Sharecropping is the legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant (sharecropper) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping is different from tenant farming, which provides the tenant greater autonomy, and higher economic and social status. Sharecropping may be a traditional arrangement of land governed by law. The French métayage, the Catalan masoveria, the Castilian mediero, the Polish połownictwo and Russian 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 agreement, landowners provide land and other necessities such as housing, tools, seed, or working animals. Local merchants provide food and other supplies to the sharecropper on credit. In exchange for the land and supplies, the cropper pays the owner a share of the crop at the end of the season, typically one-half to two-thirds. The cropper uses his share to pay off his debt to the merchant. If there is any cash left over, the cropper keeps it—but if it comes to less than what they owe, they remain 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. 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 Ireland, Scotland, and colonial Africa. Use of the sharecropper system has also been identified in England (as the practice of "farming to halves"). 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. It is still used in many rural poor areas of the world today, notably in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.
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. Therefore, they had African farmers to work the excess on a sharecropping basis. In South Africa the 1913 Natives' Land Act 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 and Zimbabwe. 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.
Scotland Half-foot (Scottish Gaelic: leth-chois, Scots: hauf-fit) was a kind of sharecropping peculiar to northern and western Scotland. The possessor, generally impoverished, or without facilities for working the land, often furnished the land and seed corn, and the tenant cultivated it, the produce being equally divided between them. There have been instances of it in the 20th century.
United States
Even prior to the Civil War, sharecropping is known to have existed in Mississippi and is believed to have been in place in Tennessee. 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. 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. 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 former slaves 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.
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