Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena . California 91125

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenthand seventeenthcentury France--a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitati·ve and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations early modern historians have tended to rely upon. ECONOMIC THEORY AND SHARECROPPING IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE Philip T. Hoffman Between the close of the Middle Ages and roughly 1700, the French countryside witnessed a dramatic expansion of sharecropping. Little known in most regions of France in medieval times, agricultural sharecropping, to quote Marc Bloch, "showed a sudden increase" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just as it had earlier in northern Italy. For Bloch and historians ever since, the spread of sharecropping was part of a far larger process which saw peasants fall into debt and then lose their land to nobles, royal officers, city dwellers (bourgeois), and other privileged persons. This enormous transfer of property--Bloch termed it "the most decisive event of French social history"--stripped many a peasant of his property and reduced him to the status of a poor "sharecropper, often working what had once been his own land, which had been sold to some noble or rich bourgeois. 111 Because of its links with the wholesale loss of peasant land, most French historians associate sharecropping with rural poverty and increasing social stratification in the countryside. They also blame it for the stagnation of the French rural economy. Cut off from cash markets and lacking any capital, the French sharecropper (so the