The Paradox of Share Tenancy under Capitalism: A Comparative Perspective on Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French and Italian Sharecropping

Abstract

As a tenurial solution, sharecropping has been a source of constant fascination and controversy for centuries. It is as old as written history. Furthermore, it has existed and to a certain extent still exists, in very different institutional frameworks, and it constitutes one of the most common tenurial solutions in the history of agriculture.Sharecropping dominated the agricultural scene in central Italy from the late Middle Ages until the early 1960s. An especially exploitative form was the backbone of Rumanian agriculture before the First World War. In Asian agriculture, sharecropping has been and still is highly dispersed, not only in wet rice production but also in non-irrigated crops such as wheat, or industrial crops like jute. The postbellum American South consituted the sharecropping region par excellence in the USA, although it was not unknown in other parts of the country. In the 1970s share tenancy reappeared in Californian strawberry production. Even if service tenancy dominated the Andean and Mexican hacienda, it was frequently supplemented with sharecropping on specific crops. In late nineteenth-century Mexico share tenancy expanded significantly in maize production. The cases mentioned above represent only a brief and highly incomplete list of economic, social and institutional frameworks where various forms of share tenancy are found.