Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Sharecropping is known to have been in operation in Italy in the early ninth century, in Tuscany, and seems to have become much more common after 1200. From the seventeenth to the mid twentieth century, the sharecropping system dominated the agriculture and land management of central Italy, and therefore necessarily dominated the lives of most of its population. Having come through the political upheavals of the Italian Risorgimento and unification largely unchanged, and then bolstered under Fascism, sharecropping (la mezzadria) imploded in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Marche, the region where it had been most prevalent and from which it was slowest to disappear, the area farmed under this system had shrunk from 69.2 per cent of all productive land in 1947 to 31.3 per cent by 1970, and it continued to shrink fast thereafter.1The dynamics of this implosion are complex: the post-war political environment did not favour sharecropping, and ultimately legislated for its demise; the central regions lost much of their rural workforce to employment abroad and then to Italy's own industrialisation, profoundly affecting the supply of agricultural labour; peasant families' expectations of a reasonable standard of living changed, and could no longer be met by subsistence agriculture; the population slid from the mountains to the hills, from the hills to the valleys and plains, and thence to the cities; and agriculture itself went through a process of modernisation. This article approaches these upheavals by examining one specific aspect of change in the rural worlds of this region after 1945: the mechanisation of agriculture. Within this, I focus on the increasing use of the tractor. This is particularly symbolic of modernisation, being both a very visible replacement of the old ways of farming, supplanting oxen and other animals, and the largest expense on equipment a farmer would have yet had to confront.
Accounts of social and economic change within Italy in the post-war decades normally concentrate on the 'economic miracle', and specifically the boom of 1958 to 1963. This was supported by migration from Italy's South towards its North West (the 'industrial triangle' of Genoa-Turin-Milan) as internal destinations became more important than the traditional external destinations of northern Europe and the Americas. My...