Sharecropping is a legal and economic arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant, the sharecropper, to work the land in exchange for a share of the crops produced, differing from ordinary tenant farming in that it typically grants the cultivator considerably less autonomy and lower economic and social standing. Under a typical sharecropping arrangement, the landowner supplies land along with housing, tools, seed, and working animals, while local merchants extend credit for food and other necessities; at the end of the season the sharecropper pays the landowner a portion of the harvest, commonly between one-half and two-thirds, then uses the remaining share to settle debts to merchants, often ending the season with little or no cash and sometimes deeper in debt through an associated crop-lien system in which the year's crop itself served as security for credit extended in advance. Sharecropping and closely related arrangements have existed across many regions and periods under various names, including the French metayage, the Italian mezzadria, and the Islamic muzaraa, and the system operated extensively in historical Ireland, Scotland, and colonial Africa. In the United States, sharecropping became widespread in the South following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and the arrangement persists today in some rural, impoverished areas, particularly in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Company towns and sharecropping both let an employer control a worker housing and credit alongside the labor relationship itself, deepening dependency well beyond the wage alone.
Convict leasing and sharecropping emerged together in the post-emancipation American South as parallel systems maintaining coerced black labor after the formal abolition of slavery.
Guest worker programs and sharecropping both tie a worker housing or livelihood to a single employer or landlord, narrowing the worker real ability to exit the arrangement even where the relationship is nominally a voluntary contract.
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