The Spread of Sharecropping in Tuscany: The Political Economy of Transaction Costs

Abstract

Land tenure is central to many agricultural transformations. The author examines one of these transformations, the spread of sharecropping in late medieval and early modern Tuscany. Previous research suggested that sharecropping spread as agricultural relations were refeudalized. In contrast, the author's analyses of fixed-term and share-term leasing (sharecropping) show that landlords used sharecropping when it lowered their overall costs of labor supervision and land management. However to explain the spread of sharecropping, the Florentine political economy, which created particular patterns of land management costs and labor supervision costs, must also be considered. Florence was a well-developed center for urban manufacturing. Landlords were frequently urban merchants and they resided in Florence; these factors were crucial in shaping agricultural relations. Landlords' use of sharecropping to reduce the overall costs of land management and labor supervision increased as the distance from Florence - the site of landlords' principal activities - increased, as the size of farms increased and when crops had high costs of labor supervision and land management. Thus, the use of sharecropping to lower costs associated with agricultural production must be considered in the context of the Tuscan political economy