Large landowners

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Large landowners are landowners who have much larger built or undeveloped properties than the usual land areas . In agriculture, the smallholders are in contrast .

General

In addition to size, large estates are usually associated with a certain amount of capital employed , employment of wage labor and market orientation . The size of the property, which makes it a large property, has always been controversial. The current causes of the increased plot size are primarily historical , socio-economic , climatic and conditioned by the soil quality class . For historical reasons, large landowners are mostly associated with agriculture , but today the term is extended to all property owners with larger than average land areas (undeveloped or developed properties ). Large plantations , farms , ranching , haciendas , fazendas or stations (Australia) are also considered to be large estates . These agricultural properties were of a size that could no longer be tended by the owner family alone. Depending on the age, you served slaves , serfs , tenants , servants or farm workers . Large landowners are not only individuals, but also other economic entities such as companies or states.

history

The legislation of Philolaus of Corinth in the 8th century BC consolidated large estates, so that Aristotle complained about the "inequality of wealth". In the Roman Empire , the large landowner built his economy in the 3rd century BC. On slave labor , thereby destroying the small farmers. Their farms gradually passed into the hands of the great owners due to over-indebtedness , bad harvests or illnesses , as a result of which the large estates , which were barely significant before the Punic wars , experienced a huge expansion. It emerged estates with a size of more than 1,000 yoke (500 hectares ). Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus tried in 133 BC. To restrict the large estates with various reforms. It was planned that no one should own more than 500 yoke (250 hectares) of land, with the area being leased to parcels of 30 yoke (15 hectares) each. This Gracchische Reform was considered one of the first land reforms , further agricultural laws to protect the small farmers followed. From the 1st century AD , large Italian landowners began to give parts of their lands to free tenants. They could therefore also lease small areas of land from large landowners or from imperial state domains ( Latin colonatus ).

Since agriculture in ancient times represented the primary source of income, was also in Galilee , the social stratification closely related to land ownership. Large landowners and small farmers lived side by side in Galilee at the time of Jesus Christ . Large estates are certainly verifiable for the Jezreel plain : In the Kishon Enge , where Galilee borders the city of Ptolemais , and at Bet She'arim , Queen Berenike owned estates.

The villikationsmäßig organized large estates became the 9th and 10th century AD more important..; the expansion of the great manors through clearing played an important role. According to Jürgen Habermas , the feudal lordship in medieval Europe was based "on large private estates that are divided among many individual owners, with the feudal lords having diverse, politically and economically defined relationships of dependency (up to serfdom)". With the emergence of a cavalry army based on fiefs and large estates, the division between knight and peasant class took place in the 12th century . The high Middle Ages were considered to be the heyday of manorial rule, provided that it represented the ruling power in economic life in fixed forms, but not yet solidified, during those centuries. The state ( state domains ), the landlords ( chamber estates , landlords ) and the church ( church property) acted as large landowners . According to Conrad Bornhak , the large estates gained authority over the rural population through the manor owners in the 13th century .

From 1531 a massive slave trade from Africa began. The slaves ( English slaves , servants ) worked mainly for large landowners, less often as house servants in wealthy urban households. From this early relationship between the landlord and the slaves, paternalism developed . After the first slaves came to Virginia through the Dutch in 1619 , slavery began in the United States . In 1636 the first slaves across the Atlantic also reached Barbados . From around 1790, the mechanization of cotton production ensured slave labor on the large cotton plantations.

After the colonizer Don Francisco de Mello Palheta (1670 - around 1750) smuggled the first coffee seeds from Cayenne to Belém do Pará in May 1727, coffee growing began in Brazil . Since 1820 the importance of the Brazilian coffee export increased, only in 1831 did it surpass the sugar export. Coffee production in Brazil began in the form of an intensive monoculture by large landowners ( Portuguese grandes proprietários ) where the vegetation of the Atlantic rainforest ( Portuguese mata atlântica ) was originally located. In addition to the cultivation of coffee, extensive livestock farming developed on large areas. The land ownership dates from the time of colonization by Portugal, which divided the Brazilian lands among a few aristocrats and military, mainly of Portuguese origin. The land distribution situation has hardly changed since then: today 56% of the arable land in Brazil is in the hands of only 3% of landowners. In the United States, around 1.8 million slaves worked on the 74,000 cotton plantations in 1860, an average of 24 slaves per plantation. In total, the sugar cane, rice and tobacco plantations employed almost 4 million slaves at that time.

The German term of the large landowner can be traced back to the German landed nobility of the Wilhelminian era who owned extensive estates. Landlords owned extensive estates . Inheritances were to increase the land area, but by inheritance also to the subdivision lead. The class of large landowners saw themselves connected to one another through their class interests and their common interests in life. Their wealth gave them the opportunity to expand their land holdings through land grabbing . The German Revolution of 1848/1849 abolished the peasants' bondage through the peasant liberation and restricted the great privileges of the large landowners. In the six eastern Prussian provinces before 1914 a total of 52% of the real estate was still in the hands of large landowners, 50% of whom owned more than 1000 hectares. While smaller businesses were common in West Germany, the property east of the Elbe was mostly concentrated on a few (mostly aristocratic) large landowners ( Junkers ) and their manors . In Brandenburg around 1900, real estate with a net income from property tax of 1500 Mk per year was part of large estate; Depending on the quality of the soil, property of 100 to 200 hectares was a prerequisite. However, the regulation was not applied rigidly.

In 1882 the following distribution of property size was recorded in the German Reich:

area surface <1 ha 1-10 ha 10-100 ha > 100 ha
German Empire 5,276,344 ha 2.4% 25.6% 47.6% 24.4%
Alsace-Lorraine 233,866 ha 5.0% 51.8% 35.9% 7.3%
Bavaria 681,521 ha 1.6% 35.6% 60.5% 2.3%
East Prussia 188,179 ha 1.0% 9.3% 51.1% 38.6%
West Prussia 134,026 ha 1.3% 9.1% 42.5% 47.1%
Pomerania 169,275 ha 1.3% 10.1% 31.2% 57.4%

In Austria , large estates began statistically in 1919 at 200 hectares; in 1933 a yearbook recorded an area of ​​over 300 hectares as large estates.

In September 1945 the Allies agreed to initiate a democratic land reform in Germany in order to forever eliminate the influence of the Junkers and large landowners on the state. The land reform in the GDR of September 1945, under the slogan "Junkerland in peasant hands", aimed at expropriating large landowners with more than 100 hectares of land. In the British Zone , a law of May 1949 stipulated that large landowners could only keep 100 hectares and receive compensation for the rest .

However, this trend was reversed. While in Germany in 1991 almost 124,000 hectares were cultivated by small farms, the area of decreased small businesses in 2007 to only 20,000 hectares. The area owned by large farms increased from 9.2 million to 12.6 million hectares in the same period.

Business aspects

Like large corporations, large farms in agriculture have organizational peculiarities , cost reductions through the law of mass production, and economies of scale . Organizationally, large estates can be characterized by deficiencies in comprehensive control or cumbersome adaptation . The farm size effect is mainly explained by the fact that large (agricultural) farms are potentially able to produce more cheaply overall than small and medium-sized enterprises. According to the law of mass production, the proportion of fixed costs decreases with increasing capacity utilization per unit, resulting in economies of scale . If the increase in capacity leads to a reduction in costs, one speaks of economies of scale (static economies of scale). Due to increasing capacity utilization, mass degression leads to a reduction in fixed unit costs because the fixed costs can be distributed over a larger production volume (fixed cost degression). High fixed costs thus require production in large quantities, which is more likely in large firms. The degression in size of costs (economies of scale) is not only expressed in the degression of fixed costs, but also in the effect of company size. Large estates often attract larger market shares and more market power ; they can be associated with wealth and power . As a result, the large landowner is economically in a position to enlarge his property. This land concentration enhances the economies of scale of large landowners.

International

The area of ​​large estates is related to the size of the state. In the territorial states with large agricultural areas outside of Europe (e.g. Canada , USA , Brazil , Colombia , Argentina , Australia ), large land ownership usually only begins at 1000 hectares, in Europe from 100 hectares. Businesses that are therefore regarded as large estates in Europe are considered normal overseas. In small states ( Luxembourg , Switzerland ), on the other hand, large property ownership often does not play a role. The lack of large landowners in Switzerland and other mountainous countries is attempted to explain the fact that the mountainous terrain makes the formation of large farms more difficult, which then also prevents the formation of large landowners.

Web links

Wiktionary: large landowners  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. Thomas Nabert, Large Estate in the Province of Saxony , 1992, p. 4
  2. Peter Melichar , Ernst Langthaler, Stefan Eminger (eds.): Lower Austria in the 20th Century , Volume 2, 2008, p. 578 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  3. Lexikografisches Institut München, Das große Universallexikon , Volume 2, 1974, p. 311
  4. Bernd Radtke, World History and Description of the World in Medieval Islam , 1991, p. 66
  5. ^ Fritz Schwind , Römisches Recht: I. History, Rechtsgang, System des Privatrechtes , 1950, p. 53
  6. ^ Fritz Schwind, Römisches Recht: I. Geschichte, Rechtsgang, System des Privatrechtes , 1950, p. 51
  7. Philipp Charwath, Römisches Recht , 2011, p. 65 f.
  8. Gerd Theißen / Annette Merz, Der historical Jesus: Ein Lehrbuch , 2011, p. 164
  9. Jürgen Habermas, On the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism , 1976, p. 165
  10. ^ Conrad Bornhak, Prussian State and Legal History , 1903, p. 382
  11. Jochen Meissner / Ulrich Mücke / Klaus Weber, Black America: A History of Slavery , 2008, p. 27
  12. Herma Wätgen, Die Hansestädte und Brasilien , in: Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Volume XXII, 1925, p. 42
  13. Fernanda Oliveira de Souza, 500 years of large estates , in: ila: The Latin America Magazine, 2015
  14. Jochen Meissner / Ulrich Mücke / Klaus Weber, Black America: A History of Slavery , 2008, p. 46
  15. Astrid von Pufendorf, Otto Klepper (1888–1957): German Patriot and Weltbürger , 1997, p. 39
  16. ^ René Schiller, From the manor to the large estate. Economic and social transformation processes of the rural elites in Brandenburg in the 19th century , 2003, ISBN 3-05-003449-1 , p. 183 f.
  17. Real estate (statistical) . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 7, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 864.
  18. ^ Wilhelm Medinger, Großgrundbesitz , 1919, p. 29
  19. Compass, Industrielles Jahrbuch , 1933, pp. 880 ff.
  20. Ulrich Enders, Land reform in the American zone 1945-1949 with special consideration of Bavaria , 1982, p. 4
  21. Volker Thomas, Germany between East and West , 2014, p. 66
  22. ^ Zeit online from April 19, 2013, Europe's new large landowners
  23. Werner Pepels, Product and Price Management in Corporate Banking , 2006, p. 194
  24. Michael Kutschker / Stefan Schmid, Internationales Management , 2010, p. 435
  25. Birga Döring / Tim Döring / Wolfgang Harmgardt / Axel Lange / Kai Michaelsen, Allgemeine BWL , 2007, p. 13
  26. Spectrum Academic Publishing House, 2001
  27. ^ Heinrich Braun / Werner Sombart / Max Weber / Emil Lederer / Robert Michels, Archive for Social Science and Social Policy , Volume 62, 1929, p. 357