sharecroppingn.
/ˈʃɛːˌkrɒpɪŋ/, U.S. /ˈʃɛrˌkrɑpɪŋ/ Originally U.S.
The action or practice of farming as a sharecropper; the cultivation of farmland by farm labourers who receive crops, board, etc., as wages in exchange for work performed, or (more generally) by tenant farmers who give a part of the income from each crop as rent.Originally and chiefly with reference to farming practices in the American South in the century following the American Civil War (1861–5). American sharecroppers typically lived in poverty, and sharecropping arrangements were one of the ways in which African-American labour continued to be exploited following the end of slavery. While the words sharecropper and sharecropping are chiefly used in this historical context, they may sometimes be used to refer to similar later farming arrangements both in the United States and elsewhere.
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1877 Cincinnati Weekly Enquirer 5 Sept. 8/4 Apart from share-cropping, the occasions to buy rich, productive and eligibly-situated farms on time are of daily occurrence.
1948 Amer. Sociol. Rev. 13 661/2 Those landowning families which do not work on their land but let out the holdings for share-cropping.
1970 S. L. Barraclough in I. L. Horowitz Masses in Lat. Amer. iv. 104 When legalized slavery and forced labor were abolished..various forms of share-cropping took their place.
2003 E. Schlosser Reefer Madness ii. 83 Sharecropping is the most insidious means by which growers avoid responsibility for their workers.
Compounds
As a modifier, esp. in sharecropping system.
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1891 Greenville (Mississippi) Times 10 Jan. The uncertain, unsettling, unprofitable, and generally unsatisfactory rent or share cropping custom was never so general or fixed.
1945 B. A. Botkin Lay My Burden Down 225 That was the beginning of the sharecropping system.
1998 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 11 June 64/1 Southern blacks were effectively reenslaved through the sharecropping system and the adamant white determination to block them from land ownership by legal or illegal means.
2020 School Libr. Jrnl. (Nexis) 1 Jan. Her grandparents shared their experiences laboring in the cotton fields under slavery, and her parents told stories of their sharecropping days.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, June 2022).
sharecroppingadj.
/ˈʃɛːˌkrɒpɪŋ/, U.S. /ˈʃɛrˌkrɑpɪŋ/ Originally U.S.
Engaged in sharecropping; that is a sharecropper.
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1919 Butler (Georgia, U.S.) Herald 30 Oct. Many of the renters or the sharecropping class are at sea as to what to do the coming year, now that they cannot raise cotton any more.
1973 Advocate-News (Barbados) 17 Feb. 8/2 A depression time share-cropping family.
2021 Dayton (Ohio) Daily News (Nexis) 6 Sept. His parents were poor, sharecropping farmers.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, June 2022).
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n.1877
adj.1919