The economics of tenancy in early twentieth-century southern Italy

Minister at the time, drew Parliament's attention to the severity of problems in the area and thus to the need to ensure that the members of the commission were 'persons who enjoyed the fullest confidence of Parliament . . . and of the entire country'.3 It is thus not surprising that the final report of the commission, contained in I2 volumes, provides the most comprehensive, detailed, and accurate portrait available of farming in southern Italy before the First World War. One of the most striking features of this report, and the one with which we are concerned in this article, is its account of southern tenure systems. In sharp contrast to the traditional picture of the south as a land dominated for the most part by large estates worked by wage labour, the commissioners discovered contractual arrangements of much greater variety and intricacy. Our task in this article is first to describe in some detail the tenurial arrangements reported by the commissioners and, second, to demonstrate that there are sound economic reasons for believing that the commissioners' portrait, not the traditional one, is the more authentic. In a nutshell, we argue that complex tenancy relationships in the south represented quite rational responses by landlords and tenants to the problems of high income variance, incomplete or nonexistent credit and insurance markets, and supervision-intensive cash crops (that is, output that was extremely sensitive to the quality of labour inputs). Tenure systems thus constituted attempts by farmers to resolve the difficulties