Essays on local and regional italian agriculture (1880-1929): sharecropping in siena
- Autores: Giacomo Zanibelli
- Directores de la Tesis: Eva Fernández García (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Samuel Pascual Garrido Herrero (presid.), Miguel Martín-Retortillo Naya (secret.), Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Historia Económica por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; la Universidad de Barcelona y la Universitat de València (Estudi General)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: e-Archivo
- Resumen
Introduction and presentation of the PhD dissertation’s general research methodologies.
This doctoral thesis consists of three essays on Italian agrarian history from the 1880s to 1929. Essay 1 studies the development of Italian agriculture in the 1880s. Essays 2 and 3 looks at agriculture in the province of Siena during the period 1880 and 1929 using data at a farm and municipal data.
Essay 2 studies the effects on production of the crisis of the 1880s in a large Tuscan sharecropping property. Essay 3 the effects the most important economic shocks between 1880 and 1929 on Sienese agriculture, a sharecropping area, through original and homogeneous data at a municipal scale.
The history of Italian agriculture has been widely reviewed thanks to the contributions by Giovanni Federico who introduced a Cliometric approach (Federico, 2003). These studies have brought new light to the Italian agricultural world in a purely macro dimension.
Before contributions of Giovanni Federico, scholars had studied Italian agrarian history through an approach mainly of a qualitative nature. Despite this, important agricultural studies have been developed by important institutions such as the Accademia dei Georgofili (2002) which promoted a series of volumes on Italian agrarian history from antiquity to the contemporary age. It is also important to mention the volumes on the history of Italian agriculture edited by Piero Bevilacqua (1989).
The general objective of this doctoral thesis is to try to observe the development of agriculture in at a regional level during the major economic crises that occurred between the late 19th century and the 1920s. The research question will be carried out mainly through the study of southern of Tuscany and in particular the province of Siena.
This thesis constitutes a regional study of the Tuscan agriculture. Scholars such as Mirri (1970), Biagioli (1970), Galassi (1984, 1989, 1992) and Galassi and Cohen (1994) have highlighted that previous studies had approached Tuscan sharecropping without considering the distinctive characteristics of this specific agricultural contract comparing production and productivity with those of high farming (Giorgetti, 1974; Pazzagli, 1979; Sereni, 2016).
Looking at Tuscan sharecropping from a perspective different to that of the traditional historiography and contributing to regional and local economic history are the main objective of this doctoral thesis. This will allow to bring new interpretations of the production system of the Tuscan sharecropping.
This was carried out by trying to create a synergy between national history and local history.
In this perspective, the study of local cases becomes particularly motivating because I could access relevant information available at local archives that allows to significantly local and regional agricultural history of Siena.
Essay 1 reviews literature about the effects of the 1880s crisis in the process of growth of Italian agriculture, starting from the controversy between Romeo (1958) and Gerschenkron (1956, 1968) on the origins of the Italian economic take-off. During the years of the “Italian Economic Miracle” Gerschenkron elaborated an index of Italian industrial production from 1881 to 1913 that allowed to identify how the State had a significant role in the delay of Italian economic development, because of the protection of traditional manufacturing that blocked the emerging modern industry, as well as the tariff policies such as the protectionist tariff on wheat introduced in 1887.
Romeo (1958), using a methodological approach linked to Rostow (1959), considered that late take-off was mainly attributable to foreign countries. Romeo also criticized Sereni's Marxist interpretation on a lack of a revolution in agriculture that would have led to rising living standards of rural population, but also slow down the development process based on industry and capital accumulation. To sum up, a key role in this delay can be attributed to the state and to the lack of attention to certain specific of the global economy.
Recently economic historians have reexamined this issue again. Especially important are the contributions of Stefano Fenoaltea (2020), recently died, which have allowed us to start a broader debate and led to the publication of fundamental studies that estimate national economic aggregates such as those of Federico and Cohen (2001) and Baffigi (2015), which made possible to examine whether protectionist policies negatively affected the Italian agricultural development process.
On the other hand, economic historians examine the role of human capital accumulation in the process of economic growth in Italy (Felice, 2007; Cappell, 2016; Cappelli and Vasta 2020). In this sense, Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro (2011) drew attention to the training of agricultural technicians considering this variable essential to be able to observe the Italian agricultural development.
In order to examine the development of agricultural production, I decided to focus attention on wheat and wine, as wine led to production specialization and is closely related to the development process.
The study was carried out through the reconstruction of the long-term evolution of output, prices, imports, exports and labor productivity in the period from 1861 to 1911 in order to verify conclusions by Fenoaltea (2006, 2020) in the long term.
Essay 2 considers the effects of the cereal crisis of 1880s in a big Tuscan sharecropping latifundia located between the provinces of Siena and Florence, the Canonica’s farm of Certaldo, which was initially composed of 25 production units over an area of over 600 hectares. The study examines the long-term evolution of production of sharecroppers from 1858 to 1889, especially in the 1880s. This was possible thanks to the well-preserved archival documentation kept at the State Archives of Siena (Zanibelli, 2019a).
This new data of a large Tuscan sharecropping farm allows to contribute to the debate on sharecropping that has attracted attention to economic historians in recent years. The Marshal's (1920) interpretation of sharecropping as a backward institution has conditioned literature for a long time.
This first interpretation was reconsidered by some pioneering studies (Cheung, 1969; Stiglitz, 1974) and more recent ones (Hoffman, 1984; Esptein, 1994; Carmona and Simpson, 1991; Ackerberg and Botticini, 2000, 2002).
The revision of the literature has shown that it is not correct to speak of a single sharecropping institution, but of different models depending on the region. For instance, Tuscany and its neighboring areas had different sharecropping contracts. This would be attributable to the customs and traditions of each individual region. This diversity supports the thesis behind this work that it is important to carry out studies on farms in order to start a wide research path on specific territorial areas. (Biagioli, 2000).
Studying the Tuscan regional case becomes interesting because sharecropping was prevalent in the region from the Middle Ages to the contemporary age and because in Tuscany the majority of large properties were concentrated as emerged from the INEA (1948) surveys carried out during the first half of the 20th century. This essay, as already mentioned above, is in line with the studies of Francesco Galassi (1984, 1989, 1993) who have observed how difficult it is to compare the Tuscan region one with high-farming areas.
The research objective was addressed through a careful study of the accounting documentation of the Canonica’s farm kept at the State Archives of Siena. This information has allowed to estimate production trends of the main products of the Tuscan agricultural economy: wheat, oil and wine. In order to promote a greater precision of the value of production, the historical series of the prices of agricultural products have also been elaborated through data available at the "Chamber of Commerce" of Siena. These prices were compared to those of the Chamber of Commerce of Florence (Bandettini, 1957) to verify the existence of a common trend in Tuscan prices.
In order to verify the initial hypothesis, the total production of wheat, oil and wine of the farm was calculated from 1858 to 1889. This was achieved using the values of the individual production units.
Subsequently, a comparative analysis was carried out with other regions in order to verify whether elements of crisis are detectable during the 1880s. Data at farm level was compared with provincial data elaborated by MAIC (various years) in order to be able to verify similarities or divergences.
Essay 3 studies how agriculture in the province of Siena reacted to economic shocks such as the Cereal Crisis of the 1880s, the Great War (Zanibelli, 2019b), the “Biennio Rosso”, and the advent of fascism. This analysis is based on original and homogeneous data at a municipal scale, which is difficult to find without accurate archive research. In addition, this study uses the results of the Catasto Agrario of 1910 for the province of Siena (BCAS, 1910), which was never been published.
As an initial analysis it was observed how crises affected Italian agriculture between 1880 and 1929 (Fenoaltea, 2006) and subsequently all the idiosyncrasies that make Siena an interesting regional case study, given the predominance of sharecroppers on total provincial population and the high percentage of agricultural population, as compared to the whole Tuscany.
Factors of production and production have been estimated at an aggregated level from the 1880s to 1929. The important role of the Consorzio Agrario of Siena has been also explored. Aggregated production was calculated on the following products: cereals (wheat, corn, barley, rye and oats), oil, legumes and wine. In order to calculate the value of the production, the prices of the Siena market recorded by the Mercuriali of the prices kept at the archive of the Camera di Commercio of Siena were used.
Final conclusions and innovative contributions within the scientific debate on Tuscany’s agrarian history.
The present PhD research thesis, through an exclusive use of unpublished archival sources, has made it possible to examine key aspects of the agrarian history in Southern Tuscany (with particular reference to essay 3) in the period spanning the second half of the 19th century to the late 1920s.
The methodological approach, based on a synthesis of qualitative and quantitative methods, has brought into light interesting results regarding production, productivity and price regime in a Tuscan sharecropping territory These results have allowed to support the research outcomes by Giuliana Biagioli and Francesco Galassi. The specific research area intends to look at sharecropping as a dynamic phenomenon, rather than something framed within set categories that would necessarily make it an example of inefficiency. In such a perspective, it is not useful to compare the realities in sharecropping with those characterized by other forms of agricultural specialization (for example high farming).
Essay 1 has highlighted how protectionist policies led to a slowdown in the agricultural growth process beginning in the 1870s and 1880s. All this would confirm how the arrival of cereals from America had encouraged an increasing production of reversal process in specialized crops, thus favoring the start of a growth process that would lead to an anticipation of the agricultural take-off of at 20 years later (Giolitti period). Essay 2 confirms for a sharecropping territory the results obtained in the previous contribution about a shift from wheat to wine occurred in the period from 1870s to 1880s. The analyses of the Canonica’s farm reveals how the cereal crisis of 1880s resulted in an increase in the production of wine. The case of Canonica is interesting because gains from the sale of wine were invested in fertilization, which improved yields of wheat. The growth of wheat production in Canonica is also important because it had not been detected on the sample studied by Galassi except for a farm located in the province of Siena. The analysis of the aggregated data at the provincial level allows to support how the province of Siena reacts better to the crisis than other regions of Tuscany.
Essay 3 considers the Sienese agriculture was able to promptly respond to the economic shock from 1880s to 1929. This study estimates agricultural production at a municipal scale (36 municipalities) of the province of Siena from 1884 to 1929. This was possible thanks to the use of unpublished sources at the archive of the Camera di Commercio of Siena.
Results indicate that the province of Siena significantly increased the production of wine during the cereal crisis of the 1880s, in particular in those areas specialized in the production of wine such as Chianti, the Montepulciano area ("Nobile" wine) and that of Montalcino ("Brunello). The study also concludes that Siena was the province with the largest number of agricultural technicians per hectare and a very intensive use of fertilizers per hectare as compared to the other provinces. This in part resulted from the activity of the Consorzio Agrario that had a privileged position over the Sienese agriculture and allocated inputs to producers. Efficient institutions such as the Consorzio, the Monte dei Paschi and the Camera di Commercio help to the good performance of Sienese agriculture from 1880 to 1929.
The results reported on the present research allow us to hypothesize how it would be interesting to study different sharecropping forms in Italy rather than comparing these with other agrarian production forms. Such a research based on small production units and regional analysis would make possible to increase knowledge about sharecropping using.
Finally, this study aims to be the starting point of further research on the evolution of the territories of Tuscany and central Italy. To this must also be added the prospect of realizing the time series of prices, on a monthly basis, of agricultural products of the province of Siena from unification to fascism in order to be able to study the evolution of supply and demand in the agricultural sector in the long term. Last, but not least for importance, the present study aims at being a starting point for further research on observe the evolution of the Tuscan and central Italy’s territories.
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