Crop‐sharing economics in mandatory Palestine — part I

Abstract

The first part of this article showed that crop division in Mandatory Palestine incorporated two superimposed principles of tenure. The first of these was the crop-sharing compact between the traditionally acknowledged factors of production that shared in the produce: land, seed, ploughing stock and labour. In Northern Samaria both capital factorsseed and ploughing stock-were contributed by one party, who was said to have been awarded the shadd or cultivation. In other words, he was the farmer. The second principle of tenure was the muzara'a or co-cultivation compact between landowner and cultivator. In this compact the cultivator (the farmer) represented the other factors of production as far as the landowner was concerned, and assigned him his rent-share of the crop. Only as a second step was the rest of the crop divided among the other factors of production: and here the farmer represented the landlord. All in all, the farmer constituted the link between the two compacts and the linchpin of the landholding system. Accordingly, it is in terms of where the capital came from under each form of tenure, that we have found it most productive to visualize agrarian institutions and to follow the evolution of the land system in this article. We then classified the forms of tenure in Northern Samaria under the Mandate in descending order of involvement in farming on the part of the landowner: (a) cropping: the landowner retained the capital (the stock) the labour being performed by croppers; (b) joint-farming (partnership in the shadd): the landowner, who owned the stock, appointed a villager to operate the farm, made over a share in the stock to him, debited him its value, and split with him the crop share due to the seed and to the ploughing stock under the crop-sharing compact. The operator, whom we shall call jointfarmer, could either perform the labour himself or take on croppers; (c) share-rent farming: the landowner provided only the land, the farmer supplying the whole capital. The farmer in turn could, if he wished, take on joint-farmers or croppers or sub-farm out the land; (d) tenancy, in which cash replaced the share-rent. We were able to analyse crop division procedures on the basis of the accounts of Nazmi Hajj Tawfeeq 'Abdul Hadi who owned extensive lands both in the hill village of 'Arrabeh in Northern Samaria and in the lowland settlement of Zar'een in the Plain of Esdraelon. We learned from them that Nazmi awarded the croppers (crop-sharing labourers) a much larger part of his share of the crop than did Nazmi's joint-farmers. This differential persisted until the mid-1930's when the croppers apparently secured its elimination-again, at the expense of Nazmi, not of his joint-farmers. We also saw that while in principle the joint-farming form of association