Sharecropping involves contractual agreement to combine productive resources and share output in agreed proportions. In stereotypical representations (to which novelists and other writers have perhaps contributed more than social scientists) such contracts are extremely unequal, enabling powerful landowners to extract high profits from the vulnerable peasants they exploit. Sharecroppers are therefore readily presented as a thinly disguised proletariat in the Marxist tradition (Byres 1983), while mainstream bourgeois economics has historically viewed share contracts as inefficient in comparison with alternative systems of fixed rents and wage labour.
In anthropology, sharecropping has provided the economic background to a considerable number of studies of peasant societies, notably in Southern Europe, South America and South Asia. However, comparatively few studies have placed sharecropping at the centre of the enquiry, and it is still unusual for the details of the contracts to be subjected to close scrutiny. For example, the pioneering work of S. Silver-man and D. Kertzer in Italy pays as much attention to the co-residential group and other social factors as to the economic practices of sharecropping. In this case, as elsewhere, foreign anthropologists can learn much from historical research into sharecropping undertaken by indigenous scholars. There is scope for combining resources in ways analogous to sharecropping contracts, provided that the local researchers are not treated as unsuspecting peasants to be exploited.
Only in the outstanding monograph of Robertson (1987) has the case been clearly made for the importance of a comparative anthropological focus on sharecropping itself. Building in part on the pioneering work of Hill in Ghana (e.g. 1963) and adding other African case studies,Robertson shows that the enormous variation and flexibility of sharecropping practices are what commend them to farming households. It persists in all parts of the world, under very different economic regimes, socialist and capitalist as well as peasant, and can be conducive not only to high yields and innovation, but also to high rates of social mobility. Such ‘revisionist’ views should not blind us to the occurrence and persistence in many parts of the world of highly exploitative forms; but through opening up the discussion with his African materials, Robertson succeeded in exposing the simplistic notions underpinning the treatment of sharecropping in other subjects, as well as uncovering important new fields of enquiry for development and economic anthropology.
