Tenant Farmer Quotes

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy--sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

But you, Achilles,/ There is not a man in the world more blest than you--/ There never has been, never will be one./ Time was, when you were alive, we Argives/ honored you as a god, and now down here, I see/ You Lord it over the dead in all your power./ So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.’ I reassured the ghost, but he broke out protesting,/ ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!/ By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man--/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

When you face tough times but keep on going; when you're discouraged and doubtful, but still show up; when you are not sure of what to do, but you give it you best anyway--you will, in the end, succeed. Just be willing to do whatever it takes.

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy – sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

It was not an unusual site to see Negro tenant farmers crossing the intersection of Spring and Barbrick on the way to the cotton warehouse

By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man — some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive — than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

I would rather slave on earth for another man -- some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive -- than rule down here over all the breathless dead

Our relationship with many of the Internet companies we rely on is not a traditional company–customer relationship. That’s primarily because we’re not customers. We’re products those companies sell to their real customers. The relationship is more feudal than commercial. The companies are analogous to feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and—on a bad day—serfs. We are tenant farmers for these companies, working on their land by producing data that they in turn sell for profit.

He would not even consider going elsewhere to live, even though he were offered a chance to work another man’s farm on shares. Even to move to Augusta and work in the cotton mills would be impossible for him. The restless movement of the other tenant farmers to the mills had never had any effect on Jeeter. Working in cotton mills might be all right for some people, he said, but as for him, he would rather die of starvation than leave the land. In seven years his views of the subject had not been altered; and if anything, he was more determined than ever to remain where he was at all cost.

Well!—an honest and industrious farmer is one of the most useful members of society;

Jewish immigrants like the Floms and the Borgenichts and the Janklows were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish and the Italians were peasants, tenant farmers from the impoverished countryside of Europe. Not so the Jews. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill. They had owned small groceries or jewelry stores. They had been bookbinders or watchmakers. Overwhelmingly, though, their experience lay in the clothing trade. They were tailors and dressmakers, hat and cap makers, and furriers and tanners.

In August 1917, white, Black, and Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscription, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union (WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working people to arm themselves and to join them along the way. After a day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Oklahoma, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which became known as the Green Corn Rebellion.

Summer, and hot. Full Earth had come to the land like a vampire lover that year, killing the land and the crops of the tenant farmers, turning the fields of the castle-city of Gilead white and sterile. In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad, and all of them paled to insignificance before the heat that rested over this place of the center. Cattle lolled empty-eyed in the pens of the stockyards. Pigs grunted lustlessly, unmindful of sows and sex and knives whetted for the coming fall. People whined about taxes and conscription, as they always did; but there was an apathy beneath the empty passion-play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried. The thread that held the last jewel at the breast of the world was unraveling. Things were not holding together. The earth drew in its breath in the summer of the coming eclipse.

For one who sets himself to look at all earnestly, at all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life: what is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart? What is it, profound behind the outward windows of each one of you, beneath touch even of your own suspecting, drawn tightly back at bay against the backward wall and blackness of its prison cave, so that the eyes alone shine of their own angry glory, but the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings, or however else one may faintly designate the human 'soul,' that which is angry, that which is wild, that which is untamable, that which is healthful and holy, that which is competent of all advantaging within hope of human dream, that which most marvelous and most precious to our knowledge and most extremely advanced upon futurity of all flowerings within the scope of creation is of all these the least destructible, the least corruptible, the most defenseless, the most easily and multitudinously wounded, frustrated, prisoned, and nailed into a cheating of itself: so situated in the universe that those three hours upon the cross are but a noble and too trivial an emblem how in each individual among most of the two billion now alive and in each successive instant of the existence of each existence not only human being but in him the tallest and most sanguine hope of godhead is in a billionate choiring and drone of pain of generations upon generations unceasingly crucified and is bringing forth crucifixions into their necessities and is each in the most casual of his life so measurelessly discredited, harmed, insulted, poisoned, cheated, as not all the wrath, compassion, intelligence, power of rectification in all the reach of the future shall in the least expiate or make one ounce more light: how, looking thus into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other and whose existence is all measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I to speak of you as 'tenant' 'farmers,' as 'representatives' of your 'class,' as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends and as I 'know' you?

Firmly grounded in the divine dream of Israel’s Torah, the Bible’s prophetic vision insists that God demands the fair and equitable sharing of God’s world among all of God’s people. In Israel’s Torah, God says, “The land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23). We are all tenant farmers and resident aliens in a land and on an earth not our own. The prophets speak in continuity with that radical vision of the earth’s divine ownership. They repeatedly proclaim it with two words in poetic parallelism. “The Lord is exalted,” proclaims Isaiah. “He dwells on high; he filled Zion with justice and righteousness” (33:5). “I am the Lord,” announces Jeremiah in the name of God. “I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight” (9:24). And those qualities must flow from God to us, from heaven to earth. “Thus says the Lord,” continues Jeremiah. “Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place” (22:3). “Justice and righteousness” is how the Bible, as if in a slogan, summarizes the character and spirit of God the Creator and, therefore, the destiny and future of God’s created earth. It points to distributive justice as the Bible’s radical vision of God. “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field,” mourns the prophet Isaiah, “until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land” (5:8). But that landgrab is against the dream of God and the hope of Israel. Covenant with a God of distributive justice who owns the earth necessarily involves, the prophets insist, the exercise of distributive justice in God’s world and on God’s earth. All God’s people must receive a fair share of God’s earth.

Max raised the mallet. He stared into her face and wished he could say he was sorry, that he didn't want to do it. When he slammed the mallet down, with an echoing bang, he heard a high, piercing scream and almost screamed himself, believing for an instant it was her, still somehow alive; then realized it was Rudy. Max was powerfully built, with his, deep water-buffalo chest and Dutch farmer's shoulders. With the first blow he had driven the stake over two-thirds of the way in. He only needed to bring the mallet down once more. The blood that squelched up around the wood was cold and had a sticky, viscous consistency. Max swayed, his head light. His father took his arm. 'Goot,' Abraham whispered into his ear, his arms around him, squeezing him so tightly his ribs creaked. Max felt a little thrill of pleasure - an automatic reaction to the intense, unmistakable affection of his father's embrace - and was sickened by it. 'To do offense to the house of the human spirit, even after its tenant depart, is no easy thing, I know.' ("Abraham's Boys")

The winter of 1789 was the hardest within living memory. No one, not even the old people of the district, had ever known anything like it. The cold weather set in early, and, coming on top of a bad harvest, led to great distress among the tenant farmers and the peasants. We were hard hit at the foundry too, for conditions on the road became impossible, what with frost and ice, and then snow; and we were unable to deliver our goods to Paris and the other big cities. This meant that we were left with unsold merchandise on our hands, and little prospect of getting rid of it in the spring, for in the meantime the traders in Paris would be buying elsewhere—if, that is, they ordered at all. There was a general drop in demand for luxury commodities at this time, owing to the unrest throughout the country.

Blackmail was paid by the tenant or farmer to a “superior” who might be a powerful reiver, or even an outlaw, and in return the reiver not only left him alone, but was also obliged to protect him from other raiders and to recover his goods if they were carried off. It reached the proportions of a major industry, with the blackmailers employing collectors and enforcers (known as brokers), and even something like accountants.

We have a timber yard?" Leo asked. Miss Marks replied, "Mr. Merripen is planning to construct houses for the new tenant farmers." "This is the first I've heard of it. Why are we providing houses for them?" Leo's tone was not at all censuring, merely interested. But Miss Marks's lips thinned, as if she had interpreted his question as a complaint. "The most recent tenants to join the estate were lured by the promise of new houses. They are already successful farmers, educated and forward-looking, and Mr. Merripen believes their presence will add to the estate's prosperity. Other local estates, such as Stony Cross Park, are also building homes for their tenants and laborers-" "It's all right," Leo interrupted. "No need to be defensive, Marks. God knows I wouldn't think of interfering with Merripen's plans after seeing all he's done so far." He glanced at the housekeeper. "If you'll point the way, Mrs. Barnstable, I'll go out and find Merripen. Perhaps I might help to unload the timber wagon." "A footman will show you the way," the housekeeper said at once. "But the work is occasionally hazardous, my lord, and not fitting for a man of your station." Miss Marks added in a light but caustic tone, "Besides, it is doubtful you could be of any help." The housekeeper's mouth fell open. Win had to bite back a grin. Miss Marks had spoken as if Leo were a small weed of a man instead of a strapping six-footer.

Mr. Ravenel, if you are to spend a fortnight here, you will conduct yourself like a gentleman, or I will have you forcibly taken to Alton and tossed onto the first railway car that stops at the station.” West blinked and looked at her, clearly wondering if she was serious. “Those girls are the most important thing in the world to me,” Kathleen said. “I will not allow them to be harmed.” “I have no intention of harming anyone,” West said, offended. “I’m here at the earl’s behest to talk to a set of clodhoppers about their turnip planting. As soon as that’s concluded, I can promise you that I’ll return to London with all possible haste.” Clodhoppers? Kathleen drew in a sharp breath, thinking of the tenant families and the way they worked and persevered and endured the hardships of farming…all to put food on the table of men such as this, who looked down his nose at them. “The families who live here,” she managed to say, “are worthy of your respect. Generations of tenant farmers built this estate--and precious little reward they’ve received in return. Go into their cottages, and see the conditions in which they live, and contrast it with your own circumstances. And then perhaps you might ask yourself if you’re worthy of their respect.” “Good God,” West muttered, “my brother was right. You do have the temperament of a baited badger.” They exchanged glances of mutual loathing and walked away from each other.

In Andhra, farmers fear Naidu’s land pool will sink their fortunes Prasad Nichenametla,Hindustan Times | 480 words The state festival tag added colour to Sankranti in Andhra Pradesh this time. But the hue of happiness was missing in 29 villages along river Krishna in Guntur district. The villagers knew it was their last Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated to seek agricultural prosperity. For in two months, more than 30,000 acres of fertile farmland would be acquired for a brand new capital planned in collaboration with Singapore. The Nara Chandrababu Naidu government went about the capital project by setting aside the Centre’s land acquisition act and drawing up a compensation package for land-owning and tenant farmers and labourers. Many are opposed to it, and are not keen on snapping their centuries-old bond with their land and livelihood. In Penumaka village, Nageshwara Rao, 50, fears the future as he does not possess a tenancy certificate that could have brought some relief under the compensation package. “The entire village is against land-pooling but we hear the government is adamant,” Rao says, referring to municipal minister P Narayana’s alleged assertion that land would be taken with or without the farmers’ consent. Narayana is supervising the land-pooling process. “Naidu says he would give us Rs 50,000 per year in lieu of annual crops. We earn that much in a month here,” villager Meka Koti Reddy says. To drive home the point, locals in Undavalli village nearby have put up a board asking officials to keep off their lands that produce three crops a year. Unlike other parts of Andhra Pradesh, the water-rich land here is highly productive yielding 200 varieties of crops. Some farmers are also suspicious about the compensation because Naidu is yet to deliver on the loan-waiver promise. They are now weighing legal options besides seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to retain their land. While the villagers opposing land-pooling are allegedly being backed by Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party, those belonging to the Kamma community — the support base for Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party — are said to be cooperative.  It is also believed that Naidu chose this location over others suggested by experts to primarily benefit the Kamma industrialists who own large swathes of land in Krishna and Guntur districts. But even the pro-project villagers cannot help feel insecure. “We are clueless about where our developed area would be. What if the project is not executed within Naidu’s tenure? Is there a legal recourse?” Idupulapati Rambabu of Mandadam says. This is despite Naidu’s assurance on January 1 at nearby Thulluru, where he launched the land-pooling process, asking farmers to give land without any apprehension. He said the deal in its present form would make them richer than him in a decade. “We are not building a mere city but a hub of economic activity loaded with superior infrastructure that is aimed at generating wealth. This would be a win-win situation for all,” Naidu tells HT. As of now, villages like Nelapadu struggling with low soil fertility seem to be winning from the package.

Antipatriot sentiments were shared by a wide variety of people across a broad social spectrum. In New York, ironically, some of those who opposed the Revolution were poor tenant farmers from the 160,000-acre Livingston Manor in the Hudson Valley. Robert Livingston, Jr., lord of the manor, was a Whig Revolutionary—not because of deep philosophical convictions, but because his opponents in New York politics were all Tories. Livingston’s tenants, according to historian Staughton Lynd, saw in the Revolution a chance to oppose their Lord and possibly take possession of the land they worked.

Whether tenant farmers seeking their own land or cultural minorities fearful of persecution, many groups of Americans, upon surveying the political landscape of the Revolution, sided with the British for reasons that had little or nothing to do with political philosophy. Articulate and vociferous Tories might preach on the moral virtues of loyalty and the corresponding evils of revolution, but many rank-and-file loyalists operated from concrete principles of survival and self-interest.

and Mary Gardner in 1941. A planter in Mississippi said that, if his tenant “didn’t stop acting so big, the next time it would be the bullet or a rope. That is the way to manage them when they get too big.” In 1948, a black tenant farmer in Louise, Mississippi, was severely beaten by two whites, wrote the historian James C. Cobb, “because he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill.

Industrialization not only caused painful social dislocations but fundamentally and permanently altered relations between employers and employees. Landlords and their tenants had been neighbors and in some respects partners. Although on occasion tenants suffered mass expulsions, as during the Enclosure Acts in England, by and large the countryside was stable, especially in such countries as the United States, where the great majority of farmers owned the soil they cultivated. In industrial societies, the relationship of owner to employee turned tenuous and volatile, as the former felt free to dismiss workers whenever demand grew slack. Differences in lifestyle became more glaring as the nouveaux riches flaunted their wealth. These developments led to a growing hostility to “capitalism.” Socialism, until then an ideal with particular appeal to intellectuals, now acquired, in addition to a theoretical foundation, a social base among certain segments of the working class.

Its first battle was to sidestep the furnishing merchant by combining individuals’ supply needs into bulk orders, which an agent for the group could purchase directly at urban wholesalers. Alliance headquarters would pay on credit. The organization would secure that credit—for the total sum, including tenants’ orders—using landowning members’ holdings and current crop liens as collateral. Then everyone’s harvest, also combined in bulk, would be sorted and graded in a common warehouse. Farmers with surplus could store it there to gain higher prices out of season. The crop would be offered for sale directly to bulk purchasers in the North, or England or Germany.

In the agrarian economy of Aberdeenshire, the crofter, or improving smallholder generally, has filled a most useful part in the past. To them it is due that many hundreds of acres of barren moor have been brought under the plough within the last fifty or sixty years; and from his class, trained up in habits of industry, thrift, and self-reliance, there have continued to go forth into various walks of life men and women fitted to act well their part under any circumstances; the main cause of regret without doubt being that in such limited proportion of numbers have these men and women been retained in connection with the soil as settled labourers, cottars, crofters, and farmers, from the smallest tenant upward. But while it will be readily admitted that the existence of crofts in a county like Aberdeen - and indeed any agricultural county - is in the highest degree desirable; and while one may assert, without much fear of contradiction, that a judicious blending of farm and croft is greatly preferable to either a community of crofers apart from farms, or a collection of farms without a mixture of the crofter element, we are not blind to the difficulties that attend the perpetuation of the crofting system, as we have been wont to view it, under the changed conditions that now obtain.

the Communists undertook a spirited defence of the small and medium proprietor and tenant farmer against the collectivizing drive of the rural wage-workers, against the policy of the labour unions prohibiting the farmer from holding more land than he could cultivate with his own hands, and against the practices of revolutionary committees, which requisitioned harvests, interfered with private trade, and collected rents from tenant farmers.

Lady Beatrice insisted that she was no witch, but an Elemental. This is an unfamiliar term to most, but certainly not one invented by the late duchess. References to Elementalism are found as far back as in Greek mythology and Ancient Egyptian writings. An Elemental is known as a child of nature. Unlike mere humans, they are one with the four elements, able to manipulate the air, earth, water, and fire around them. There are those who find it a frightening concept, but I have interviewed two of the late duchess's acquaintances who profess that she used her gift for good. A Wickersham tenant farmer who was growing destitute from the lack of thriving crops recalls that Lady Beatrice visited his land, and shortly after her departure, the soil came back to life and grew fertile.

Last autumn, a certain Kushan student who had studied in Japan, by the name of Chow Shui-p'ing, returned to this village. (Chou had first graduated from Wuhsi provincial Teachers' College). He could not bear the sight (of such oppression), and encouraged the tenant farmers to organize into a body called the 'Tenant Farmers' Cooperative Self-help Society'. Chou moved from village to village speaking with tears in his eyes of the sufferings of the peasants. A large number of Kushan peasants followed him, and those in the neighbouring areas of Chiangyin, Shangshu, and Wuhsi hsien were all inflamed. They rose like clouds and opposed the rich but heartless big landlords, and with one voice demanded the reduction of rent.

I went out the side door, and Sam fell into step behind me as we walked out beyond the mule barn where four mules stood in the lot and on past the cotton house and then down the dim road past a little leaning shack where our tenant farmers lived, a black family in which there was a boy just a year older than I was. His name was Willalee Bookatee. I went on past their house because I knew they would be in the field, too, so there was no use to stop

employ, there is not enough land to employ the surplus population. The result is the farm labourers are competing for the privilege of working on the land. As agriculture goes down and the land produces less, the population increases and the rents go up. Thus between the upper and the nether millstone the farmer is crushed. In the South we have just the contrary situation. We have land crying for the hand to till it; we have the landowners seeking labour and fairly begging for tenants to work their lands. If a Negro tenant does not like the way he is treated he can go to the neighbouring farm; he can go to the mines or to the public works, where his labour is in demand. But the only way the poor Italian can get free is by going to America, and that is why thousands sail from Palermo every year for this country. In certain places in Sicily, in the three years

The tenants with jobs at the lumber mill or the warehouses or on a road crew pay cash. Some tenants pay with Kincaids, as we call the scrip we give out at the Emporium. The dirt farmers pay with corn, tobacco, hams, eggs, sacks of walnuts or potatoes, jars of pickles or fruit preserves, but mostly bottles of homemade whiskey—and we sell it all at the Emporium.

Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, by Walker Evans (version published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). From a print in a private collection, trimmed under Evans’s direction and signed by him in 1971.

For John Tyson, the lesson wasn’t in the crops or the soil. It was in the financing. Cash-poor farmers rented land, and their landowners arranged a credit system that financed crops up front for the farmers who were broke. So the landowner provided the money, the farmer provided the labor, and they split the money when the crop came to fruition. The system spread throughout the South, carried on the back of poverty, allowing wealthy landowners and bankers to raise crops without working the land, while forcing farmers to grow crops they would never truly own. In shorthand, it was called tenant farming. The method slowly migrated to Springdale, where John Tyson and other feed dealers were trying to ensure a steady supply of chicken. The feed dealers started providing their product up front for farmers, collecting their payment when the chickens were sold. Then they started fronting the money to buy chickens as well. John Tyson took it a step further. He bought the chickens himself from a hatchery, then he essentially loaned them to farmers who agreed to raise the birds and get paid a fixed price on delivery. The farmer didn’t take any risk on prices because he never owned the birds, and Tyson got his steady flow of chickens to deliver to customers up north.

The mirage—the floral illusion—of democracy is that it purports to include everybody, when it is in reality the banging drum not of the tenant farmer but the supreme suzerain.

Sharecropping is the dirty little secret at the root of America’s wealth—along with slavery itself. The immense profits generated by the industrious yet impoverished Black “sharecroppers” and “tenant farmers” financed Europe’s and America’s Industrial Revolution, including the building of their railroads, factories, mills, and their entire infrastructure. It is truthfully asserted that the major cities of America and the Western world were “built with bricks of cotton.” Today the debt traps designed to ensnare the working poor and middle class in a lifelong cycle of debt—the high-cost installment loans that charge usurious interest rates of 100% or more, the “payday” loans that charge 400% interest, the extortionate credit card multi-charges, the subprime mortgages with ballooning interest rates, and the home equity loan swindles—are the bastard children of the sharecropping American South. It

The so-called "social gospel" lays stress upon this life, not on the next. In many quarters it is now regarded as very old-fashioned and passe' to urge people to prepare to die. Social security, better housing, relief for tenant farmers, better living conditions for the poor and the care of underprivileged children—these have occupied so much of the teaching and preaching of these modern days, that preachers have left hungry-hearted people ignorant about Heaven.

a five-pound mastodon tooth, disinterred by the spring floods, rolled down a steep hill and landed at the foot of a Dutch tenant farmer working the fields. The farmer brought the fist-size tooth into town and traded it to a local politician for a glass of rum. The first remnant of an extinct animal discovered in America, nicknamed Incognitum, set off a frenzy of theological concerns: how could something vanish from God’s earth? Had Noah forgotten to load Incognitum onto the ark?

The second . . . when a tenant farmer raises his hand against his landlord and master, regardless of the reasons . . . it leads to unpleasant social repercussions.

One incident from Yasuko’s days in the village elementary school was indelibly etched in her memory. She was the head of her class for two or three years in a row, including the time when it happened. Just before graduation the principal asked the pupils how many would go on to attend middle school. Of the twenty pupils from Sunada and Tsukigata only three were able to do so. Those three raised their hands. The other pupils—children of poor tenant farmers, small-time candy store owners, and barkeepers—turned around to look at them, their faces vivid with envy. With everyone’s eyes focused on them the three blushed a little but, as might be expected, they looked proud. Not only was each of the three inferior to Yasuko in grades, they—except for the assistant class leader—were from the bottom half of the class. At that moment Yasuko was assailed by a strange and incomprehensible feeling. She felt she could not bear to explain it away convincingly even within her own heart. Pupils who were much, much worse than she were going on to a higher school! She understood of course that it was because their families had “money,” but understanding alone was not enough to make Yasuko accept it. Similar things had happened a number of times. For instance, when a Hokkaido government director came to inspect their school it was really Yasuko who as head of the class should have delivered the congratulatory address. However, since she did not even have a different kimono to change into, a rich child took her place. The lack of clothes and money also led to her being absent from athletic meets and excursions. But at such times Yasuko, unlike Okei, assumed a scornful expression. She smiled faintly while listening to the rich child read the congratulatory address; and said that only those with nothing better to do wanted to take part in excursions and athletic meets. Unlike Yasuko, Okei often cried at such times, saying it was a terribly cruel and unfair way to treat fellow schoolmates.

Karl Marx, observing this disruption in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, could not accept the English evolutionary explanation for the emergence of capitalism. He believed that coercion had been absolutely necessary in effecting this transformation. Marx traced that force to a new class of men who coalesced around their shared interest in production, particularly their need to organize laboring men and women in new work patterns. Separating poor people from the tools and farm plots that conferred independence, according to Marx, became paramount in the capitalists’ grand plan.6 He also stressed the accumulation of capital as a first step in moving away from traditional economic ways. I don’t agree. As Europe’s cathedrals indicate, there was sufficient money to produce great buildings and many other structures like roads, canals, windmills, irrigation systems, and wharves. The accumulation of cultural capital, especially the know-how and desire to innovate in productive ways, proved more decisive in capitalism’s history. And it could come from a duke who took the time to figure out how to exploit the coal on his property or a farmer who scaled back his leisure time in order to build fences against invasive animals. What factory work made much more obvious than the tenant farmer-landlord relationship was the fact that the owner of the factory profited from each worker’s labor. The sale of factory goods paid a meager wage to the laborers and handsome returns to the owners. Employers extracted the surplus value of labor, as Marx called it, and accumulated money for further ventures that would skim off more of the wealth that laborers created but didn’t get to keep. These relations of workers and employers to production created the class relations in capitalist society. The carriers of these novel practices, Marx said, were outsiders—men detached from the mores of their traditional societies—propelled forward by their narrow self-interest. With the cohesion of shared political goals, the capitalists challenged the established order and precipitated the class conflict that for Marx operated as the engine of change. Implicit in Marx’s argument is that the market worked to the exclusive advantage of capitalists. In the early twentieth century another astute philosopher, Max Weber, assessed the grand theories of Smith and Marx and found both of them wanting in one crucial feature: They gave attitudes to men and women that they couldn’t possibly have had before capitalist practices arrived. Weber asked how the values, habits, and modes of reasoning that were essential to progressive economic advance ever rooted themselves in the soil of premodern Europe characterized by other life rhythms and a moral vocabulary different in every respect. This inquiry had scarcely troubled English economists or historians before Weber because they operated on the assumption that human nature made men (little was said of women) natural bargainers and restless self-improvers, eager to be productive when productivity

Cook had seen an avocado before, but not like this---so smooth, so green. The fruit took an express route to the greenhouse, where workers propagated the seeds, first in soil, and then suspended slightly in water. Fairchild had included written instructions that only mature trees would fruit, after several years, not months. He advised that as soon as the seedlings grew reasonable roots, they should be shipped to experiment stations in California to be shared with farmers interested in experimental crops. Cook complied, and then mostly forgot about the avocado. In California, that single shipment helped build an industry. Other avocados turned up as well, from travelers or tourists who packed the oversized seeds as souvenirs. There were one-off stories that avocados had been spotted in America before, in Hollywood in 1886 or near Miami in 1894. But none were as sturdy as Fairchild's Chilean variety, prized for its versatility, color, and flavor---résumé of strong pedigree. Fairchild's avocado would turn out to be a mix of a Guatemalan avocado and a Mexican avocado and to have been only a short-term tenant in Chilean soil before Fairchild picked it up. But as with most popular fruits, the true geographic origin faded into irrelevance. Farmers and early geneticists dissected this sample and ones that came after it to create newer cultivars attuned to more specialized climates or tastes. This work yielded a twentieth-century variety called Fuerte, Spanish for "strong," growable in the coldest conditions ever tested on an avocado. It fell from favor after proving unable to ship even modest distances without bruising.

As Linus grew into his teens, became even more awkward, with long, gangly arms and odd ginger hairs sprouting from his spotty chin, Georgiana blossomed into a beautiful child, beloved of all on the estate. She brought a smile to the face of even the most hardened tenants, farmers who hadn't had a kind word for the Montrachet family in years would send baskets of apples to the kitchen for Miss Georgiana to enjoy.

Commercial farming makes up only twenty-eight percent of this country’s land. But there’s a black farmers’ union that represent six percent of that. The Development Trust, which is government, has three percent. There are black tenant farmers with four percent. And Forestry has one percent. That leaves whites with about fourteen percent of the country’s land. Doesn’t sound the same as seventy percent, does it? And that fourteen percent produced about sixty-five percent of all agricultural produce and fifty percent of foreign earnings, and employed or supported almost two million people. But all you ever heard about was us greedy white farmers.” Everyone

New Deal legislation undoubtedly saved thousands of lives and prevented destitution for millions. New labor laws led to a flourishing of unions and built a strong white middle class. The Social Security Act of 1935 established the principle of cash payments in cases of unemployment, old age, or loss of a family breadwinner, and it did so as a matter of right, not on the basis of individual moral character. But the New Deal also created racial, gender, and class divisions that continue to produce inequities in our society today. Roosevelt’s administration capitulated to white supremacy in ways that still bear bitter fruit. The Civilian Conservation Corps capped Black participation in federally supported work relief at 10 percent of available jobs, though African Americans experienced 80 percent unemployment in northern cities. The National Housing Act of 1934 redoubled the burden on Black neighborhoods by promoting residential segregation and encouraging mortgage redlining. The Wagner Act granted workers the right to organize, but allowed segregated trade unions. Most importantly, in response to threats that southern states would not support the Social Security Act, both agricultural and domestic workers were explicitly excluded from its employment protections. The “southern compromise” left the great majority of African American workers—and a not-insignificant number of poor white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and domestics—with no minimum wage, unemployment protection, old-age insurance, or right to collective bargaining.

I need your help, West,” he said quietly. His brother took his time about replying. “What would you have me do?” “Go to Eversby Priory.” “You would trust me around the cousins?” West asked sullenly. “I have no choice. Besides, you didn’t seem particularly interested in any of them when we were there.” “There’s no point in seducing innocents. Too easy.” West folded his arms across his chest. “What is the point of sending me to Eversby?” “I need you to manage the tenants’ drainage issues. Meet with each one individually. Find out what was promised, and what has to be done--” “Absolutely not.” “Why?” “Because that would require me to visit farms and discuss weather and livestock. As you know, I have no interest in animals unless they’re served with port wine sauce and a side of potatoes.” “Go to Hampshire,” Devon said curtly. “Meet with the farmers, listen to their problems, and if you can manage it, fake some empathy. Afterward I want a report and a list of recommendations on how to improve the estate.” Muttering in disgust, West stood and tugged at his wrinkled waistcoat. “My only recommendation for your estate,” he said as he left the room, “is to get rid of it.

No wonder her father was in such a state. Some large tea estates like the Oxford were ruthless in their quest for new labour to work their vast gardens. She had met Wesley Robson at a polo match in Tezpur last year: one of those brash young men newly out from England, good- looking and arrogant, thinking they knew more about India after three months than those who had lived here all their lives. Her father had taken against him at once, because he was one of the Robsons of Tyneside, a powerful family who had risen from being tenant farmers like the Belhavens, making their money in boilers and now investing in tea. Everything they touched seemed to spawn riches. The Robsons and the Belhavens had had a falling out years ago over something to do with farming equipment.

Yet it was the majority-led Girondins who had spearheaded the revolution and challenged the establishment. They accomplished far more than did the Montagnards. After toppling the king, the Girondins rushed into an abolitionist spree fueled by liberty, dissolving the last vestiges of aristocratic privilege, the system of church tithes, dues owed to local landlords, and personal servitude. The radical liberals also released the peasants from the seigneurial (lord) dues, which helped tenant farmers buy their own private farmland. Next, they turned their abolitionist gun-sights on the guild system that blocked entry to markets, as well as ‘tax farming,’ where private individuals would be licensed to collect taxes for the state while taking a large share for themselves.

But if her brother were now to be imprisoned for years, she herself, being the eldest, would have to find a way of providing for the family. Living was hard even with her brother working so diligently. Though they ate only the bare minimum, they could not even keep up with rent payments, and debts kept piling up. In autumn when various grains ripened, prices fell, and just when tenant farmers absolutely had to sell, they hit rock bottom. Then it would be winter, and by the time spring came, prices always began to rise. That was the time when landowners and urban wholesale merchants who had taken and stored the tenant farmers’ grain would begin to sell. People like Okei stood no chance at all. To make up for the “gap,” they took up day labor, piled up gravel, cut timber, and dug irrigation ditches. Now her brother would be gone. Okei felt she could see what kind of life lay ahead of her. The Yamagami girl’s cries now pierced Okei’s body like shards of broken glass, one by one. “You got your money, you had your fun—what in the world are you still bawling about?!” Okei heard the words but could not bear to listen to them. Agitated, she stood up and then promptly sat down. In a short while, her mother returned.

Do you understand?” asked Yasuko, showing rows of even white teeth. “From spring to autumn the whole family works together plowing the fields, sowing the seeds, and pulling up weeds. And then, once we’ve finally harvested the crop, a full half of it gets taken away and we get nothing for it. Unless you’re a tenant farmer yourself, you really can’t understand how it feels when that happens.” Diffidently yet mischievously as always, she flicked her thumb toward the owner at his counter. “It’s the same thing here with the boss! I know just how much he makes with me working like this. And all I get is ten yen a month! He’s exploiting me! No wonder he gets fat!” Yasuko had recently learned the word “exploit,” and liked to use it often.

John Turner lived at Saltersford Hall, where his father was a tenant farmer. He was born in 1706 and became a packman, or jagger, with a train of four horses. His main occupation was from Chester and Northwich, carrying salt, to Derby, from where he would return with malt. His home in Saltersford was ideally placed on this prehistoric trade route. On Christmas Eve, 1735, (that is, when John was twenty-nine), he was on his way back from Northwich. It was snowing. But packmen were used to being on the road in all weathers and at all hours. They knew the hills better than anyone. They took no risks. Jaggers were essential to their communities and yet at the same time mistrusted. Travel in eighteenth century England was not for ordinary folk. Most people didn’t move more than four miles from their birthplace in their entire lives. Jaggers were looked on as boundary-striders, as Grendel is described in Beowulf, wild men, wodwose, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. They belonged more to the hills than to the valleys. Yet on that Christmas Eve, John Turner did not reach home. The next morning he was found dead, though his team of horses survived, covered by drifts. And by him, on the white, wind-smoothed land, was the single print of a woman’s shoe in the snow.

I'm here at the earl's behest to talk to a set of clodhoppers about their turnip planting. As soon as that's concluded, I can promise you that I'll return to London with all possible haste." Clodhoppers? Kathleen drew in a sharp breath, thinking of the tenant families and the way they worked and persevered and endured the hardships of farming... all to put food on the table of men such as this, who looked down his nose at them. "The families who live here," she managed to say, "are worthy of your respect. Generations of tenant farmers built this estate- and precious little reward they've received in return. Go into their cottages, and see the conditions in which they live, and contrast it with your own circumstances. And then perhaps you might ask yourself if you're worthy of their respect." "Good God," West muttered, "my brother was right. You do have the temperance of a baited badger." They exchanged glances of mutual loathing and walked away from each other.

The big landlords owned the place, the prosperous tenant farmers did well out of the arrangement. Inevitably, there was more thieving in this type of economy than there was in England, so Irish crime figures for the period are always higher than English. To English contemporaries this proved that the Irish were feckless, dishonest, potentially violent. The reality is that if you started from scratch and invented a society such as that controlled by the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, in which the bottom 4 (out of 8+) million were given no educational or economic advantages or incentives, they would end up, very much as the Irish peasantry did end up, cultivating very small patches of land and doing little else besides. It was simply appalling bad luck that this very deprived and numerous group of people subsisted on one tuber alone which, since its introduction in the seventeenth century, had given no sign or indication that it would fail. It was the reliability of the spud, as well as the ease of growing it, which made it the favoured peasant food. Two million acres of Ireland were given over to potatoes. Three million people ate nothing else. Nothing. (Adult males consumed between twelve and fourteen pounds daily.)