In many otherwise diverse societies, owners of large agricultural estates have paid their year-round workers with the use of a piece of land on which to produce their own subsistence crops. In a “preliminary report” Magnus Morner cited some eleven examples of this system in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Although Mörner mentions different influences, he does not advance an argument to explain these systems. This essay seeks to contribute to our understanding of the political economy of these “labor rent” or “estate labor” systems. The paper is exploratory: previous approaches are considered, a theoretical framework is proposed, and some tentative hypotheses are presented. My evidence comes from three examples: the Insten system of East Elbian Germany from ca. 1750 to ca. 1860; the ‘izbah system of the Egyptian Delta from ca. 1850 to ca. 1940; and the pre-1930 inquilinaje system of Central Chile.

Early in his tenure in office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announced that his agrarian reforms would affect the lives of the common people of Pakistan more than any other measure contemplated by his avowedly socialist and populist regime. Almost seven years later, the martial law regime of Zia-ul-Haq issued a White Paper on the performance of Bhutto's government (which Zia ended with a coup in July of 1977), charging that the land reforms were in practice yet another example of that Government's cynical posturing, sinister manipulation, favoritism and victimization, corruption and abuse of power. The irony is that a centerpiece of Bhutto's program for the “salvation” of Pakistan should appear in a White Paper which attempted to add legitimacy to the execution of the popular ex-Prime Minister. A further irony is that Bhutto himself came from a background which could only be called “feudal” in the terms of Pakistani political discourse, and surrounded himself politically with scions of similar families. What was meant by Bhutto's pledge to eradicate feudalism via land reform and what are we to make of it?

In a recent paper in this journal, Bernard Wong (1978) compares the assimilative experiences of Chinese in New York City and Lima, Peru. He concludes that the Lima Chinese are substantially more assimilated than their New York counterparts and attributes this distinction in part to differences in the attitudes of the larger societies in which the two Chinese communities are embedded. Discriminatory immigration and miscegenation laws and endemic racism in the United States inhibited the assimilation of the New York Chinese, while a substantially lower level of racial prejudice and official discrimination in Peru facilitated the assimilative process there.

The Japanese in Brazil may be called “an associational people in an unorganizational society.” More than fifty years ago, Oliveira Vianna, a pioneer in Brazilian social sciences, remarked: “The institutions of social solidarity are extremely scanty among our people. Here men live, as a rule, isolated either within the large estates or within their family circles. … The non-solidarity is complete. We cannot discover any trace of association among the neighbors for the sake of common utility” (Vianna 1920: 169–70).

Schooling is now a routine part of childhood in Western Europe, but this has not, of course, always been the case. The historical process of incorporation into school systems was one which affected the children of some social groups earlier than others and which occurred earlier in some regions than in others. In Western Europe, the contrast between the Protestant North and the Catholic South has proven to be significant in schooling history as in so many other realms: in general the South was less literate and less schooled than the North apparently from the sixteenth century until the accomplishment of universal school attendance and literacy around the beginning of the twentieth century.