A Historical Precedent: Sharecropping

Abstract

Sharecropping is the only major instance of a system in which the worker’s compensation is indexed to his output that has gained citizenship in the history of economics. Sharecropping, or share tenancy, is an institutional arrangement under which the size of the firm coincides with the tenant (or his family), so that the level of ‘employment’, which depends on the level of compensation, is defined in hours rather than in heads; it may therefore be seen — like an individual piece-rate system — as a trivial case of the definition of a share system we set forth in Chapter 1. As such it would seem to be uninteresting for the macroeconomic purposes we have in view in this book, were it not that the secular controversy over sharecropping has malgré lui highlighted a number of issues that on the one hand anticipate some of the typical problems of share systems, and that on the other hand suggest a basic approach to the analysis of those systems. This chapter — which should be taken as an appetiser to the main body of our study — is devoted to a concise survey of this controversy and to an appraisal of its upshot.