Labor Use and Landlord Control: Sharecropping and Household Structure in Fifteenth‐Century Tuscany

Abstract

The prevalence of large and extended families among sharecroppers in northern and central Italy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been well documented in the historical demographic literature. Landlords relied on tenants' extended household structure to provide a large labor force that increased their income. In earlier centuries, however, landlords' involvement in agricultural production may have had little impact on household structure. Evidence from fifteenth-century Tuscany illustrates that household extension was not as common among sharecroppers during this period of time. Qualitative analyses of personal correspondence and tax declarations from the fifteenth century suggest reasons why landlords' management techniques did not lead to household extension among sharecroppers. Unlike landlords in later periods of time, fifteenth-century landlords relied more on rearranging plots of land than particular demographic practices, because land consolidation was still in progress and farms were not fixed geographically. In addition, during the earlier period of time, sharecropping was less institutionalized and landlords had less power over their tenants. These findings suggest that sharecropping, as a tenurial form, did not necessarily lead to household extension. Instead, the effect of the tenurial form depended on the nature of sharecropping and the degree of landlords' power.

Introduction: Towards a Comparative History of Europe’s Labour Laws c.1350–1850

“…In such a context, wage control was simply redundant. 69 The absence of wage control cannot only be explained by the relative weakness of competitive labour markets, however. Regions that were highly dependent on wage labour were also characterised by the absence of market interventions.…”

Marriage and Family

“…Using individual records from decennial censuses, Fitch and Ruggles (2000) used other information about the individual and household to create measures of family relationships using a probabilistic approach, although they could not identify all those who had been married but were not married at the time of the census. Emigh (1998) studied the relationship between household structure and sharecropping in 15th-century Tuscany using data from the Catasto of 1427-fiscal documents from 15th-century Tuscany used to assess taxes. Documentary evidence of this sort ''makes sampling by households virtually impossible'' and makes it difficult to gather variables for large numbers of cases (Emigh 1999).…”