1 Introduction
The economic significance of sharecropping, a type of farming in which families rent small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of their crop, has been reinterpreted over the past couple of decades.1 A long tradition of considering the sharecropping contract as an explanation of agrarian backwardness and an obstacle to economic development has been replaced by a more favourable view, in which it is seen as a useful contract for resolving problems associated with moral hazard or risk.2 The literature has insisted on the advantages of its use for a crop such as the vine, whose output is highly sensitive to the quality and timing of labour inputs and the fact that the plant can be easily and permanently damaged if the operations are badly carried out. Moreover, viticulture is very labour-intensive and has been difficult to mechanise until recently. Studies on sharecropping in the Tuscan wine region since the Middle Ages, or in the Catalonia vineyards in the last two centuries, have shown the advantages of this contract, especially when compared to fixed rent tenancy.3 However, a limitation of these studies is that sharecropping is less common in European vineyards than the literature suggests.4 Certain
The factors offered in the previous part explain why the sharecropping contract was common in a number of important wine regions, such as Beaujolais in France, the Italian region of Tuscany (Chianti) or Catalonia in Spain, but mainly absent in others. Although the contract originated in the Middle Ages in Tuscany, and from the seventeenth century in the other two cases, these regions not only survived without major changes until the 1940s but successfully helped displace other types of local wine producers, adapted to the profound changes in viticulture in this period, and were capable of producing premium wines. For the reasons we have already indicated, usual explanations are not enough to explain the survival of the form of organisation occurring in these regions, and we offer a different one. One crucial characteristic of wine production in these three regions was its concentration in large properties that centralised the production process of all or part of the harvest in order to enjoy the advantages offered by the integration of the production of grapes thanks to the nature of the contract, which gave the landowners great freedom to control the production of sharecroppers. On the other hand, the three regions shared a particularly hilly landscape which made labour-intensive viticulture and mechanisation expensive. Moreover, the nature of the terrain led to high levels of human specificity and explains the fact that most sharecroppers
In this chapter, we will first show the factors that explain the presence and absence of sharecropping in viticulture. Next, we will show which types of contracts vineyard landowners could use to maintain the advantages offered by sharecropping without its disadvantages. Finally, we will show how the landowners of Beaujolais, Tuscany and Catalonia solved the problems of division of harvest, specialisation and wine production in a context of technical change. We will pay special attention to the role of the supervision of sharecroppers, which was done in order to favour technical change and the reduction of transaction costs.
2 Sharecropping and Viticulture
The family farm is the most widespread form of organisation in agriculture because of the low costs of supervising labour. In farming, output is highly sensitive to the timing and quality of effort, and often deficiencies in these areas only become apparent after the harvest. Even then, it can be difficult to determine whether a poor crop was caused by the worker’s negligence or by exogenous factors, such as adverse weather conditions.5 The family farm provides strong incentives for labour to carry out tasks diligently and over time, and members can acquire important human asset specific skills linked to their land, which allow them to be more productive than if they have to keep changing farms each year.6 Furthermore, until recently there were few economies of scale in most types of agriculture, allowing the family farm to compete successfully with large estates or plantations.7 In addition, the fact that workers prefer to work their own land in order to increase their income and gain security for old age implies that in traditional economies the majority of farms are worked by their owners. Therefore, in order to be viable, land or labour contracts have to replicate the advantages that family farms enjoy.
Agriculture is a risky economic activity, not just because of output sensitivity to weather or disease, but also because price variability can have a big impact on farm income. National and international market integration can increase income variability as a poor harvest is no longer offset by high local prices. In this sense, the advantage of sharecropping compared to fixed rental tenancies, is that it shifts part of the risk of harvest or price failure to a less risk-averse landowner.9 However, there are a number of objections to the tenant’s risk aversion as being the determining factor in contract choice. First, fixed rent tenants can expect to be helped in case of poor harvests.10 Second, recent studies have questioned that sharecroppers are more risk averse than fixed rent tenants or even the landowners. Small owner-occupiers typically reduce risk by using the family endowments of land, labour and capital to produce a variety of different income streams, a characteristic found especially in the case of wine, whose output fluctuated considerably more than other crops. In France, like in Spain or Italy, most vineyards were minuscule and worked by part-time producers.11 Therefore, if large landowners wanted to attract potential tenants, they had to allow multicropping (polyculture) in sufficiently large holdings or to permit sharecroppers to work outside the exploitation, despite
A second kind of explanation is related to transaction costs. According to Alfred Marshall, transaction costs with sharecropping were particularly high because neither the landowner nor tenant received the full marginal return from increased labour and capital inputs, encouraging both to be undersupplied.12 However, the transaction costs associated with effort are actually lower on a family farm worked by sharecroppers, than using wage labour. More recently, transaction costs explanations have been used for preferring sharecropping contracts instead of tenancy when it is possible to damage fixed assets which affect future harvests (buildings, trees, soil, etc.). For example, with a crop such as the vine, output is highly sensitive to the quality and timing of labour inputs and the plant itself can be easily and permanently damaged if the pruning, ploughing and hoeing operations are carried out badly.13 This explains why rental contracts were not common in viticulture, while the use of wage labour was rare because the close monitoring required to reduce the risks of opportunistic behaviour on the part of the workers was too costly for most landowners.14 However, the relatively high figures for vineyards under fixed rent tenancy contracts found in French statistics in 1892 (8 per cent) suggest that the effect was limited in certain contexts.15 Sharecropping also created transaction costs associated with the division of the harvest, which was an important factor in limiting its use with viticulture.16 If the division took place in the vineyard, the landowner needed to be present to avoid theft and ensure that the different varieties, together with under- and over-ripe fruit, were divided equally between the two parties. For exogenous reasons, vineyards were usually highly fragmented, and the landowner would have considerable difficulties in monitoring a number of geographically dispersed plots throughout the village since most were located only on certain parts of the hillsides (generally south-facing), and on marginal land. The grapes then needed to be transported quickly to the landowner’s cellar to prevent fermentation. A less time-critical moment for dividing the harvest was after fermentation, but the
Market imperfections for factor inputs such as technical know-how, managerial skills or capital provide a third type of explanation. Farm management might involve not only organising the timing of activities, such as the start of the harvest, but also planning responses to exogenous shifts in factor and commodity prices or the appearance of new biological or labour-saving technologies, skills that were not easily accessible to sharecroppers.17 Capital market imperfections are another explanation in cases in which tenants were too poor to accept fixed rental contracts and sharecropping allowed landowners to advance farm equipment and working capital, with the future harvest used as security.18 However, on occasions, sharecroppers also had access to credit markets, sometimes because they owned some land, while, over time, market imperfections might be eliminated, leading to sharecropping disappearing locally.19
By contrast, too little attention has been given to two other factors that influence the nature of contracts in viticulture. First, contract choice needs to be linked to the nature of vertical co-operation and integration associated with the production and marketing arrangements of individual crops and livestock. The literature assumes that the landowner was indifferent to receiving payment in cash or kind but, while this might have been the case with crops such as cereals where spot markets existed, it was not with crops which required immediate processing and demanding a high degree of vertical coordination. Therefore, decisions on contract choice sometimes carried important implications concerning the extent that they were to be involved in downstream operations associated with processing and marketing farm produce. A second factor is the role of human asset specificity in long-term contracts. These contracts allowed sharecroppers to become more productive as they accumulated human asset specificity linked to the land, which encouraged them
3 Contract Choice in Commercial Viticulture From 1850
Problems such as the division of the harvest, the tenant’s desire to multicrop to reduce risk, or the monitoring of effort on highly fragmented plots all help to explain why sharecropping was comparatively rare. In France in 1892, according to the official statistics, only 8.3 per cent of the total area of vines were cultivated using sharecropping contracts, and these were concentrated in a few regions.22 Spanish statistics on contract choice are very poor, but sharecropping appears to have been rare, and geographically highly concentrated.23 In Italy, sharecropping was more widespread, but rarely used in commercial viticulture, despite the crop representing 20 per cent of the total agricultural output in 1911.24 Therefore, how were vines cultivated if sharecropping was so rare? By far the most common were owner-occupiers who made their own wines, generally of low quality, using only family labour. However, fine wines were often made on large estates, and specific labour contracts were more common than sharecropping or fixed rent tenancy. Finally, from 1860, technological change allowed
The typical organisation structure in the late nineteenth century was a family-operated vineyard making its own wine, much of it consumed by the family. Increasing amounts, however, were sold to wholesale merchants, who blended these different types of wine for the hundreds of thousands of small retailers in urban areas, to be sold as common wine.25 Fine wine production was organised differently, since there was a strictly limited area of favourable land to produce these wines, and considerable care was required in carrying out the different activities. This led landowners to create sophisticated labour contracts to resolve problems of moral hazard and monitoring, and creating incentives for vineyard workers to acquire, and utilise, human asset specificity. Fine wine production also required large amounts of capital as producers deliberately reduced output to improve quality, and high-quality winery equipment was needed.26 Sharecropping could have provided the high levels of human asset specificity that were required, but its use was absent in Bordeaux and Champagne, and vineyard workers lacked the skills and capital required to transform quality grapes into fine wine. Fine wine producers also wanted to protect their brand names, and therefore did not want sharecroppers to be able to sell their share on the market. As a result, the landowner kept the whole harvest and hired skilled winemakers, while vineyard workers received high wages. In Bordeaux, the prix-faiteurs were given the responsibility on the large estates for all the skilled operations on a fixed area of vines. In Burgundy, the vigneron a prix d’argent was given this responsibility, while the Champagne maisons outsourced the production of their grapes to small growers, although they remained under their supervision.27
But even in the case of common wine, new technologies changed the nature of vineyard supervision and reduced transaction costs between 1860 and 1914, encouraging the creation of large estates and use of wage labour and sometimes sharecropping contracts, especially in the French Midi.28 In the Midi, economies of scale began to be important on vineyards of over thirty hectares that were established on the fertile plains rather than the hills, and growers used large quantities of pesticides, fungicides and artificial fertilisers, as well
These factors suggest why sharecropping contracts were not widely used in commercial vine cultivation. Yet in a few important wine regions, notably Beaujolais in France, Tuscany (Chianti) in Italy and Catalonia in Spain, sharecropping was the most common contract. Furthermore, it managed to survive the profound technical and commercial changes in wine production over several centuries, and remained important until after the Second World War. At first glance, this seems to be the only element these very different contracts had in common, especially with respect to the degree of specialisation and the share of the production delivered to the owner. Nevertheless, sharecroppers in all three regions worked for large landowners who centralised the production process for all or part of the harvest, and produced a medium-quality wine for the market. The rest of the chapter shows how this type of organisation solved the problems of transaction costs associated with the supervision of work, management and the division of the harvest, together with the incentive structure for sharecroppers.
4 The Vigneronnage
The vineyards of Beaujolais were close to navigable water, and from the seventeenth century viticulture grew rapidly in response to the Parisian market. The region, in particular Haut (northern) Beaujolais where the hillside was especially steep, benefitted from a growing reputation and high prices from the mid-nineteenth century.31 Sharecropping represented between 30 and 40 per cent of all vines of the département of Rhône in 1882, but reached 80 per cent in the district of Villefranche-sur-Saône, in the north.32 Beaujolais
A typical property in Beaujolais had between twelve and forty hectares of vines, which were sub-divided and cultivated by between five and fifteen sharecroppers in standard units called vigneronnage.37 Tenants were given about two hectares of vines, and one-and-a-half hectares of pasture for livestock, which was sufficient to keep a family and a domestic servant fully employed. The sharecropper was required to reside on the farm, and the family was prohibited from working elsewhere. Although the milk, butter and cheese production was of poor quality, they provided an important dietary supplement and helped them survive phylloxera or periods of abnormally low wine prices.38 If the sharecroppers owned land themselves, they were expected to rent it to others.39 Landowners were responsible for all the major production decisions, including the choice of grape varieties and pruning methods used, as well as the timing and methods to be used in replanting after phylloxera (1875–1890), the degree of mechanisation, and when to begin the grape harvest.40 Landowners often advanced capital because of the high cost of harvesting for the sharecropper, and sometimes because of crop destruction by hail storms. However the role of the sharecropper was decisive. The hills and the high density of vines made viticulture in Beaujolais especially labour-intensive and made mechanisation expensive. The sharecropper was responsible not just for working the vines but also for supervising the harvest and winemaking,
The landowner played a crucial part in the winemaking process. The harvest was collected rapidly, and sharecroppers made the wine using their own equipment although, to avoid cheating, this was always located within the landowner’s winery. Sharecroppers were not allowed to have winemaking equipment in their own cellars, and for this reason the wineries of large estates sometimes had to accommodate more than a dozen wine presses.43 Winemaking was managed personally by the landowner or their agent, and after fermentation the wine from each vat was divided by somebody considered independent, with the landowner and sharecropper both present.44 Only then could the sharecropper take possession of their wine, to either sell on the market or to the landowner.45 Although these measures helped reduce the monitoring costs associated with dividing the harvest, they increased production costs compared to large growers without sharecroppers.46
An important feature of the contract for landowners was that labour costs were borne by the sharecroppers, including those of the harvest and winemaking. Therefore, when the poor harvests and exceptionally low prices of the 1900s ruined many sharecroppers, landowners had to offer a different contract called grands gages, which guaranteed a salary.47 These contracts were similar to the prix-fait found in Bordeaux or the vigneron a prix d’argent found in Burgundy, although they contained only limited incentives for good work for the sharecropper. While both landowners and tenants might have preferred
Finally, the vignerons might have preferred to be landowner-occupiers themselves. In fact, sharecroppers owned very little land, just 1.5 per cent of the Beaujolais land market during the nineteenth century, less than day labourers.48 Sharecroppers were able to save money after the First World War, but land concentration continued to increase during the interwar period.49 Not only did small growers lack the skills to produce quality wine and the capital to establish a cellar, but there were economies of scale associated with marketing it.50 One possibility was to move down the quality ladder, which had the added advantage of requiring less labour. Indeed, on the plains of the Bas-Beaujolais, which were well suited to mechanisation and producing large quantities of cheap wines, sharecropping was less common and disappeared after 1900. However, the area of vines in this region also declined because production costs were high compared to those of the Midi with which it competed.51 Sharecropping in Beaujolais was, therefore, linked to the production of better quality wines requiring the presence of a specialist winemaker to supervise operations and the need for a labour-intensive viticulture to provide a supply of suitable grapes. Yet the northern Beaujolais was an exception: its wines were superior to most other French wines (although inferior to those of Bordeaux or Burgundy, where direct cultivation was practised). Landowners were highly active in monitoring both the grape and winemaking process, as well as selling the wines.52 Sharecroppers preferred increasing human asset specificity than moving to other wine producing regions and becoming owner-occupiers. Despite the advantages, in times of low prices landowners had to be prepared to guarantee a salary to attract and retain workers.
5
The rabassa morta began to be used throughout Catalonia from the end of the seventeenth century to meet the rapid increase in the demand for wines and spirits. Most contracts were found in the districts where vines were planted on the hillsides, especially in the province of Barcelona and parts of Tarragona. In 1920, in many regions, including Penedès, between 60 to 80 per cent of all vines were cultivated by sharecroppers.53 Landowners were able to obtain a common wine of better quality and price compared to those produced by the new, large-scale cooperatives which started appearing during the first third of the twentieth century and, despite the intense conflicts that brought rabassers and landowners head to head, the contract seems to have reached its greatest geographical spread in the 1930s.54
The rabassa morta contracts originally required the grower or rabasser to clear the land, which was generally marginal land, and wooded, to plant vines within a fixed period (usually between two and ten years), to cultivate them in accordance with the customs of the region, and to hand over between one-fifth and one-third of the annual harvest to the owner.55 The farms covered between two and four hectares, often in different plots cultivated by a single sharecropper. The contracts were originally valid until two-thirds of the vines had died and, in theory, this implied that the contacts were indefinite, lasting for generations.56 Several factors explain how the contract was successful in reducing the different types of transaction costs associated with sharecropping. First, the absence of economies of scale in traditional viticulture and the scale of winemaking was low enough to allow sharecroppers to produce their own wine.57 Second, by guaranteeing a separated possession of the vines from the land, including the right to sell them, the contract provided strong motivation for labourers to care for the vines. Monitoring was therefore enforced through the market, and gave “high powered” incentives to apply more labour in the vineyard rather than in other activities, in contrast to the situation
In the wine districts, land concentration was on the rise, which gave the landowners the opportunity to process a significant amount of wine, even if they only received a relatively small share of the total harvest. Initially, quality was not relevant because exports from the region consisted of aguardiente (spirits), rather than wines. However, the building of new roads connecting the vineyards with Barcelona and other ports by the early nineteenth century allowed growers to switch to the production of table wines, for which they obtained better prices. Better quality wines were initially achieved without technological change, but wine production was increasingly centralised in the wineries of the mas, under the supervision of a masover, with the landowner, who usually lived locally, also taking an active role.61 The appearance of new vine diseases and pests – and, particularly, the destruction of all the vineyards by phylloxera between 1880 and 1900 – led to greater involvement of growers in grape production. Landowners and sharecroppers maintained their contracts, despite the opportunity offered to the landlords to recover the land when two-thirds of the vines had died. However, the planting and cultivation of the new American strains was more capital-intensive and required chemical fertilisers, which further increased the intervention of the landowner.62 Like in Tuscany and Beaujolais, the particularities of the mountainous landscape, which made
Despite the difficulties created by the low wine prices during the interwar period, the landowners’ wineries using the rabassa morta contract were more successful than the cooperative wineries that spread throughout the Catalan wine-growing areas from the early twentieth century.64 Like in Tuscany, cooperatives had more difficulty establishing themselves in sharecropping areas. Despite having modern facilities and enjoying enormous economies of scale, cooperatives had trouble competing with low-cost regions, such as La Mancha. In particular, while Catalan cooperatives failed to supply economic incentives to independent growers to improve grape quality, large growers using sharecropping contracts were able to guarantee the quality of the grapes through vertical integration across the different farms in their property. The rabassa morta contract clauses allowed the landowner to enter the farm in order to supervise the various tasks, to fix the harvest date, and to control the winemaking process in the vats of each sharecropper.65 This supervision indirectly benefitted the rabassers themselves, as it allowed them to produce better quality wines – and explains their reluctance to join the cooperatives, considering that their product was of better quality.66 Landowners were also able to make marketing decisions autonomously, having the ability to control their product, while cooperative managers usually struggled to justify their decisions to their members, given the large price fluctuations.67
However, like in Tuscany, the increasing costs of chemical products and depressed wine prices from the early twentieth century decreased the return on unit labour input in viticulture compared to what unskilled wage labour in industry could earn, especially in the rapidly growing city of Barcelona, whose population quadrupled between 1887 and 1930. Although yields per hectare
6 The Mezzadria Poderale in Tuscany
The mezzadria poderale was a medieval sharecropping contract, widely found in the provinces of central Italy, particularly in the mountainous regions of Tuscany, Umbria and Marche. In a similar way to the large French métairies, farmers practised multicropping (polyculture) and self-sufficient agriculture. In the case of Tuscany, and, more specifically, in the Chianti regions of Florence, Arezzo, Pisa and Siena, there was a growing trend towards wine specialisation and the expansion of the contract between 1830 and 1940, while preserving the multicropping characteristics of the contract. Like Beaujolais, Chianti sold at a higher price than common wine, with a premium of up to one hundred per cent in the 1930s, and in Italy in 1938 it represented 34 per cent of premium wine produced in wineries of more than 500 hl.71
Although sharecroppers had ample autonomy to choose the crops, landowners could ask them to increase the production of more commercial ones. Landowners could modify the size of the podere in order to make them suited to more labour-intensive crops or a smaller family, and, in certain cases, they supplied basic food in exchange for an increase in the production of commercial crops.76 With the increased commercialisation of Tuscan wines in the national and international market from the last third of the nineteenth century, landowners started to play a greater role in key production decisions, such as the choice of grape varieties needed to produce Chianti, the pruning system used or the control of the harvest.77 In addition, the fattorie were equipped
Winemaking was originally carried out by both sharecroppers and landowners, but as wine quality and demand increased, it was carried out by the sharecroppers in the central winery, where the division took place under the supervision of the farm manager (fattore).81 As Chianti wine is a mixture of different varieties, its production required great control. Sharecroppers often took out loans with the fattore against commercial crops such as wine, which were settled annually after the harvest.82
The landowners of the fattorie, which were closely linked to the production and export of Chianti, benefitted from their greater economies of scale in winemaking, their capacity to produce a sufficient variety of grapes, and the advantages in marketing they provided.83 Despite the growing criticism in the nineteenth century of the mezzadrie poderale because of their supposed inefficiency and conservatism, the number of sharecroppers increased as a share of the labour force, from 42 per cent in 1882 to 55 per cent in 1911. Just like in the Penedès region, cooperatives did not compete with the private wineries in sharecropping regions.84
7 Conclusions
Although sharecropping was generally rare in viticulture, it was widely found in the important European regions of Beaujolais, Chianti and Penedès, where it showed significant capacity to adapt to the profound changes in viticulture between 1830 and 1930. Geographical restrictions made viticulture especially labour-intensive and limited mechanisation in these regions, thus explaining the importance of human asset specificity and long-term contracts. Furthermore, in these three regions landowners centralised winemaking, which allowed them to enjoy the advantages of greater economies of scale and enabled them to control the grape quality of their tenants. However, their success was linked to being located in the vicinity of Lyon, Florence and Barcelona. These were their main markets and were close enough to the vineyards that landowners did not need to create sophisticated marketing networks to sell their premium wines. By contrast, while the local cooperative wineries had the economies of scale to create such networks, they failed to create economic
A further consideration is the increasing long-term instability in the day-to-day relations between landlords and vine growers. The combination of low wine prices, growing capital requirements, higher opportunity costs of labour (because of industrialisation) and the barriers to exit led to collective action to improve contractual conditions. In particular, sharecroppers wished to take action because their autonomy, a characteristic of these long-term contacts, was threatened by the greater involvement of landlords in the management of their estates. While this allowed sharecroppers to produce better quality wines, it also limited their possibilities for negotiating changes and devising alternative contracts.
An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the eurho Conference 2019, Paris, 10–13 September 2019. We wish to thank Rolf Bauer for his comments. The authors have benefitted from financial assistance from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación pid2019-104869gb-100.
Douglas W. Allen and Dean Lueck, The Nature of the Farm (Cambridge: The mit Press, 2002).
Daniel A. Ackerberg and Maristella Botticini, “The Choice of Agrarian Contracts in Early Renaissance Tuscany: Risk Sharing, Moral Hazard or Capital Market Imperfections?” Explorations in Economic History 37 (2000): 241–57, for Tuscany. Juan Carmona and James Simpson, “The Rabassa Morta in Catalan Viticulture: The Rise and Decline of a Long-Term Sharecropping Contract, 1670s–1920s,” The Journal of Economic History 59, no. 2 (1999): 290–315; for Beaujolais, Philip Hoffman, “The Economic Theory of Sharecropping in Early Modern France,” The Journal of Economic History 42, no. 1 (1984): 155–62.
Juan Carmona and James Simpson, “Explaining Contract Choice: Vertical Coordination, Sharecropping, and Wine in Europe, 1850–1950,” The Economic History Review 65, no. 3 (2012): 887–909; Samuel Garrido, “Sharecropping Was Sometimes Efficient: Sharecropping with Compensation for Improvements in European Viticulture,” The Economic History Review 70, no. 3 (August 2017): 997.
Allen and Lueck, Nature, 6–7; Yujiro Hayami and Keijiro Otsuka, The Economics of Contract Choice: An Agrarian Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 12–16.
For asset specificity, see Oliver Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, and Relational Contracting (New York, Free Press: 1985), 242.
Debraj Ray, Development Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1998), 453–55; Hayami and Otsuka, Economics, 6–7.
Allen and Lueck, Nature, 58–61.
French literature has noted the expansion of the contract in times of difficulty; see Fabien Connord, La terre des autres: Le métayage en France depuis 1889 (Montrouge, Editions du Bourg: 2018), 98–99.
Elizabeth Griffiths and Marc Overton, Farming to Halves: The Hidden History of Sharefarming in England from Medieval to Modern Times (Basingstoke, Palgrave: 2009), 127–30.
In France there were 1.6 million hectares of vines and 1.6 million growers in the 1900s. Marcel Lachiver, Vins, vignes et vignerons: Histoire du vignoble français (Paris, Fayard: 1988), 583. Vine scattering was an additional risk-minimising device in Italy. Giovanni Federico and Pablo Martinelli, “Italy to 1938,” in Wine Globalization: A New Comparative History, ed. Kym Anderson and Vicente Pinilla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 190–91.
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume (Basingstoke, [1890] 1990), 534–37.
Carmona and Simpson, “Rabassa Morta,” 292–93.
See, especially, Jules Guyot, Étude des vignobles de france pour servir a l’enseignement mutuel de la viticulture et de la vinification françaises, vol. 3 (Paris, 1868), 292–93.
Garrido, “Sharecropping Was Sometimes Efficient,” 980.
Allen and Lueck, Nature, 53–55.
James Roumasset, “The Nature of the Agricultural Firm,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 26 (1995): 161–77.
Ray, Development Economics, 564–68; Hayami and Otsuka, Economics, Chapter 5.
Connord, La terre des autres, 48–51.
Oriana Bandiera, “Contract Duration and Investment Incentives: Evidence from Land Tenancy Agreements,” Journal of the European Economic Association 5, no. 5 (2007): 956–57 stresses the importance of non-observable investments.
In the US South, the contract is usually explained as a rung on a farm ladder that saw the tenant move from labourer, to sharecropper, tenant and, finally, landowner, as they accumulated capital, skills and reputation over their working life. Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie, “Time on the Ladder: Career Mobility in Agriculture, 1890–1938,” The Journal of Economic History 65, no. 4 (2005): 1058–81.
Connord, La terre des autres, 44–48.
Zoilo Espejo, Costumbres de derecho y economía rural (Madrid, 1900).
Federico and Martinelli, “Italy to 1938,” Table 5.1.
Henri Sempé, Régime économique du vin: Production, consommation, échange (Bordeaux and Paris, 1898), 104–6.
Carmona and Simpson, “Explaining Contract Choice,” 896.
Carmona and Simpson, “Explaining Contract Choice,” 896–98.
James Simpson, Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Carmona and Simpson, “Explaining Contract Choice.”
Carmona and Simpson, “Explaining Contract Choice,” 903.
Gilbert Garrier, Paysans du Beaujolais et du Lyonnais: 1800–1970, vol. 1 (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1973), 270, notes that planning vines (the minage) cost between eight and ten times more than further south.
Pierre Galet, Les vignobles de France, vol. 1, Méditerranée, Rhône-Alpes, Bourgogne, Franche-Comté, Alsace-Lorraine (Paris: Éditions Tec & Doc, 2004), 1100. The area of vineyards in Villefranche increased fourfold, from 6,643 hectares in 1827 to 26,396 in 1905.
Jacques Burel, Le vignoble Beaujolais (Lyon: Riou, 1941), 71–72.
Garrier, Paysans, vol. 1, 138.
Especially during the mid-nineteenth century. Garrier, Paysans., vol. 1, 605 and vol. 2, Table 6.
Garrier, Paysans, vol. 1, 269.
François Myard, Le vigneronnage en Beaujolais (Lyon, 1907).
Humbert Chatillon, Le Beaujolais viticole (Paris, 1906), 67.
Cheysson, L’habitation du métayer vigneron du Beaujolais autrefois et aujourd’hui (Paris, 1899), 221.
Myard, Vigneronnage, 208–9. For the increasing landowner participation in sharecroppers’ expenses, see Connord, La terre des autres, 52.
Myard, Vigneronnage, 193. The harvest represented about 25 to 30 per cent of the sharecropper’s annual farm costs. Garrier, Paysans, vol. 1, 391.
Garrier, Paysans, vol. 1, 152–53. An enquiry carried out in 1898 showed that some families had been working the same farm for more than 150 years: Myard, Vigneronnage, 305.
Paul Ferrouillat and M. Charvet, Les celliers: Construction et matériel vinicole avec la description des principaux celliers du Midi, du Bordelais, de la Bourgogne et de l’Algérie (Montpellier: Paris, 1896), 380 and Cheysson, L’habitation, 230.
Myard, Vigneronnage, 193.
Garrier, Paysans, vol. 1, 390.
Winemaking at Château Malescot in Bordeaux in the late nineteenth century, for example, cost 437 francs per hectare, against 657 francs on the Deleche estate: Ferrouillat and Charvet, Les celliers, 360, 388.
M. V. Vermorel and M. R. Danguy, Les vins du Beaujolais, du Mâconnais et du Chalonnais (Dijon, 1894), 17; Myard, Vigneronnage, 262–63.
Garrier, Paysans, vol. 1, 360.
Garrier, Paysans, vol. 1, 605.
Hubert Clique, Les caves coopératives de vinification en Bourgogne (Paris, 1931), 97, 141.
After the phylloxera, vineyards in the Bas Beaujolais declined by 25 per cent compared to an increase of 18 per cent in Villefranche. Garrier, Paysans, vol. 1, 429.
According to Goujon, most of them were négociants, or needed a professional manager to supervise the cellar. Paul Goujon, La cave et le grenier: Vignobles du Chalonnais et du Mâconnais au xixe siecle (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989), 216.
According to Raimon Soler-Becerro, Viticultura, desigualtat i conflicte agrari: La lluita per la terra a la Catalunya vitícola, 1900–1936 (Tarragona: Publicacions urv, 2019), Appendix 5, in 26 villages of Penedès.
Juan Carmona and James Simpson, “Cuando el rentista no es derrotado: El caso de la rabassa catalán, 1890–1936” (ifcs – Working Papers in Economic History, wh 31891/uc3M, Universidad Carlos iii de Madrid, Instituto Figuerola, 2020), Table 1.
Emili Giralt, “El conflicto ‘rabassaire’ y la cuestión agraria en Cataluña hasta 1936,” Revista de trabajo 7 (1964): 51–72.
Hence the Catalan name, rabassa morta, meaning “dead vine.”
Carmona and Simpson, “Rabassa Morta,” 297.
Carmona and Simpson, “Rabassa Morta,” 293.
Carmona and Simpson, “Explaining Contract Choice.” Among recent works, Garrido, “Sharecropping Was Sometimes Efficient,” or Josep Colomé et al., “The Rabassaire Struggle: Long Term Analysis of a Social and Political Movement,” International Review of Social History 63, no. 1 (2018): 1–27 ignored the role of landlords as winegrowers.
Carmona and Simpson, “Rabassa Morta,” 294.
Most landlords were growers who advertised in the trade directories and sold on Barcelona’s expanding market: Carmona y Simpson, “Cuando el rentista.” The information on the place of residence of the landowners is based on Soler-Becerro, Viticultura, Appendix 2.
Carmona y Simpson, “Rabassa Morta,” 303–4.
Giralt, “El Conflicto,” 56–57.
For Catalan cooperatives, see Jordi Planas, “Els inicis del cooperativisme vitivinícola,” in Vinyes, vins i cooperativisme vitivinícola a Catalunya, ed. Josep Colomé Ferrer, Jordi Planas Maresma, and Francesc Valls Junyent (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2015), 369–401.
Mancomunitat de Catalunya, Projecte de regulació dels censos, rabassa morta i terratge a Catalunya (Barcelona, 1923), 38–47, Instituto de reformas sociales, La “Rabassa morta” y su reforma (Madrid, 1923).
Jordi Planas, Viticultura i cooperativisme: La comarca d’Igualada, 1890–1939 (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2013), 384–85, notes that few sharecroppers joined cooperatives.
Simpson, Creating Wine, 74.
Tenants would complain about the landlord’s failure to get good prices.
A different interpretation is based on the increasing autonomy of the sharecroppers. For example, see Ramon Garrabou, Jordi Planas, and Enric Saguer, “Sharecropping and Management of Large Rural Estates in Contemporary Catalonia,” Journal of Peasant Studies 28, no. 3 (2001): 101. However, in this study the role of the landowner as grower is, again, completely ignored.
Carmona and Simpson, “Cuando el rentista,” 22–28.
Istituto Centrale di Statisticca del Regno d’Italia, Annuario Statisco dell’Agricoltura italiana 1936–1938 (Roma, 1939), 103. For the percentage of quality wine in Federico and Martinelli, Italy until 1938, see Table 5.4.
Sandro Rogari, Le campagne toscane nel ventennio postunitario: Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura, vol. 2 (2009), 103; Istituto Centrale di Statisticca, Annuario Statisco, 103, and Ministro per la Costituente, Rapporto della Commissione económica (Roma, 1947), 213.
The Riccoli, one of the best known, had two thousand hectares in three fattorie in 1838: Giulana Biagioli, “Storie di aziende agrarie,” in Marche 7 (2016): 177.
Francesco Galassi, “Stasi e sviluppo nell’agricoltura toscana, 1870–1914: Primi resultati di uno studio aziendale,” Rivista di storia economica 3 (1986): 304–37; Giuliana Biagioli, “La mezzadria poderale nell’Italia centro-settentrionale in età moderna e contemporanea (secoli xv – xx),” Rivista di storia dell’agricoltura 42, no. 2 (2002): 83.
Biagioli, “La mezzadria poderale,” 54–55.
Luporini and Parigi, “Multi-Task Sharecroppping Contracts: The Italian Mezzadria.” Economica 63 (1996): 445–57; Biagioli, “Storie di aziende,” 185; Frank Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany 1919–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 28.
Ricasoli’s role in the definition of the varieties of grapes that make up the “Chianti Classico” was crucial: Biagioli, “La mezzadria poderale,”2000. For Chianti and sharecropping, see Luca Mocarelli and Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “Viticulture in the Italy of the Mezzadria,” in A History of Wine in Europe, ed. Conca Messnia (London: Palgrave, 2018); on pruning, see Galassi, “Stasi e sviluppo,” 322.
In 1902, the demands for reform called for greater sharecropper participation in the major production decisions. Snowden, Fascist Revolution, 52. Ministro, Rapporto, 214–15.
Promiscuous cultivation was greatest in the Chianti production areas: Yearbook, 1939, 272. For promiscuous cultivation as a way to reduce erosion, see Dario Gaggio, The Shaping of Tuscany: Landscape and Society between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 116.
Evictions were very rare, although there was some mobility within the fattorie themselves: Snowden, Fascist Revolution, 30.
Biagioli, “La mezzadria poderale,” 77–78.
Biagioli, “La mezzadria poderale,” 85.
Giulia Meloni and John Swinnen, “Trade and Terroir: The Political Economy of the World’s First Geographical Indications,” Food Policy 81 (2018): 1–20. It was marketed at higher prices; the price was double that of ordinary wine in the 1930s: Istituto Centrale di Statisticca, Annuario Statisco, 406–7.
The competitive advantages in Biagioli, “La mezzadria poderale,” 63–64.
Biagioli, “La mezzadria poderale,” 65.
Luporini and Parigi, “Multi-Task Sharecropping Contracts,” 455.
Ministro, Rapporto, 221; Biagioli, “La mezzadria poderale,” 92 and 66.
For an average of the expenditure of four large fattorie at the beginning of the twentieth century, see Galassi, “Stasi e Sviluppo,” 324.
For the sharecroppers’ demands, see Snowden, Fascist Revolution, 44–47.
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