The Forms of Monopoly Land Rent and Agrarian Organization

The incidence of diverse forms of surplus – fixed rents, share rents, profits from direct cultivation and labour rents – remains a conundrum in the study of agrarian organization. The article presents a theoretical account of the form of rent when a dominant landowner faces landowning peasants. From a purely economic standpoint, the surplus‐maximizing choice among forms is shown to be contingent not only on their incentive and labour‐process characteristics but also on land inequality and labour productivity. By incorporating the difficulty of extracting effort from hired labour as a fixed parameter, political and ideological factors are accommodated as independent additional determinants of the form of agrarian organization. When there is also a class of landless labourers, sharecropping or labour‐tying may prove superior to wage‐leadership as a form of tacit collusion among dominant and subordinate landowners. Some of these forms of rent extraction are also shown to restrict the monopolist's incentive to adopt technical improvements.