Property Rights and Labour Relations: Explaining the Relative Success of Native Purchase Area Farmers in Southern Rhodesia, 1930–1965

Erik Green and Mark Nyandoro

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2023, vol. 49, issue 5-6, 889-906

Abstract: In the 1930s the colonial authorities in Zimbabwe set aside geographical areas where Africans were allowed to purchase land. Despite having private property rights to land, a rare occurrence among Africans in colonial times, the performance of this group of farmers has rarely been investigated. In this article, we show that the average group of ‘native purchase’ farming households performed far better than the average African farmer in the native reserves. We do more, by offering one of the first explanations behind the ‘success’ of this group of farmers. We argue that the explanation for this is not that private property rights were more secure than other forms of land rights as argued in mainstream economics. The farmers who owned land performed better than those who did not because private property rights changed social relations in a wider sense of the term. Private property rights enabled the emergence of various forms of non-family labour relations including sharecropping and wage labour that the landowner could exploit to increase production.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2023.2325326 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:49:y:2023:i:5-6:p:889-906

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2023.2325326

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().