Leasing and Inequality in the Highlands of Jujuy (Argentina) at the End of the 19th Century

Abstract

Agrarian structures resulting from the most general processes of capitalist development and the redefinition of property rights in the Argentinean province of Jujuy in the 19th century encouraged the consolidation of important large estates. The other side of this high concentration of land was the existence of a broad sector of the society composed by tenants. Several studies have highlighted the existence of a deeply unequal and conflictive society because of the unequal distribution of land. The objective of this article is to study tenants as producers, the wealth and gross income resulting from the rural exploitation under their responsibility in order to find out their remuneration capability while contrasting this information to other social situations. In order to attain this objective, we analyzed two cases where production relations were based on leasing factors. Based on fiscal and census sources in the 1890’s containing data about agricultural and farming activities and on reports on profitability rates of the various agricultural or livestock products in the same decade, we reconstructed the gross income of these units for each of the actors involved and analyzed the inequality levels for this community.