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The Economic Theory of Sharecropping in Early Modern France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Philip T. Hoffman
Philip T. Hoffman
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125
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Abstract

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France—a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations upon which early modern historians have tended to rely.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Third Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 309 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1984

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References

1 Bloch, Marc, French Rural History, trans. Sondheimer, Janet (Berkeley, 1970), pp. 125, 146–48;Google ScholarDuby, George et al. , Histoire de la France rurale, vol. 2: L'âge classique (Paris, 1975), pp. 230–31, 264.Google Scholar Perhaps the best local study of sharecropping in France is Louis Merle's La métairie et l'évolution agraire de la Gâtine poitevine de la fin du Moyen Age à la Revolution (Paris, 1958). In the area Merle studied, share contracts rose from less than the 5 percent of the agricultural contracts in the 1580s to over 90 percent one century later.Google Scholar

2 Bloch, History, pp. 147–48; Duby et al., Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 123, 130–31, 230–31;Google ScholarForster, Robert, “Obstacles to Agricultural Growth in Eighteenth-Century France,” American Historical Review, 75, pt. 2 (1970), 1604–5;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMerle, La métairie, p. 203.Google Scholar The question of agricultural tenure—in particular, the failure to develop wage labor—also figures prominently in the “Brenner debate” that has enlivened the pages of Past and Present. For this, see The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Ashton, T. H. and Philpin, C. H. E. (Cambridge, forthcoming).Google Scholar

3 Bloch, History, pp. 146, 148.Google Scholar

4 Merle, La métairie, p. 202.Google Scholar

5 Admittedly, we have a small sample here, but the evidence is still unlikely to be a statistical fluke. One might worry about what would happen if the sample underrepresented one of the types of contracts—say labor contracts, which did not occur as frequently as tenancy contracts in the notarial registers. Fortunately we can put this worry to rest. Even if labor contracts were underrepresented in the sample, it would not disturb our logit coefficients (other than the constant), and hence it would not affect our conclusions.Google Scholar

6 On the crisis of French seigniors, see Brenner, Robert, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe: The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present, 97 (11 1982), pp. 58–65, 76–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Serres, Olivier de, Le théâtre de l'agriculture (Paris, 1600), pp. 45, 47–50;Google ScholarBloch, History, p. 144.Google Scholar

8 Serres, De, Le théâtre, pp. 46–48, 53.Google Scholar For more contemporary evidence from Normandy on this point and on the costs of administering estates in general, see Dewald, Jonathon, The Formation of a Provincial Nobility (Princeton, 1980), pp. 195–200.Google Scholar

9 Serres, De, Le théâtre, pp. 46–47, 53;Google ScholarHoffman, Philip T., “Sharecropping and Investment in Agriculture in Early Modern France,” this Journal, 42 (03, 1982), 155–59.Google Scholar

10 Archives départmentales du Rhône (Lyon, France), 3 E 8731 (Nov. 5 and Dec. 3, 1598); 8732 (Feb. 7 and April 30, 1599; Jan. 6, Sept. 14, and Nov. 25, 1600); 8779 (April and 9, 1600); 1028, fol. 133 (1576); 8721 (July 3, Dec., 4, and Dec. 17, 1570).Google Scholar

11 For what follows, see Newbery, David M. G., “Risk, Sharing, Sharecropping and Uncertain Labor Markets,” Review of Economic Studies, 44 (10 1977), 585–94;CrossRefGoogle ScholarStiglitz, Joseph, “Incentives and Risk Sharing in Sharecropping,” Review ofGoogle ScholarNewbery, David M. G. and Stiglitz, Joseph, “Sharecropping, Risk Sharing and the Importance of Imperfect Information,” in Risk, Uncertainty, and Agricultural Development, ed. Roumasset, James A. and Boussard, Jean-Marc (College Laguna, 1979), pp. 311–39;Google ScholarWarr, Peter G., “Share Contracts, Limited Information and Production Uncertainty,” Australian Economic Papers, 17 (06 1978), 110–23;CrossRefGoogle ScholarLucas, Robert E. B., “Sharing, Monitoring, and Incentives: Marshallian Misallocation Reassessed,” Journal of Political Economy, 87 (06 1979), 501–21;Google ScholarHiggs, Robert, “Race, Tenure, and Resource Allocation in Southern Agriculture, 1910,” this JOURNAL, 33 (03 1973), 149–69;Google ScholarAlston, Lee J., “Tenure Choice in Southern Agriculture,” Explorations in Economic History, 18 (07 1981), 211–32;CrossRefGoogle ScholarAlston, Lee J. and Robert, Higgs, “Contractural Mix in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses, and Tests,” this Journal, 42 (06 1982), 327–53.Google Scholar For additional work by economic theorists and economic historians on sharecropping, see Hoffman, “Sharecropping and Investment,” pp. 155–56Google Scholar. There are of course a number of problems with this literature. To begin with, apart from several qualitative remarks, Newbery and Stiglitz deal with a world where the costs of monitoring labor are either zero or infinite–clearly unrealistic. If these monitoring costs are zero, they go on to show that sharecropping offers no risk-sharing advantages, provided there are no economies of scale and no uncertainty in factor markets; see Hoffman, “Sharecropping and Investment,” pp. 155–56, for details. More realistic theory can be found in Warr and Lucas, who deal with sharecropping versus renting and sharecropping versus labor; both these articles include specifics of the effect of monitoring and transaction costs upon contractual choice. As for Higgs and Alston, they have the virtue of using a simple model involving a trade-off between transaction costs and the risk premium needed to attract tenants. Their work has been most useful, but they assume (as do I) that landlords enter into contracts after they have made decisions about what to farm. For the problems of such an assumption, see Alston, “Tenure is Southern Agriculture,” p. 219. What we need is a general equilibrium model that explicitly includes transaction costs and explains the mix of all three types of contracts. Such a theory does not yet exist.

12 This account of contract choice is only one among several possible theories; there are other explanations that place greater stress upon the landlord's entrepreneurial input, other factors of production, and incentives. See, for example, Hallaghan, William, “Self Selection by Contractural Choice and the Theory of Sharecropping,” Bell Journal of Economics, 9 (Autumn 1978), 344–54;Google Scholar and Reid, Joseph D., “Sharecropping and Agricultural Uncertainty,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 24 (04 1976), 549–76. These alternative theories, though, have their own limitations–Reid, for example, tends to glide over questions of monitoring costs–and they do not fit the early modern qualitative evidence as well as the explanation I have given. In any case, all of these different theories are in fact more complementary than mutually exclusive.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 De Serres, Le théâtre, pp. 46–48, 53. See also Dewald, Formation of a Provincial Nobility, pp. 183–201.Google Scholar

14 Compare the similar argument of Alston and Higgs, “Contractual Mix,” p. 340.Google Scholar

15 Compare Ibid., p. 344.

16 One-tailed tests are appropriate since the theory predicted the signs of the various coefficients.Google Scholar

17 The presence of vines does seem to have a stronger effect on contract choice than do other sorts of landlord capital. The reason may be that the vineyards required more constant surveillance than tools or animals; moreover, damage to vines was more difficult to remedy since there was obviously no rental market one could turn to in order to replace damaged vines.Google Scholar

18 If we add a real wage index for urban building workers to the logit equations with VINE and DISTANCE, the t-statistics are far from significant (t = 0.22 for the effect on renting; t = -0.05 for the effect on sharecropping). I have also tried to add various human capital measures, such as literacy and occupation, to the logit analysis, because some of the literature on contract choice suggests that the various contracts allow landlords to screen for tenant skill. Unfortunately, I found no evidence for this, no doubt because my human capital proxies were poor measures of the requisite skills.Google Scholar

19 With a larger sample, we could verify that the number of plots was an accurate proxy by checking it for those contracts that do mention farm size. I plan to do this in future research.Google Scholar

20 I relied upon an index of lease rates for a fixed collection of farm plots to construct my risk proxy. If the lease rates included a risk premium, then the level of the index itself ought to provide a rough proxy of risk conditions. If, on the other hand, the lease rates reflected only the expected profits from farming, then the coefficient of variation of the lease rates ought to track risk. I tried both proxies for risk, with similar results.Google Scholar

21 One additional task for future research is to specify a theoretical model in such a way that under certain circumstances sharecropping could actually become preferable to both wage labor and renting. This would be possible, for example, with a probit model.Google Scholar

22 A numerical example would be useful here. On the basis of our logit coefficients, we would expect a landlord who lived adjacent to his vineyard to sharecrop only 19 percent of the time and employ wage labor 75 percent of the time. An absentee landlord who lived 20 kilometers from the vineyard (a typical figure in the Lyonnais) would be much more likely to sharecrop (38 percent of the time) and less likely to farm with laborers (45 percent of the time).Google Scholar

23 For this, see “Social History and Taxes: The Case of Early Modern France,” California Institute of Technology Social Science Working Paper 495 (1983).Google Scholar

24 Duby, et al. , Histoire, vol. 2, p. 235;Google ScholarDontenwill, Serge, “Les baux à mi-fruits en Roannais et Brionnais aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Gutton, Jean-Pierre, Lyon er l'Europe: Hommes et Sociéiés: Mélanges d'histoire offerts à Richard Gascon, 2 vols. (Lyon, 1980), vol. 2, p. 198.Google Scholar

25 Although Louis Merle talks of the “draconian” terms of the sharecropping contracts, he acknowledges that they changed; see Merle, La métairie, pp. 161–85, 203, and also de Serres, Le théâtre, pp. 51–52.Google Scholar