Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land.
Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have used a form of the system. Some are governed by tradition, and others by law. The
Frenchmétayage, the
Catalanmasoveria, the
Castilianmediero, the
Slavicpołownictwo and izdolshchina, the
Italian mezzadria, and the
Islamic system of muzara‘a (المزارعة), are examples of legal systems that have supported sharecropping.
Overview
Under a sharecropping system, landowners provided a share of land to be worked by the sharecropper, and usually provided other necessities such as housing, tools, seed, or
working animals.[1] Local merchants usually provide food and other supplies to the sharecropper on credit. In exchange for the land and supplies, the cropper would pay the owner a share of the crop at the end of the season, typically one-half to two-thirds. The cropper used his share to pay off their debt to the merchant.[2] If there was any cash left over, the cropper kept it—but if their share came to less than what they owed, they remained in debt.
A new system of credit, the
crop lien, 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.[3]
Farmers who farmed land belonging to others but owned their own mule and plow were called
tenant farmers; 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.
Application by region
Historically, sharecropping occurred extensively in
Scotland,
Ireland and colonial
Africa. Use of the sharecropper system has also been identified in England (as the practice of "farming to halves").[4] It was widely used in the
Southern United States during the
Reconstruction era (1865–1877) that followed the
American Civil War, which was economically devastating to the Southern states.[5] It is still used in many rural poor areas of the world today, notably in
Pakistan,
India, and
Bangladesh.[6][7][8]
Africa
In settler colonies of colonial Africa, sharecropping was a feature of the agricultural life. White farmers, who owned most of the land, were frequently unable to work the whole of their farm for lack of capital. They, therefore, had African farmers to work the excess on a sharecropping basis.
In South Africa the 1913
Natives' Land Act[9] outlawed the ownership of land by Africans in areas designated for white ownership and effectively reduced the status of most sharecroppers to
tenant farmers 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
Ghana[10] and
Zimbabwe.[11]
Economic historian Pius S. Nyambara argued that
Eurocentric 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.[11]
Prior to the Civil War, sharecropping is known to have existed in
Mississippi and is believed to have been in place in
Tennessee.[12][13] However, it was not until the economic upheaval caused by the
American Civil War and the end of slavery during and after
Reconstruction that it became widespread in the South.[14][5] It is theorized that sharecropping in the United States originated in the
Natchez District, roughly centered in
Adams County, Mississippi with its county seat,
Natchez.[15]
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 formerly enslaved people 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 formerly enslaved people 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".[16] Notwithstanding, many formerly enslaved people, 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
indigent white farmers were integrated into the system.[2][17] During Reconstruction, the federal
Freedmen's Bureau ordered the arrangements for freedmen and wrote and enforced their contracts.[18]
American sharecroppers worked a section of the plantation independently, usually growing
cotton,
tobacco,
rice,
sugar, and other
cash crops, and received half of the parcel's output.[19][20] Sharecroppers also often received their farming tools and all other goods from the landowner they were contracted with.[1] 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.[21] 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.[21] Sharecropping often proved economically problematic, as the landowners held significant economic control.[22]
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 is considered more economically productive than the
gang system plantations using enslaved workers, though less productive than modern agricultural techniques.[18][23]
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.[24][25] 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.[13] In Mississippi, by 1900, 36% of all white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, while 85% of black farmers were.[12] 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.[26]
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
labor strikes to push for better treatment. The success of these actions frightened and enraged landlords, who responded with aggressive tactics.[27] 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.[28] Sharecroppers' strikes in Arkansas and the
Missouri Bootheel, the 1939 Missouri Sharecroppers' Strike, were documented in the
newsreelOh Freedom After While.[29] The plight of a sharecropper was addressed in the song Sharecropper's Blues, recorded by
Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra in 1944.[30]
The 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.[13][31] As a result, many sharecroppers were forced off the farms, and migrated to cities to work in factories, or became
migrant workers in the
Western United States during
World War II. By the end of the 1960s, sharecropping had disappeared in the United States.[citation needed]
Sharecropping and socioeconomic status
About two-thirds of sharecroppers were white, the rest black. Sharecroppers, the poorest of the poor, organized for better conditions. The racially integrated
Southern Tenant Farmers Union made gains for sharecroppers in the 1930s. Sharecropping had diminished in the 1940s due to the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and other factors.[32]
Impacts
Sharecropping was harmful to tenants with many cases of high interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often keeping tenant farm families severely indebted. The debt was often compounded year on year leaving the cropper vulnerable to intimidation and shortchanging.[33] Nevertheless, it appeared to be inevitable, with no serious alternative unless the croppers left agriculture.[34][35]
Landlords opt for sharecropping to avoid the administrative costs and
shirking that occurs on plantations and
haciendas. 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.[36]
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."[37]
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.[38]
Workers can rent plots of land from the owner for a certain sum and keep the whole crop.
Workers work on the land and earn a fixed wage from the land owner but keep some of the crop.
No money changes hands but the worker and land owner each keep a share of the crop.
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.[21]
Sharecropping may allow women to have access to
arable land, albeit not as owners, in places where ownership rights are vested only in men.[39]
Economic theories of share tenancy
The theory of share tenancy was long dominated by
Alfred Marshall's famous footnote in Book VI, Chapter X.14 of
Principles[40] where he illustrated the inefficiency of agricultural share-contracting.
Steven N.S. Cheung (1969),[41] challenged this view, showing that with sufficient competition and in the absence of transaction costs, share tenancy will be equivalent to competitive labor markets and therefore efficient.[42]
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,[43] 1988),[44] 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),[45] Murrel (1983),[46] Roumasset (1995)[47] and Allen and Lueck (2004)[48] 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;[49] Allen, 1982;[50] Muthoo, 1998),[51]moral hazard (Reid, 1976;[52] Eswaran and Kotwal, 1985;[53]Ghatak and Pandey, 2000),[54]
intertemporal discounting (Roy and Serfes, 2001),[55] price fluctuations (Sen, 2011)[56] or
limited liability (Shetty, 1988;[57]Basu, 1992;[58] Sengupta, 1997;[59] Ray and Singh, 2001).[60]
^
abMandle, Jay R. Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience Since the Civil War. Duke University Press, 1992, 22.
^
abRonald L. F. Davis "The U. S. Army and the Origins of Sharecropping in the Natchez District—A Case Study" The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 62, No.1 (January 1977), pp. 60–80
in JSTOR
^
abJoseph D. Reid, "Sharecropping as an understandable market response: The postbellum South." Journal of Economic History (1973) 33#1 pp. 106–130.
in JSTOR
^Ronald L. F. Davis "The U. S. Army and the Origins of Sharecropping in the Natchez District—A Case Study" The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 62, No.1 (January, 1977), pp. 60–80
in JSTOR
^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)
^
abGregorie, Anne King (1954). History of Sumter County, South Carolina, p. 274. Library Board of Sumter County.
^F. N. Boney (2004-02-06).
"Poor Whites". The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Archived from
the original on 2012-08-29. Retrieved 2006-05-18.
^
abcRoyce, Edward (1993). "The Rise of Southern Sharecropping". In Royce, Edward (ed.). The Origins of Southern Sharecropping. Temple University Press. pp. 181–222.
ISBN9781566390699.
JSTORj.ctt14bt3nz.9.
^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.
^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).
^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.eduArchived 2001-11-25 at the
Wayback Machine June 19, 2006
^Formalized in Roumasset, James (1979). "Sharecropping, Production Externalities and the Theory of Contracts". American Journal of Agricultural Economics. 61 (4): 640–647.
doi:
10.2307/1239911.
JSTOR1239911.
^Hallagan, William (1978). "Self-selection by contractual choice and the theory of sharecropping". Bell Journal of Economics. 9 (2): 344–354.
doi:
10.2307/3003586.
JSTOR3003586.
^Allen, Franklin (1982). "On share contracts and screening". Bell Journal of Economics. 13 (2): 541–547.
doi:
10.2307/3003473.
JSTOR3003473.
^Eswaran, Mukesh; Ashok Kotwal (1985). "A theory of contractual structure in agriculture". American Economic Review. 75 (3): 352–367.
JSTOR1814805.
^Ghatak, Maitreesh; Priyanka Pandey (2000). "Contract choice in agriculture with joint moral hazard in effort and risk". Journal of Development Economics. 63 (2): 303–326.
doi:
10.1016/S0304-3878(00)00116-4.
^Roy, Jaideep; Konstantinos Serfes (2001). "Intertemporal discounting and tenurial contracts". Journal of Development Economics. 64 (2): 417–436.
doi:
10.1016/S0304-3878(00)00144-9.
^Shetty, Sudhir (1988). "Limited liability, wealth differences, and the tenancy ladder in agrarian economies". Journal of Development Economics. 29: 1–22.
doi:
10.1016/0304-3878(88)90068-5.
^Sengupta, Kunal (1997). "Limited liability, moral hazard and share tenancy". Journal of Development Economics. 52 (2): 393–407.
doi:
10.1016/S0304-3878(96)00444-0.
^Ray, Tridip; Nirvikar Singh (2001). "Limited liability, contractual choice and the tenancy ladder". Journal of Development Economics. 66: 289–303.
doi:
10.1016/S0304-3878(01)00163-8.
Further reading
Adams, Jane; Gorton, D. (2009). "This Land Ain't My Land: The Eviction of Sharecroppers by the Farm Security Administration". Agricultural History. 83 (3): 323–51.
doi:
10.3098/ah.2009.83.3.323.
Agee, James; Evans, Walker (1941). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Allen, D. W.; Lueck, D. (1992). "Contract Choice in Modern Agriculture: Cash Rent versus Cropshare". Journal of Law and Economics. 35 (2): 397–426.
doi:
10.1086/467260.
S2CID153707520.
Ferleger, Louis (1993). "Sharecropping Contracts in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South". Agricultural History. 67 (3): 31–46.
JSTOR3744228.
Garrett, Martin A.; Xu, Zhenhui (2003). "The Efficiency of Sharecropping: Evidence from the Postbellum South". Southern Economic Journal. 69 (3): 578–595.
doi:
10.1002/j.2325-8012.2003.tb00514.x.
Hurt, R. Douglas Hurt (2003). African American Life in the Rural South, 1900–1950. University of Missouri Press.
ISBN0-8262-1471-1.
Liebowitz, Jonathan J. (1989). "Tenants, Sharecroppers, and the French Agricultural Depression of the Late Nineteenth Century". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 19 (3): 429–445.
doi:
10.2307/204363.
JSTOR204363.
Reid, Joseph D. Jr. (1975). "Sharecropping in History and Theory". Agricultural History. 49 (2): 426–440.
JSTOR3741281.
Shaban, R. A. (1987). "Testing Between Competing Models of Sharecropping". Journal of Political Economy. 95 (5): 893–920.
doi:
10.1086/261495.
S2CID55141070.
Singh, N. (1989). "Theories of Sharecropping". In Bardhan, P. (ed.). The Economic Theory of Agrarian Institutions. Clarendon Press. pp. 33–72.
ISBN0-19-828619-8.
Southworth, Caleb (2002). "Aid to Sharecroppers: How Agrarian Class Structure and Tenant-Farmer Politics Influenced Federal Relief in the South, 1933–1935". Social Science History. 26 (1): 33–70.