Sharecropping and Investment in Agriculture in Early Modern Times

Abstract

the paper examines the spread of sharecropping that followed a wave of investment in agriculture in sixteenth - and seventeenth-century France. Using results from the modern theory of share contracts, it argues that sharecropping was a means of risk sharing that favored both landlords and tenants. Although the evidence used in this paper comes from France, the results may well apply to other areas of early modern Europe.

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