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The Origins of Southern Sharecropping, by Edward Royce. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993. 279 pp. $34.95 cloth. ISBN: 1-56639-069-9
SCOTT G. MCNALL California State University, Chico
At the end of the Civil War, white plantation owners struggled to maintain the harsh gang labor system typical of the antebellum South. Freed blacks, on the other hand, demanded their "forty acres and a mule." Neither owners nor former slaves got what they wanted. By 1868, sharecropping was the dominant economic arrangement in southern agriculture. What happened?
Royce examines with care and precision two of the major explanations offered by historians and economists for the rise of southern sharecropping. The first is the predisposing-conditions argument, which claims that sharecropping occurred because of certain favorable conditions: a large class of landholders, a shortage of labor, and no incentives to mechanize. The second, or neoclassical economic explanation, suggests that sharecropping was a rational market response, advantageous to both black...