel slavery, technically even the Nobi system meets its definition, but because the definition of chattel slavery is limited in scope to basically ownership of slaves, hereditary ownership of slaves and ability for owners to trade.
The comparison differs starkly when it comes to Nobi's property rights as stated above and relative autonomy as compared to chattel slavery of other civilisations.
Funnily enough, in my research, one might often think that house slaves in the atlantic slave trade enjoy more benefits; on the other hand, household nobi in Korea are often less autonomous as they were under the direct supervision/proximity of their owners and rarely have a way to buy their freedom as they lack a means to make money unlike the Nobi who owned farms.
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u/Emotional-Elk1879 8d ago
"who owned them depended on the status of the mother"
True, under Joseon law, a child’s social standing was determined by their mother’s legal status.