The Deed and the Wage · Episode 4 of 10 · 20 min
Why Free Land Produced Slavery and Sharecropping
Where land was abundant, a worker could walk off and farm alone, so elites who wanted others' labor bound the laborer instead. Evsey Domar's arithmetic says a society can have any two of free land, free labor and a landowning elite. The episode follows encomienda, slavery, Wakefield's high land prices and the revoked forty acres to sharecropping and debt.
Who's who
- Evsey DomarMIT economist whose 1970 hypothesis gives the land-labor trilemma
- H. J. NieboerDutch ethnographer who found slavery flourishing where resources were open
- Edward Gibbon WakefieldPromoter of systematic colonization with deliberately high land prices
- Karl Marx+5 more episodesDissected Wakefield's scheme in the final chapter of Capital
- William T. ShermanUnion general who issued Special Field Orders No. 15 in 1865
- Andrew JohnsonPresident who ordered Sherman lands restored to pardoned Confederates
Where it happens
- Potosí, PeruSilver mines supplied by the Andean mita draft
- Sea Islands, South Carolina and GeorgiaWhere freedpeople settled about 400,000 acres in 1865
- Virginia+3 more episodesColony shifting from indenture to hereditary African slavery
- Cape Colony, South AfricaCase that complicates the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis
Timeline
- 1573Viceroy Toledo reorganizes the Andean mita for Potosí and Huancavelica
- 1705Virginia's slave code consolidates lifelong hereditary slavery
- 1861Russia emancipates roughly 23 million serfs, keeping them tied by redemption payments
- January 16, 1865Sherman issues Special Field Orders No. 15 at Savannah
- Autumn 1865Johnson orders Sherman lands restored; first Black Codes enacted
- 1970Domar publishes The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis
Still debated
How much of American slavery Domar explains is contested, with northern colonies as a counterexample and profitability scholars offering a rival frame. Whether sharecropping was coercion or a bargain freedpeople preferred, and whether Wakefield's scheme worked as designed, are also argued.
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