Mansharing is something witches excel at, and have excelled at since prehistoric times, which brings me back to the suspicion that witches have not evolved in millions of years, like the sharks and the crocodiles. They get by by wearing a veneer of civility and a fake smile. Anyways, I digress, it's mansharing I was talking about.
About the time of King Solomon, a witch and her neighbor began arguing over a man. Both claimed he was her husband. The man said they were both his wives. Both women said they had no evidence he had had ever been married to the other. The village elders could not decide who was telling the truth, so they sent them up to King Solomon's court. He heard them out, told the executioner to chop the man in half, split him down the middle, like just so, so each woman could have at least half a husband.
The witch went,"Yes!"
Her neighbor went,"Nooooo. She can keep him."
- SDG
SHARECROPPING(Wiki)
Sharecropping has benefits and costs for both the owners and the croppers. It encourages the cropper to remain on the land throughout the harvest season to work the land, solving the harvest rush problem. At the same time, since the cropper pays in shares of his harvest, owners and croppers share the risk of harvests being large or small and prices being high or low. Because tenants benefit from larger harvests, they have an incentive to work harder and invest in better methods than in a slave plantation system. However, by dividing the working force into many individual workers, large farms no longer benefit from economies of scale. On the whole, sharecropping was not as economically efficient as the gang agriculture of slave plantations.[1] In the U.S. "tenant" farmers own their own mules and equipment, and "sharecroppers" do not, and thus sharecroppers are poorer and of lower status.
Sharecropping occurred extensively in colonial Africa, Scotland, and Ireland and came into wide use in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). The South had been devastated by war; planters had ample land but little money for wages or taxes. At the same time, most of the former slaves had labor but no money and no land; they rejected the kind of gang labor that typified slavery. The solution was the sharecropping system focused on cotton, which was the only crop that could generate cash for the croppers, landowners, merchants and the tax collector. Poor white farmers, who previously had done little cotton farming, needed cash as well and became sharecroppers.[2]
Jeffery Paige made a distinction between centralized sharecropping found on cotton plantations and the decentralized sharecropping with other crops. The former is characterized by political conservatism and long lasting tenure. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. Their work is heavily supervised as slave plantations were. This form of tenure tends to be replaced by wage slavery as markets penetrate. Decentralized sharecropping involves virtually no role for the landlord: plots are scattered, peasants manage their own labor and the landowners do not manufacture the crops. Leases are very short which leads to peasant radicalism. This form of tenure becomes more common when markets penetrate.[3]
Use of the sharecropper system has also been identified in England[4] (as the practice of "farming to halves"). It is still used in many rural poor areas today, notably in Pakistan and India.
Although there is a perception that sharecropping was exploitative, “evidence from around the world suggests that sharecropping is often a way for differently endowed enterprises to pool resources to mutual benefit, overcoming credit restraints and helping to manage risk.”[5]
It can have more than a passing similarity to serfdom or indenture, and has therefore been seen as an issue of land reform in contexts such as the Mexican Revolution. However, Nyambara states that Eurocentric historiographical devices such as 'feudalism' or 'slavery' often qualified by weak prefixes like 'semi-' or 'quasi-' are not helpful in understanding the antecedents and functions of sharecropping in Africa.[6]
Sharecropping agreements can however be made fairly, as a form of tenant farming or sharefarming that has a variable rental payment, paid in arrears. There are three different types of contracts.[7]
- Workers can rent plots of land from the owner for a certain sum and keep the whole crop.
- Workers work on the land and earn a fixed wage from the land owner but keep some of the crop.
- No money changes hands but the worker and land owner each keep a share of the crop.
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