Mastering the sharecroppers: land, labour and the search for independence in the US South and South Africa

Abstract

This article explores the institution of sharecropping in the racialised countrysides of the American South and South Africa, where, in the second half of the nineteenth century, black sharecroppers farmed white‐owned land in return for a share of the crop. In both countries, the labour of sharecropping families was an important ingredient in the recovery of the countryside from the devastating effects of war, which left white landowners vulnerable and ill‐equipped to assert mastery over farm labour. This article explores how sharecropping brought labour to the farms, but also allowed a degree of autonomy and independence to develop that sat uncomfortably with the imperatives of agricultural ‘modernisation’ and white supremacy. Sharecropping ended after interventions in the countryside by the state, which aimed to promote ‘modernisation’ of agriculture and control of black labour in South Africa, but which, in the American South, became as concerned with restoring white supremacy, and which allowed a ‘pre‐modern’ form of labour organisation – share‐cropping – to continue long into the twentieth century.