Product Code Database
Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant (sharecropper) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping is different from tenant farming, which provides the tenant greater autonomy, and higher economic and social status.
Sharecropping may be a traditional arrangement of land governed by law. The France métayage, the Catalonia masoveria, the Castilian mediero, the Slavs połownictwo and izdolshchina, the Italy mezzadria, and the Islamic system of muzara‘a (المزارعة), are examples of legal systems that have supported sharecropping.
A new system of credit, the Crop-lien system, became closely associated with sharecropping. Under this system, a planter or merchant extended a line of credit to the sharecropper while taking the year's crop as collateral. The sharecropper could then draw food and supplies all year long. When the crop was harvested, the planter or merchants who held the lien sold the harvest for the sharecropper and settled the debt.
Sociologist Jeffery M. Paige made a distinction between centralized sharecropping found on cotton plantations and the decentralized sharecropping with other crops. The former is characterized by long lasting tenure. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. This form of tenure tends to be replaced by paid salaries as markets penetrate. Decentralized sharecropping involves virtually no role for the landlord: plots are scattered, peasants manage their own labor and the landowners do not manufacture the crops. This form of tenure becomes more common when markets penetrate.Jeffery Paige, Agrarian Revolution, page 373
Farmers who farmed land belonging to others but owned their own mule and plow were called ; they owed the landowner a smaller share of their crops, as the landowner did not have to provide them with as much in the way of supplies.
In South Africa the 1913 Natives' Land Act outlawed the ownership of land by Africans in areas designated for white ownership and effectively reduced the status of most sharecroppers to and then to farm laborers. In the 1960s, generous subsidies to white farmers meant that most farmers could afford to work their entire farms, and sharecropping faded out.
The arrangement has reappeared in other African countries in modern times, including GhanaLeonard, R. and Longbottom, J., Land Tenure Lexicon: A glossary of terms from English and French speaking West Africa International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London, 2000 and Zimbabwe., Centre for Applied Social Sciences, University of Zimbabwe and Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison, March 2003 (200Kb PDF)
Economic historian Pius S. Nyambara argued that Eurocentrism historiographical devices such as "feudalism" or "slavery" often qualified by weak prefixes like "semi-" or "quasi-" are not helpful in understanding the antecedents and functions of sharecropping in Africa.
After the war, plantations and other lands throughout the South were seized by the federal government. In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, which announced that he would temporarily grant newly freed families 40 acres of this seized land on the islands and coastal regions of Georgia. Many believed that this policy would be extended to all former slaves and their families as repayment for their treatment at the end of the war. In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson, as one of the first acts of Reconstruction, instead ordered all land under federal control be returned to the owners from whom it had been seized.
Southern landowners thus found themselves with a great deal of land but no liquid assets to pay for labor. They also maintained the "belief that gangs afforded the most efficient means of labor organization", something nearly all former slaves resisted. Preferring "to organize themselves into kin groups", as well as "minimize chances for white male-black female contact by removing their female kin from work environments supervised closely by whites", black southerners were "determined to resist the old slave ways".Jones, Jaqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. Basic Books, 1985. Notwithstanding, many former slaves, now called freedmen, having no land or other assets of their own, needed to work to support their families. A sharecropping system centered on cotton, a major cash crop, developed as a result. Large plantations were subdivided into plots that could be worked by sharecroppers. Initially, sharecroppers in the American South were almost all formerly enslaved black people, but eventually cash-strapped Poor White farmers were integrated into the system.Eva O'Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (2007); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (1986); Roger L. Ransom and David Beckham, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (2nd ed. 2008) During Reconstruction, the federal Freedmen's Bureau ordered the arrangements for freedmen and wrote and enforced their contracts.
American sharecroppers worked a section of the plantation independently. In South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the dominant crop was usually cotton. In other areas it could be tobacco, rice, or sugar. At harvest time the crop was sold and the cropper received half of cash paid for the crop on his parcel. Sharecroppers also often received their farming tools and all other goods from the landowner they were contracted with.Mandle, Jay R. Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience Since the Civil War. Duke University Press, 1992, 22. Landowners dictated decisions relating to the crop mix, and sharecroppers were often in agreements to sell their portion of the crop back to the landowner, thus being subjected to manipulated prices. (1993). 9781566390699, Temple University Press. ISBN 9781566390699 In addition to this, landowners, threatening to not renew the lease at the end of the growing season, were able to apply pressure to their tenants. Sharecropping often proved economically problematic, as the landowners held significant economic control.Ransom, Roger L., and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. 2nd edition. Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 149.
In the Reconstruction Era, sharecropping was one of few options for penniless freedmen to support themselves and their families. Other solutions included the crop-lien system (where the farmer was extended credit for seed and other supplies by the merchant), a rent labor system (where the farmer rents the land but keeps their entire crop), and the wage system (worker earns a fixed wage but keeps none of their crop). Sharecropping as historically practiced in the American South was more economically productive than the gang system plantations using slave labor, though less productive than modern agricultural techniques.
Sharecropping continued to be a significant institution in many states for decades following the Civil War. By the early 1930s, there were 5.5 million white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and mixed cropping/laborers in the United States; and 3 million Blacks.The Rockabilly Legends; They Called It Rockabilly Long Before they Called It Rock and Roll by Jerry Naylor and Steve Halliday DVDThe Devil's Music: A History of the Blues By Giles Oakley Edition: 2. Da Capo Press, 1997, p. 184. , In Tennessee, sharecroppers operated approximately one-third of all farm units in the state in the 1930s, with white people making up two thirds or more of the sharecroppers. In Mississippi, by 1900, 36% of all white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, while 85% of black farmers were. In Georgia, fewer than 16,000 farms were operated by black owners in 1910, while, at the same time, African-Americans managed 106,738 farms as tenants.
Around this time, sharecroppers began to form unions protesting against poor treatment, beginning in Tallapoosa County, Alabama in 1931 and Arkansas in 1934. Membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union included both blacks and poor whites, who used meetings, protests, and Strike action to push for better treatment. The success of these actions frightened and enraged landlords, who responded with aggressive tactics.The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues By Giles Oakley Edition: 2. Da Capo Press, 1997, p. 185. , Landless farmers who fought the sharecropping system were socially denounced, harassed by legal and illegal means, and physically attacked by officials, landlords' agents, or in extreme cases, angry mobs. Sharecroppers All. Arthur F. Raper and Ira De A. Reid. Chapell Hill 1941. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011, Sharecroppers' strikes in Arkansas and the Missouri Bootheel, the 1939 Missouri Sharecroppers' Strike, were documented in the newsreel Oh Freedom After While. The plight of a sharecropper was addressed in the song Sharecropper's Blues, recorded by Charlie Barnet in 1944. sharecropping system in the U.S. increased during the Great Depression with the creation of tenant farmers following the failure of many small farms throughout the Dustbowl. Traditional sharecropping declined after mechanization of farm work became economical beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s.Gordon Marshall, " Sharecropping," Encyclopedia.com, 1998. As a result, many sharecroppers were forced off the farms, and migrated to cities to work in factories, or became in the Western United States during World War II. By the end of the 1960s, sharecropping had disappeared in the United States.
Landlords opt for sharecropping to avoid the administrative costs and Efficiency wage that occurs on plantations and . It is preferred to cash tenancy because cash tenants take all the risks, and any harvest failure will hurt them and not the landlord. Therefore, they tend to demand lower rents than sharecroppers.Sharecropping and Sharecroppers, T J Byres
Some economists have argued that sharecropping is not as exploitative as it is often perceived. John Heath and Hans P. Binswanger write that "evidence from around the world suggests that sharecropping is often a way for differently endowed enterprises to pool resources to mutual benefit, overcoming credit restraints and helping to manage risk."
Sharecropping agreements can be made fairly, as a form of tenant farming or sharefarming that has a variable rental payment, paid in arrears. There are three different types of contracts.Arthur F. Raper and Ira De A. Reid, Sharecroppers All (1941); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (1986).
According to sociologist Edward Royce, "adherents of the neoclassical approach" argued that sharecropping incentivized laborers by giving them a vested interest in the crop. American plantations were wary of this interest, as they felt that would lead to African Americans demanding rights of partnership. Many black laborers denied the unilateral authority that landowners hoped to achieve, further complicating relations between landowners and sharecroppers.
Sharecropping may allow women to have access to arable land, albeit not as owners, in places where ownership rights are vested only in men.Bruce, John W.- Country Profiles of Land Tenure: Africa, 1996 (Lesotho, p. 221) Research Paper No. 130, December 1998, Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison accessed at UMN.edu June 19, 2006
He also showed that in the presence of transaction costs, share-contracting may be preferred to either wage contracts or rent contracts—due to the mitigation of labor shirking and the provision of risk sharing. Joseph Stiglitz (1974, 1988), suggested that if share tenancy is only a labor contract, then it is only pairwise-efficient and that land-to-the-tiller reform would improve social efficiency by removing the necessity for labor contracts in the first place.
Reid (1973), Murrel (1983), Roumasset (1995) and Allen and Lueck (2004) provided transaction cost theories of share-contracting, wherein tenancy is more of a partnership than a labor contract and both landlord and tenant provide multiple inputs. It has also been argued that the sharecropping institution can be explained by factors such as informational asymmetry (Hallagan, 1978; Allen, 1982; Muthoo, 1998), moral hazard (Reid, 1976; Eswaran and Kotwal, 1985; Maitreesh Ghatak and Pandey, 2000), intertemporal discounting (Roy and Serfes, 2001), price fluctuations (Sen, 2011) or limited liability (Shetty, 1988; Kaushik Basu, 1992; Sengupta, 1997; Ray and Singh, 2001).
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