The Legal Status of Tenants and Sharecroppers in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France and Ottoman Syria

Abstract

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the role of the tenant farmer and sharecropper in both Syria and France witnessed important transformations which lent increasing relevance to the social and legal status enjoyed by these cultivators. In various regions of France after the sixteenth century, a rising class of bourgeois landholders increasingly appropriated agricultural lands from both peasant proprietors and nobles, leading to the spread of both sharecropping and leasing contracts. In Ottoman Syria, the appropriation of peasant lands and proliferation of tenancy arrangements was linked to an expanding state which sought to consolidate power and ensure the consistent flow of revenue. Thus, this paper will address how the socio-legal discourse on tenants and sharecroppers differed in a context where arable lands were appropriated by private rather than public forces. Issues that are examined include: perceptions of agricultural innovation; possession rights; and payment of rent and other dues.

While Islamic legal scholars articulated a discourse which sought to incorporate tenants and sharecroppers, French legal and social thinkers of the day championed the rights of the landlord above all else. Unlike their Syrian counterparts, French thinkers linked agricultural development and efficient production to private ownership of land. In Syria, on the other hand, jurists advocated a land tenure system in which the possession rights of cultivators were supported while landlord interests were not jeopardised. Thus, agricultural development in the Syrian case was articulated within a framework which conceded multiple layers of ownership. These ideas would have an important impact on nineteenth-century developments in both regions.