Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of the French system. One of Smith's (1992 [1776]) important contributions to the analysis
of cropsharing is his introduction of the notion of the share acting as a tax on behavior:
“The tithe, which is but a tenth of the produce, is found to be a very great hindrance to
improvement. A tax, therefore, which amounted to one-half, must have been an effectual
bar to it” (376).
Interestingly, Smith (1992 [1776]) also was keen to point out the issue of the problem
of measurement with cropsharing and noted that “in France, where five parts out of six
of the whole kingdom are said to be still occupied by this species of cultivators, the
proprietors complain that their metayers take every opportunity of employing the master's
cattle rather in carriage than in cultivation; because in the one case they get the whole profits
to themselves, in the other they share them with their landlord” (367).
In contrast to Smith, John Stuart Mill in his
Principles of Political Economy
(topic
II, chapter VIII) offered a much more balanced, and surprisingly modern, approach to
cropsharing and cash renting. Writing roughly a century later than Smith, Mill agreed with
Smith that France and Italy had a great deal of cropsharing and that this share acts as a tax on
effort. Mill, however, surveyed several contemporary writers at the time, noting that these
contracts had been in existence a long time, that the level of cultivation was not suffering, and
that there was a great deal of variation in the contracts across the region. Mill (1965 [1871]),
in great contrast to Smith, thus concluded: “I do not offer these quotations as evidence of
the intrinsic excellence of the metayer system; but they surely suffice to prove that neither
'land miserably cultivated' nor a people in 'the most abject poverty' have any necessary
connexion (
sic
) with it, and that the unmeasured vituperation lavished upon the system by
English writers is grounded on an extremely narrow view of the subject” (315).
While the difference between Smith and Mill is of interest for those who follow the
history of economics, our point here is more narrowly related to our own predictions about
the determinants of farmland contracts. Both Smith and Mill acknowledged that cash rent
and cropsharing existed in Europe, and that France, Italy, and Spain tended to be dominated
by cropsharing while the northern European countries tended to be dominated by cash rent
contracts. Many other writers since Smith and Mill, including modern economic historians,
would agree with this general characterization of the distribution of farmland contracts
across historical Europe. For instance, Kohn (2001) states: “Both fixed rent and share leases
were to be found wherever the limited term lease appeared, but in most regions one or
the other eventually came to predominate. The fixed-rent lease was the more common
form in Northern France, the Low Countries, Western Germany, and the Po Valley. The
share lease predominated in Western and Southern France and in Tuscany” (3). Similarly,
when discussing France, Hoffman (1984) notes: “Sharecropping flourished both during the
inflation of the sixteenth century and during the declining prices of the 1600s...despite
overall similarities in European population trends, sharecropping took root only in particular
