By comparing how landlord-tenant relations adapted to and shaped the political economy and hierarchies of race, gender, and class in the North, South, and Midwest, this project recovers tenancy’s elusive place amid this process of legal transformation. And, it emerged from the legal and extralegal maneuvers of the dispossessed-freedpeople, single women, immigrants-who depended on tenancies as a way to secure a measure of independence. It also emerged from the demands of white men of small property, who hoped tenancy could provide a path toward upward mobility, civic equality, and control over their households, and from complicated political negotiations between landed and commercial interests. It emerged from thousands of small and large decisions made by politicians, judges, and attorneys, who expanded the role of law as a tool for growing the economy and widening opportunity for white men, while confining the rights of “racialized others” and women to participate equally in political, social, and economic life. Rather, its structures emerged from above and below. Tenancy was neither the inevitable outcome of market forces, nor a hegemonic order imposed by a powerful few. As urbanization, emancipation, and the expansion of capitalized farming transformed the American landscape between 18, tenancy rates spiked in crowded cities, Southern cotton and tobacco fields, and Midwestern corn and wheat farms.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |