Rich agriculture and poor farmers: land, landlords and farmers in Flanders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This article focuses on the property relations in Belgian and Flemish agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main question is: what was the relationship between land use, land ownership and land rents? By analysing the position of the (small) farmers and of the (small) landlords we could confirm that the dominance of small-scale farming coincided with a specific pattern of property distribution and surplus extraction. The high and increasing returns of the land were almost entirely pruned away by private landowners. The extreme fragmentation of the land, the large proportion of leaseholds and the high rents grew to a maximum in the second half of the nineteenth century due to competition both on the property market and on the leasehold market. This put the Flemish farmer in the worst possible situation, with a sad contrast between brilliant harvests and the miserable existence of those who generated them. The land question is not only a matter of distribution of economic wealth; it is as much one of economic power. (Dovring, 1956: 1-2) The paradox of small farms 'There are too many tenant-farmers, and too few peasant-proprietors, the leases are excessively short, and the rents are excessively high'. This observation was made by the renowned liberal economist and rural sociologist Emile de Laveleye on the eve of the late nineteenth-century agricultural crisis in an extensive report on Flemish and Belgian agricultural organisation (de Laveleye, 1881, quotation: 468). His treatise is a long plea for small-scale farming, which he deems superior to Ma grande culture' both on economic (land productivity, food supply), social (a restraint on impoverishment), and moral grounds (as it promotes order and stability). De Laveleye voiced the opinion of many of his contemporaries, who saw family-run farms as the main barrier against 'modern' pauperism. In order to confirm his arguments, de Laveleye made a telling comparison between Flanders: 'yet having nearly all of them a little plot of land to work, they are at any rate kept from starving' and England: 'and, supposing there were 200,000 small farmers more than there are now, might there not be 500,000 fewer paupers less to be