Typically, a partial lease would specify the part that was to cover certain expenses such as seeds, fertilizers, weed control, irrigation district assessments, and fuel. Sometimes the partial tenant covered these costs, but he expected a larger share of the harvest in return. The agreement would also specify whether the partial tenant would use their own equipment to grow the crop or whether they would use the landlord`s equipment. The agreement would also specify whether the landlord would pick up his share of the crop from the field or whether the tenant would deliver it and where it would be delivered. However, many external factors make it effective. One of the factors is the emancipation of slaves: sharecropping allowed freed slaves from the United States, Brazil and the end of the Roman Empire to access land. It is also effective in escaping inflation, hence its rise in France and Italy of the 16th century. Century. [9] Although the system developed from immediate post-war crises, it defined the agricultural system in rural Georgia for nearly 100 years. In 1880, 32% of the state`s farms were managed by tenants; This number would increase over the next fifty years. In 1910, tenants operated 37 percent of the state`s 291,027 farms.
Rental rates in general and partial rental rates in particular were highest in parts of the state where cotton was grown mainly. In 1910, for example, Burke, Dooly, and Houston counties led the state`s cotton production, and each had above-average rates of farms and tenant-managed tenants. The partial rental system also locked much of the South into cotton dependence – just as the price of cotton collapsed. Sharecropping developed after the failure of the system of contract labour and agrarian reform after the Civil War (1861-65). The contract labor system, administered by the Freedmen`s Bureau, was designed to negotiate labor contracts between white landowners and former slaves, many of whom rejected the system and refused to participate. Moreover, despite some talks during and immediately after the War of Land Reform, during which the federal government divided Confederate plantations into small farms to distribute to the liberated, most of the land was returned to its original owners. Instead of taking advantage of the oft-cited “forty acres and a mule” that the government could have provided, Georgia`s freedmen were left with few options as workers. After the Civil War, plantation owners without slave laborers or without the money to pay for free labor were often unable to cultivate their land. Tenants worked part of the plantation independently, usually growing cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar and other cash crops, receiving half of the package`s production. [21] [22] Tenants also often received their farm supplies and all other property from the landowner entrusted to them. [23] Landowners dictated decisions about crop mixing, and tenants often agreed to resell their share of the crop to the landowner, exposing them to manipulated prices.
[۱۰] In addition, landowners who threatened not to renew the lease at the end of the growing season could put pressure on their tenants. [10] Partial leases often proved to be economically problematic because landowners exercised significant economic control. [24] Partial lease is a form of farm management in which families lease small parcels of land to a landowner in exchange for a portion of their harvest, which are handed over to the landowner at the end of each year. Various types of partial leases have been practiced around the world for centuries, but in the rural south it was usually practiced by former slaves. When the economy of the South was in disarray after the abolition of slavery and the ravages of the Civil War, conflicts arose during the period of reconstruction between many white landowners who sought to restore labor power and liberated blacks in search of economic independence and autonomy. As a result of these dramatic changes, the partial leases that had helped define the state`s economy in the post-Civil War century had all but disappeared by the end of the twentieth century, when the U.S. Census reported that fewer than 3,000 tenants were cultivating land in Georgia without any special classification for partial lease. By the early 1870s, the system known as partial lease had dominated agriculture throughout cotton cultivation in the south. In this system, black families would rent small plots of land or shares to work themselves; In return, they would give the landowner a portion of their harvest at the end of the year.
Sharecropping has a long history and there are a variety of different situations and types of chords that have used some form of system. Some are subject to tradition, others to the law. The Italian Mezzadria, the French Métayage, the Spanish Mediero, the Slavic Połowcy, the издoльщина and the Islamic system of the Muzara`a are examples of legal systems that supported partial leases. Tenants pose in a bulloch County tobacco field in 1949. The practice of partial leasing, in which workers grew grain on someone else`s farm in exchange for part of the harvest, developed in the years following the Civil War and lasted until the mid-twentieth century. Jeffery Paige distinguished between centralized subcultures found in cotton plantations and decentralized partial lease with other crops. The first is characterized by political conservatism and a long tenure. Tenants are linked to the owner via the plantation shop. This form of tenure tends to be replaced by salaries paid as markets flood. Decentralized partial leases play virtually no role for the landowner: plots are dispersed, farmers manage their own work, and landowners do not produce the crop. This form of tenure becomes more common as markets enter. [3] Reid (1973),[44] Murrel (1983),[45] Roumasset (1995)[46] and Allen and Lueck (2004)[47] have provided theories on the transaction cost of the stock agreement, according to which the lease is a partnership rather than a contract of employment and the landlord and tenant as tenant provide multiple inputs.
It has also been argued that the institution of sharecropping can be explained by factors such as information asymmetry (Hallagan, 1978;[ 48] Allen, 1982; [49] Muthoo, 1998],[50] moral hazard (Reid, 1976;[51] Eswaran and Kotwal, 1985; [52] Ghatak and Pandey, 2000],[53] intertemporal discount (Roy and Serfes, 2001),[54] price fluctuations (Sen, 2011)[55] or limited liability (Shetty, 1988;[ 56. Basu, 1992; [57] Sengupta, 1997; [58] Ray and Singh, 2001). [59] Despite the general perception that the struggles for leases were a black institution, the tenants came from the ranks of all poor Georgians. In 1910, tenants farmed 11 million hectares of the state`s 27 million hectares; Black Georgians cultivated just over half of this land cultivated by tenants. However, African Americans were much more willing to cultivate land owned by someone else than to cultivate their own land. Fewer than 16,000 farms were operated by black owners in 1910, while African Americans managed 106,738 farms as tenants in the same year. The details of partial leases differed from place to place and over time, but in general, workers who could offer nothing but their ability to perform agricultural tasks made arrangements that overwhelmingly favored the landowner. In many cases, at the end of a season, an employee may receive only one-third of the harvest they have produced. If a tenant and his family could offer something other than just a working capacity – a mule, for example – then they could be paid at the end of the season with a slightly larger portion of the harvest. Shared tenants were workers who could promise the landowner a fixed portion of the crop in payment of the “lease” of the land for one season. In this case, the worker could promise the landowner ten bushels of cottonseed as a fixed rent in the fall, and in return, the harvester would rely less on the landowner during the season. In the colonies of colonial Africa, the partial lease was a feature of agricultural life.
White farmers, who owned most of the land, were often unable to manage the entire farm due to lack of capital. So they asked African farmers to process the surplus on a partial harvest basis. In South Africa, the Natives` Land Act of 1913[15] prohibited African ownership of land in areas designated for white ownership and effectively reduced the status of most tenants to tenants and then to agricultural workers. .