¹ On the reaper see David, Paul, “The Mechanization of Reaping in the Ante–Bellum Midwest,” in David, Paul, Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays on the American and British Experiences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975).Google Scholar On the picker see Street, James H., The New Revolution in the Cotton Economy: Mechanization and its Consequences (Chapel Hill, 1957).Google Scholar

² Musoke, Moses S. and Olmstead, Alan L., “The Rise of the Cotton Industry in California: A Comparative Perspective,” this JOURNAL, 42 (06 1982), pp. 405–406.Google Scholar

³ See David, Paul, “A Contribution to the Theory of Diffusion,” CREG Memorandum No. 71 (Stanford University, 1969).Google Scholar

⁴ See Whatley, Warren C., “Institutional Change and Mechanization in the Cotton South,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1983), chap. 3;Google ScholarSargen, Nicholas, “Tractorization” in the United States and its Relevance for Developing Countries (New York, 1979);Google ScholarMusoke, Moses S., “Mechanizing Cotton Production in the American South: The Tractor, 1915–1960,” Explorations in Economic History, 18 (04 1981);CrossRefGoogle ScholarAnkli, Robert E., “Horses vs. Tractors on the Corn Belt,” Agricultural History, 54 (01. 1980);Google ScholarAnkli, Robert E., Helberg, H. Dan, and Thompson, John H., “The Adoption of the Tractor in Western Canada,” Canadian Studies in Rural History, 2 (04 1979), pp. 244–61.Google Scholar

⁵ See U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Plantation Organization and Operation in the YazooMississippi Delta Area,” Technical Bulletin No. 1269 (Oct. 1924); Harald Pedersen and Arthur Raper, “The Cotton Plantation in Transition,” Mississippi Agricultural Experimental Station, Bulletin No. 508 (Jan. 1954); Frank Welch, “The Plantation Land Tenure System in Mississippi,” Mississippi Agricultural Experimental Station, Bulletin No. 385 (June 1943); U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Utilization and Cost of Power on Mississippi and Arkansas Plantations,” Technical Bulletin No. 497 (Dec. 1935); Mississippi Agricultural Experimental Station, “Farm Power in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,” Bulletin No. 295 (November. 1931); and The National Research Project, “Changes in Technology and Labor Requirements in Crop Production: Cotton,” Report No. A–7 (Philadelphia, 1938).Google Scholar Also see File, Gilbert, “Mechanization of Cotton Production Since World War II,” Agricultural History, 55 (01 1980), pp. 190–207;Google ScholarFite, Gilbert, “Recent Progress in the Mechanization of Cotton Production in the U.S.,” Agricultural History, 24 (01 1950);Google Scholar and Street, The New Revolution, pp. 104–106.Google Scholar

⁶ Street, The New Revolution, p. 34.Google Scholar

⁷ Fleisig, Heywood, “Mechanizing the Cotton Harvest in the Nineteenth-Century South,” this JOURNAL, 25 (12. 1965) p. 706.Google Scholar

⁸ Mandle, Jay, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy After the Civil War (Durham, 1978), chap. 5.Google Scholar

⁹ Sargen, “Tractorization” in the United States; Musoke, “Mechanizing Cotton Production.” Sargen's calculations are for the wheat belt, but he makes inferences about the South. Musoke's calculations are for the South, but they do not incorporate many important features of the problem like multi-row animal techniques, capacity constraints, and the tenant plantation. For a more complete calculation with results critical of Sargen and Musoke, see Whatley, “Institutional Change and Mechanization,” chaps. 3, 4.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Day, Richard H., “The Economics of Technological Change and the Demise of the Sharecropper,” American Economic Review, 57 (06 1967), pp. 427–49;Google ScholarAlston, Lee, “Tenure Choice in Southern Agriculture. 1930–1960,” Explorations in Economic History, 18 (04. 1981), pp.211–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ Musoke and Olmstead, “The Rise of the Cotton Industry,” p. 411.Google Scholar

¹² The following draws heavily on U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Farming Practices in the Cultivation of Cotton,” Technical Bulletin No. 511 (Mar. 1917).Google Scholar

¹³ See Bardhan, Prenab K., “Wages and Unemployment in a Poor Agrarian Economy: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy, 87 (06 1979), pp. 479–500. Bardhan modeled this situation and showed that the coinplementarity of stage one and stage two labor induces agricultural employers to “tie” downstream labor to the premises.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ For formal models see Whatley, Warren C., “A History of Mechanization in the Cotton South:The Institutional Hypothesis,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 100 (11 1985), pp. 1191–1215;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bardhan, “Wages and Unemployment”.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Welch, “The Plantation Land Tenure System in Mississippi,” p. 35.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Mississippi Agricultural Experimental Station, “Farm Power in the Yazoo,” pp. 28–29. For similar statements see U.S. Department of Agriculture, “The Relation of Tenure to Plantation Organization,” Department Bulletin No. 682 (May 1939), p. 26; U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Plantation Organization and Operation,” pp. 59–60. Pedersen and Raper, “The Cotton Plantation in Transition,” pp. 15–18, 24–26.Google Scholar

¹⁷ U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Plantation Organization and Operation,” pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

¹⁸ On the determinants of the length of the contract see Whatley, , “A History of Mechanization” Jaynes, Gerald, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class (Oxford, 1986);Google Scholar and Bardhan, “Wages and Unemployment.” The literature on the share aspect of the contract is voluminous.Google Scholar For a sample see Cheung, Steven, The Theory of Share Tenancy (Chicago, 1969);Google ScholarAlston, “Tenure Choice”;Google ScholarAlston, Lee and Higgs, Robert, “Contractual Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses and Tests,” this JOURNAL, 42 (06 1982), pp. 327–53.Google Scholar

¹⁹ For a formal model of these markets and some econometric evidence, see Whatley, , “A History of Mechanization”;Google Scholar see also Newberry, David M. G. and Stiglitz, J. E., “Risk Sharing, Sharecropping and Uncertain Labor Markets,” in Roumasset, James A. et al. , eds., Risk, Uncertainity and Agricultural Developement (1980).Google Scholar

²⁰ The wage is assumed to be exogenous because the wage labor market was broader in geographic scope than the tenant market. Tenants had to signal characteristics such as credit worthiness and productivity to landlords. In addition, tenancy was a family-based contract, while wage contracts tended to attract younger, more mobile single men. See Whatley, “A History of Mechanization”; Allen, Franklin, “On the Fixed Nature of Sharecropping Contracts,” The Economic Journal, 95 (03 1985), pp. 30–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an excellent account of the structure of these markets see Wright, Gavin, “Postbellum Southern Labor Markets,” in Kilby, Peter, ed., Quantity and Quiddity: Essays in Honor of Stanley Lebergou (Middletown, 1987).Google Scholar

²¹ This occurs when an increase in the wage results in a percentage increase in the equilibrium size of tenant plots that is greater than the percentage decline in the equilibrium number of tenants on plantations. Elsewhere I have called this case the Strong Interpretation of the Institutional Hypothesis of mechanization. The Weak Interpretation is the simpler claim that the tenant system was unmechanizable. See Whatley, “A History of Mechanization,” pp. 1204–7.Google Scholar

²² Manuscripts for 22 plantations surveyed in 1910 survived and were analyzed in Alston and Higgs, “Contractual Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War”.Google Scholar

²³ U.S. Bureau of the Census, Plantation Farming in the United States (Washington, D.C.,1916), p. 13.Google Scholar

²⁴ Allen, Franklin, “On the Fixed Nature of Sharecropping Contracts,” The Economic Journal, 95 (03 1985), p. 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁵ The sample was drawn from the 1930 census by Lee J. Alston. The same counties are used for 1910 and 1930 in this study. They are 25 from each of the following ten states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Only 240 of these were found in the 1910 census, 10 being part of other counties. These 10 were dropped from the 1910 analysis.Google Scholar

²⁶ The probit model is a specification of the relationship between a binary dependent variable and a continuous explanatory variable that eliminates the heteroskedastic nature of the disturbance term. See Kmenta, Jan, Elements of Econometrics (New York, 1971), pp. 425–28.Google Scholar

²⁷ These equations should be run on nontenant farms only, but the census did not report size distribution by tenure.Google Scholar

²⁸ A Gini coefficient is not used as the independent variable because the available classes are very uneven in size and the Gini coefficient is very sensitive to this.Google Scholar

²⁹ The wage is exogenized because this market is broader in geographic scope than the tenant market and is beyond the determination of local market forces.Google Scholar

³⁰ See Whatley, “A History of Mechanization in the Cotton South,” p. 1206.Google Scholar

³¹ Pedersen and Raper, “The Cotton Plantation in Transition,” p. 26.Google Scholar

³² Musoke and Olmstead, “The Rise of the Cotton Industry in California,” p. 407.Google Scholar

³³ See Street, The New Revolution, chaps. 8, 11; Day, “The Economics of Technological Change.”Google Scholar

³⁴ Peterson, Willis and Kislev, Yoav, “The Cotton Harvester in Retrospect: Labor Displacement or Labor Replacement?” this JOURNAL, 46 (03 1986), pp. 199–216.Google Scholar

³⁵ See Gill, Flora, “The Economics of the Black Exodus,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1974);Google ScholarHiggs, Robert, “The Boll Weevil, the Cotton Economy and Black Migration, 1910–1930,” Agricultural History, 50 (04 1972), pp. 335–50;Google Scholar and Vickery, William, “The Economics of the Negro Migration, 1900–1960,” (Ph.D. diss., Chicago University, 1969).Google Scholar

³⁶ Alston, “Tenure Choice,” pp. 221–30. These are pooled cross-section and time-series regressions on the 250 countries; 1960 is the excluded time dummy.Google Scholar

³⁷ Whatley, Warren, “Labor for the Picking: The New Deal in the South,” this JOURNAL, 43 (12 1983), pp. 905–29.Google Scholar

³⁸ Fite, “Mechanization of Cotton,” pp. 190–91; Street, The New Revolution, pp. 107–29.Google Scholar

³⁹ International Harvester Archives, New Works Reports, Engineering Department, General Office, meeting no. 22, Oct. 30, 1906.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Whatley, Warren, “Labor for the Picking: The New Deal in the South,” this JOURNAL, 43 (12 1983), pp. 905–29, meeting no. 46, 04 1, 1907.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Whatley, Warren, “Labor for the Picking: The New Deal in the South,” this JOURNAL, 43 (12 1983), pp. 905–29, meeting no. 83, 11 26, 1907.Google Scholar

⁴² Fite, Gilbert, “Recent Progress,” p. 25; Street, The New Revolution, pp. 117–18, 120–23. Campbell took out his first patent in 1895.Google Scholar

⁴³ McCormick Collection, Cyrus H. McCormick, Jr. Papers, Series 4C, Box 11, vol. 101, p. 493.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ “New Work Reports,” meeting no. 604, October 22, 1924.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Ibid., emphasis added.

⁴⁶ Ibid., meeting no. 680, Mar. 29, 1928.

⁴⁷ Ibid., meeting no. 704, Apr. 4, 1930. On the success of the experiments of 1928 see ibid., meeting no. 694, Mar. 14, 1929.

⁴⁸ Ibid., subreport no. 388, Mar. 25, 1931.

⁴⁹ Ibid., subcommittee report no. 495, Apr. 11, 1932.

⁵⁰ This calculation assumes a $1500 machine with operating costs of $5 for a 500-pound bale.Picking wages are for Mississippi and are taken from U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Crops and Markets,” 19 (May 1942).Google ScholarThe average 1930–1940 wage for picking 100 pounds of seed cotton was $0.51. The USDA uses a 35 percent factor to transform seed cotton into lint cotton. See U.S.Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Statistics, “Statistics on Cotton and Related Data,” Statistical Bulletin No. 99 (June 1951). This yields a cost of $7.29 to hand-pick a bale of lint cotton. The calculation also assumes a 6 percent interest rate and a ten-year service life.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Street, The New Revolution, pp. 107–29.Google Scholar

⁵² See fn. 50. The average picking wage for 1925–1930 was $1.14. The average cost of hand-picking a bale was $16.29.Google Scholar

⁵³ A similar kind of result is found in Wright, Gavin and Kunreuther, Howard, “Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century,” this JOURNAL, 35 (09 1975), pp. 526–51;Google Scholar and Ransom, Roger and Sutch, Richard, “The ‘Lock-in’ Mechanism and Overproduction of Cotton in the Postbellum South,” Agricultural History, 49 (04 1975), pp. 405–25.Google Scholar