Terre, paysans et pouvoir économique (Grèce, XVIIIe-XXe siècle)

Land Peasants and Economic Power. Long-term physical and demographic conditions in Greece (15th-18th c.) favoured small-scale intensive agriculture and handicaped large-scale extensive farming depending on hired labour. Large property was further impeded when the Ottoman conquest instituted Islamic land-tenure law dispossessed the Church eliminated the Byzantine nobility and crippled bourgeois power. By the 18th c., rural revenues obtained by occupiers of large plots of land through direct exploitation were much lower than those accrued by these same people through letting, usufruct and emphyteosis contracts; by merchants and notables through moneylending and; by the State through taxation. With the growth of commercial agriculture in the 19th c. the small producers need for credit increased in balance with their re-investing capacity thus they continued sharing revenues with the merchants without having to share land as well .Moreover, merchants avoided direct investment in land and farming high risk and low yield venture compared with moneylending and trade. As only investment in new technology could overcome physical and demographic handicaps and increase productivity the system tended to self-reproductive unstable equilibrium Social conditions of sharing and compromise however by favouring reform counterbalanced these reproductive tendencies and prepared the system change.Dertilis Georges. Terre, paysans et pouvoir économique (Grèce, XVIIIe-XXe siècle). In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 47ᵉ année, N. 2, 1992. pp. 273-291