Overview
sharecropping
Quick Reference
A farming type where the tenant pays his rent in produce rather than in cash. In the USA, lack of capital left the cropper dependent upon others for subsistence until market time. Storekeepers furnished the cropper with food and clothing during the year, the accumulated debt to be repaid, with interest, at harvest time. The store owner was often also the buyer of the crops (M. P. Conzen1994). ‘Share-tenant relations are…compromises between risk and incentive…Given a choice, better-off workers would seek tenant relations, while poorer workers or recent arrivals would have to enter sharecropping arrangements’ (Brannstrom (2001) Polit. Geog. 20, 7).
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